2026 promises to be an epic year for movies. Among the impressive line up are heavy hitters like Avengers: Doomsday, The Odyssey, Dune: Part Three, Supergirl, and many others! However, the biggest surprise among them all is flying right under everyone’s radars; Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.
Recently, Geeks of Color was invited to IMAX Headquarters in Los Angeles to screen about eight scenes from the upcoming sci-fi epic. While we can’t go into full spoilers about what we saw (that would ruin the amazing surprises for all audiences), we can tell you that audiences are in for a funny, awe-inspiring, and heartfelt epic. What we saw was a combination of Earth and space-set sequences, with the Earth scenes filmed in standard format and the space-sequences filmed in IMAX. The result is not only gorgeous, but incredibly immersive.
Naturally, good visuals alone do not a good movie make. As storytellers, Lord and Miller have brought us some of the single best films of the past two decades, from the Spider-Verse series to the Jump Street films, the incredibly underrated Mitchells Vs. The Machines, and The LEGO Movie. However, Project Hail Mary eclipses everything the duo has ever done in terms of scope and scale. When the marriage of incredible visuals blends together with expert storytelling, that’s how timeless blockbusters are born. This is what I feel we’re in for with Project Hail Mary.
After viewing the scenes, with Lord and Miller introducing each one, the duo stayed for a mini-press conference to answer questions from GoC and other members of the press. Through the discussion, we were able to gain insight on how they approached adapting the material, the techniques they used to bring it to life, and what it was like working with stars Ryan Gosling and Sandra Hüller.
Here’s what they had to say:
The duo was asked how the project came to be, originating from Gosling and producer Amy Pascal.
“We had a long-standing relationship with Ryan, who we met over a decade ago and always wanted to do something together,” Miller started. “And so when they called us, we had also read the manuscript. We have Aditya Sood, our producing partner who produced The Martian and discovered the book before it was even published. We had a long-standing relationship with Andy, and so we were already very excited to join the team. It was a great collaboration.”
They were next asked about collaborating once more with Spider-Verse composer, Daniel Pemberton, for the music in the film.
“There are two big things,” started Lord. “One is that this is a relationship story between these two guys [Grace and Rocky] and that it had to feel a sense of optimism and magic. And so, we actually had Daniel do some sketches that we would play on set. Ryan likes performing with music sometimes, so we had Daniel compose things and we’d put them in all of our ears and we’re watching the scene play out and we’re like hearing the score. It was amazing. But the other big idea was Ryan is alone in a lot of scenes in space. He’s marooned. Ryland Grace is marooned in space, but the entire planet is rooting for him. So it was like how do I feel as many human beings as I possibly can. That’s why there’s so much choir, that’s why there’s so many, we wanted to feel the players. Daniel got a bunch of school kids to come in and like stomp and clap to create percussion. And he found musicians all over the world to bring very unique strange instruments. The idea that the whole world and every culture on Earth, every society, every spacefaring nation has put their chips on this one dude. And we wanted to always feel that every time we’re watching the picture.”
When asked about the science in the film and the experts who were consulted, the duo had this to say:
“We had several NASA and JPL consultants who came to set several times and were super helpful for us in development,” began Miller. “Even after we would shoot some things, we would ask, OK, here, is this right? Did we do this right? They were incredibly helpful and JPL came to set and was like: you guys are the first people to get what it feels like to be in zero-g.”
Lord added, “A lot of movies, people just play it slow. Like somehow you stop moving at speed but you’re not. And that was really important to Ryan, by the way, he wanted to not be good at everything. He’s like, ‘I’m a microbial scientist. I’m good at that. I’m bad at space.’ And so that’s why you saw him figuring out a system of ropes to move around. So some part of the realism was also not making space slick. It’s messy, there’s wires everywhere. It’s a machine in space, it can be taken apart and put to use in other ways. We didn’t want it to feel like an Apple store. We always say this movie is not a Mac, it’s a PC. You could take it apart. And that’s why anytime there was something messy in the frame, we left it.”
Miller continued, “And Andy Weir was a producer on the movie and he’s a stickler for science accuracy. And so every time there’s an equation or a calculation or anything, Andy did it. And sometimes Grace is writing calculations on a whiteboard, and those are all things that we had Andy write out for us so that we could have Grace do it exactly right, so all the math checks out throughout the movie, it all it all crazily accurate.”
When asked about working with Hüller, and balancing emotion and humor, the duo said this:
“This is only a small sampling,” started Miller. “The movie is very emotional. The whole movie is a very emotional experience, and every time someone comes out they’re like, I didn’t realize how emotional it was gonna be and casting Sandra Huller was a big part of that, and she is obviously one of the great talents of this era. We wanted her to make sure that the character wasn’t an American and I thought Anatomy of Fall was one of the best movies of the year that year, and she was also in a film called Toni Erdmann, which is actually a very funny movie from many years ago. She’s great. If you haven’t seen it, see it.”
Lord added, “While we were prepping this movie, she was on stage in Germany playing PJ Harvey and singing in a musical. So we were just like, we need to give her the scenes and moments in the scenes to show the full breadth of what she’s capable of because she’s hilarious. She’s an amazing dramatic actor. She gets to sing in the movie.”
Miller continued, “And the two of them [Gosling and Hüller] really played off each other in an amazing way.”
The duo was next asked about the visual texture of the film.
“We did film out with two different film stocks, one for space and one for Earth. Same technique that Greig [Fraser] used on The Batman and Dune,” Miller said.
Lord added, “The idea was on Earth, it’s a memory. So it’s more limited, it’s compressed, it’s idealized, it’s cleaner. In space, it’s something we’re experiencing right now. It’s more raw. It’s immediate, grittier and we didn’t want it to feel super easy to capture, like it’s a pain in the neck to shoot space. We wanted it to feel like there’s a little bit of effort in it.”
When asked about how, given the scale and grandness of the film, their previous experience with smaller films helped prepare them for Project Hail Mary, Lord had this to say: “We luckily had wonderful teammates, also some of the same people as on the Spider-Verse movies, even Mitchells. There’s a lot of our past experience came to bear on this and we had amazing people. Paul Lambert, Charlie Wood doing sets, Neil Scanlon, our buddy, that we had worked with before creating this incredible puppet. Actually, puppets. Because you saw Armando, the medical arm is also an operated puppet so it might seem like a kind of a big jump. But in our experience it was really more of the same, a really collaborative thing that you need a lot of really smart people around you to pull off.”
A point was brought up about Project Hail Mary being a unique sci-fi story that doesn’t require violence to create and provide tension or compelling storytelling. Miller discussed the origins of this.
Miller said, “It is from the book, but it was one of the things that drew us to the book. It’s a movie and a book about collaboration and cooperation, and what’s possible if we work together. And it’s a very hopeful book. It’s a hopeful movie and it’s sort of this relationship is at its core, and these are two beings that could not be more different and when they come together, they’re able to accomplish amazing things, and that’s what’s drew us to the book in the first place and drew us to the project, and I think hopefully people will leave the movie feeling a sense of optimism about what’s possible.”
Lord added, “And one of the things we’ve learned over the years is that the most spectacular and engaging thing for an audience is to watch people get along. It’s really fun. It plays big. And it was a shock to me because the first half of my career, everybody was like, oh, you’ve got to make sure there’s a lot of conflict. There’s obstacles and there’s differences of opinion and you saw them not being able to put a bed together like at IKEA, but I think that the thing that’s important to us was to represent a successful partnership.”
Miller continued, “And people doing a job well is a great genre of movie, whether it’s Spotlight or Ghostbusters, and this sort of falls in that category as well.”
When asked about the tone of the film, Miller said, “It’s a bit of a genre-defyer because it’s thrilling, it’s dramatic, it’s emotional, and it’s funny, and it’s all of those things and it doesn’t have to be just one. I would say it’s a drama with comedic elements. It’s probably the closest thing you could say, but a drama with a lot of jokes. It’s fun but you hopefully will cry at least a few times as well.”
The duo was asked about working with Gosling, and whether he did anything to surprise him.
“I mean, nothing and everything because to work with that guy, he’s so boundlessly creative he does something different on every take,” stated Lord. “He has such a dynamic range in his performance because he’s really funny, he’s really sweet, he’s really strong, he can be really brave, he plays engagement really well. We wanted to make sure that the movie gave him enough opportunities to show all of those moves, and he was surprising us constantly because he was doing things that were spontaneous, and that’s the main thing when you’re shooting like, can I please have one moment happen today that I didn’t expect, and then it’s not surprising at all because that’s just how the guy works.”
The team was asked about what the obstacles were bringing the book to life.
Miller started by saying, “There is a lot that happens in the book that there isn’t time for in a motion picture, and there’s sort of several darlings along the way that that couldn’t quite fit in, and we kept trying to squeeze in, but just didn’t want to lose momentum and the pace that we’re trying to keep audience engagement going. There’s so much in the book but having Drew as a partner in this, who also adapted The Martian and has been a longtime buddy of ours, we had a great foundation to start with cause he’s very smart about what this movie is about. At the end of the day, it’s this relationship between Grace and Rocky that is the heart of the movie and so that’s sort of what was driving the structure. We keep going back and forth between Earth and space as Grace is remembering more of how he got up there. Figuring out how to transition that story and make it still move forward was tricky both in the script form and then also in the editing. Our editor, Joel Negron,sp did an amazing job with it.”
Lord added, “The other thing that’s tricky is that the whole book is in the first person, so you’re hearing his thought process. Two things were really important to us. You saw how the movie opened. I want you to be in his head. There are moments when we’re like don’t let us hear anything that Ryan can’t hear. The other thing is, he would always narrate the science and what he was doing. So we had to find ways for the movie to describe cinematically the things that you were reading on the page so that you could follow it and you would be as engaged in putting the astrophage sample in a centrifuge as he was. Hopefully it feels seamless, but it was a huge pain in the bum.”
Lord and Miller were then asked about what creative itch Project Hail Mary scratched for them.
“What’s really interesting about this movie is that it is so massive in its scale and the epic visuals, but the story is so intimate,” started Miller. “It’s these two characters together. It’s so big and so small at the same time and that’s what’s really compelling about the story. That’s why I think it makes the movie extra engaging because it’s not just big grandeur and epic battle scenes. It has this massive scale and I can’t wait for you guys to see some of the other cinematography in the movie, that’s really gorgeous. But at the end of the day, it’s very, very intimate, this movie.”
“There are small things that for me were aesthetically unusual for us, like the movie’s really messy looking, it’s full of panes of glass and wires and stuff,” added Lord. “We always said, it’s not a Mac, it’s a PC and it’s aesthetically that way too, like you feel it in the photography, it’s beautiful. We were always like: it’s beautiful, it’s not pretty. It’s a lovely picture, it’s not picturesque. We have the right team for the job for that for sure. The other thing is that to your point, it’s emotionally a really moving book and a really moving picture and for us that was an outgrowth of the stuff we’re doing in animation and really even movies that are ostensibly silly like Jump Street. Jump Street, that’s a love story between those two fellas, and you never want them to be apart and so that’s what we tried to accomplish here. We wanted to make this movie about forces of nature, right? Physics and the way that we share common things like numbers and laws of time and space. But one of the laws of time and space is love. And that’s what I think that ultimately the movie is about. It’s like one of the things we share across species.”
When discussing the visual style of the movie and the artistic inspirations behind it, Miller joked, “Oh, you blew it. You asked an art history major. Did he think about any paintings?”
Lord stated, “A couple different things, we looked at a bunch of movies. The first Alien is an important touchstone just for how warm that movie looks visually, how tactile and real, how textured the ship is inside. One of my favorite painters is a guy named Albert Bierstadt who is a painter in the 19th century of The American Sublime. Talk about picturesque, but the thing that’s amazing about those paintings is they’re like a call to adventure. So our spacescapes, and you didn’t see it in this clip, but when we go to Adrian and you see the aurora, it kind of feels like that. It’s like he painted the West. And so I always think about space movies as westerns. I’m obviously not the first person to say that, but you’re out on the frontier, you’re out looking beyond any place that anyone has been and I love that sense of exploration about space that it has a kind of I don’t know, you’re getting closer to the beyond.”
Miller discussed a bit of how the text informed the look as well.
“There’s, in the book, this planet, Adrian. It is described as a green planet. We knew that there was gonna be a green chapter in the movie. And that astrophage is visible in infrared light. We did a lot of actual infrared photography that made this sort of eerie pink color that was really beautiful. We knew in the sort of the color script of the movie where these sections were going to be. There’s also, one little tiny glimpse of Rocky, who is a character who has no eyes, but he hears with echolocation. We get to sort of see who we were calling Rocky vision, which has no color. There’s one shot in that thing that you saw, the sort of the 3D texture of his echolocation of how he’s perceiving the world. So that’s another aspect of the color script of the movie.”
Another question came up about working with Hüller. “She’s the best,” began Miller.
“We love her very much,” added Lord. “She’s also very cool. So cool that everyone wanted her to think they were cool. But luckily I disabused myself of that immediately.”
“She would sing in between takes and she had a beautiful singing voice, and there was a karaoke scene, and Ryan was like, why isn’t she singing?” added Miller. “Shouldn’t she sing? We rewrote the script so that she would. She could sing in the movie also but she was up for anything and was really thoughtful about everything and was just such a pleasant person. You just want her to be your best friend and be super playful. She is good at jokes.”
Lord added, “That’s the irony. “She’s such a good actor, she can play someone who’s not good at jokes.”
Lord and Miller were asked about the character of Rocky and his appearance in the marketing campaign, with fans being concerned it was too big a spoiler.
“The thing is that as we were saying, this movie is a relationship movie and, and the co-star of the movie is not really a secret,” defended Miller. “It’d be like doing E.T. without E.T. or something. That’s what the movie is.”
Lord added, “One of the things people often ask when they go to see a movie is what is the premise of the movie. So we felt like we should convey that.”
Overall, we couldn’t be happier with what we saw. The presence of Rocky (Gosling’s character’s extraterrestrial buddy in the film) in both the marketing campaign and the clips we saw epitomizes the central heart of the movie; setting expectations that Project Hail Mary is, at its core, a tale about friendship and cooperation.
During these times where tensions are high and division is everywhere, audiences need to hope in the idea of unity in the face of unimaginable odds against survival. That definitely makes films like Project Hail Mary increasingly rare, but all the more important. And I, for one, can’t wait to see it on the biggest screen possible, laughing, crying, and hoping with a theater full of audiences doing the same.