In 'Project Hail Mary,' Phil Lord and Chris Miller finally get their space odyssey

NEW YORK – Ryan Gosling wanted a friend.

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were in the midst of their largest production ever, the $200 million science-fiction adventure “Project Hail Mary.” They were shooting some of the movie’s early scenes, when middle school biology teacher Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes up in deep space. After realizing he’s the sole survivor on board the spaceship, he turns depressed and, eventually, drunk.

“Ryan was like, ‘I just feel like I need a friend. I need a scene partner for this. I don’t know what to do in here,’” Miller recalls. “We were like: OK, let’s make a friend. So we scoured the set and found a mop and got a dress from the costume department. And we made a little mop friend for him to dance around with.

“We called it ‘Moppy Ringwald.’”

In their two decades making movies together, Lord and Miller have shown a particular talent in making inanimate objects come alive. They did this especially in 2014’s “The Lego Movie,” but little in their idiosyncratic filmography, from “21 Jump Street” to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” hasn’t involved some degree of playful reinvention.

“Project Hail Mary” may be their biggest challenge yet in breathing life into an improbable concept — and not just Moppy Ringwald. The film, adapted from Andy Weir’s bestseller, stars Gosling as an astronaut sent far into space on a mission to save Earth that brings him into contact with a faceless, rock-based alien whom Ryland nicknames “Rocky.”

“It did seem like a crazy idea to make a movie with the hunkiest actor of his generation and a rock puppet,” Lord said, chuckling, in an interview alongside Miller. “I guess we’re interested in difficult things.”

A big-budget bet

Budgets of $200 million are usually reserved for the biggest franchises, but “Project Hail Mary,” which opens in theaters Thursday, is hoping to become a blockbuster built on originality. The film, comic and heartwarming, arrives with an enviable pedigree.

Weir’s 2011 book “The Martian” became the Oscar-nominated 2015 film, which adopted the book’s sense of joy and wonder for science. That movie’s screenwriter, Drew Goddard (“The Cabin in the Woods,” “Bad Times at the El Royale”), also penned the adaptation to “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was attached before the 2021 book was even published. Sandra Hüller, the celebrated German actor of “Anatomy of a Fall,” co-stars as the leader of a United Nations task force trying to save the planet from a star-eating virus called “astrophage.”

Lord and Miller have made a career out of turning seemingly bad ideas into good movies, but “Project Hail Mary,” greenlit by MGM before it was acquired by Amazon, started off with clear crowd-pleasing possibilities, albeit with an unconventional extraterrestrial.

“We no longer get the benefit of low expectations,” Miller says, laughing. “So we sort of try to do things that maybe seem like a good idea from the beginning. It’s the evolution of our career.”

The result is something a little like a combination of “Interstellar” and “Deep Space Homer.” Though the directors’ first sojourn into space (the “Star Wars” spinoff “Solo”) was famously aborted, “Project Hail Mary” gives Lord and Miller a space odyssey entirely of their irreverent sensibility. While the movie shares Weir’s physics-and-jokes approach from “The Martian,” Lord and Miller are approximately the polar opposite of Ridley Scott.

“In both cases, the directors were perfect for the task ahead of them. Ridley Scott is really good at conveying grandeur, really letting the setting hit and capturing the scale of things,” says Weir. “But ‘Project Hail Mary’ is a bromance. It’s like a buddy comedy.

“It’s much more fast-paced, there’s a lot of rapid dialogue, and that’s Phil and Chris’ bread and butter,” he adds. “You can give them any random thing off the shelves and they can make a movie such that you care about its emotions.”

Giving Gosling free rein, in space

Much of what distinguishes “Project Hail Mary” is that, despite the size of its production, the directors were still able to make a loose-limbed comedy, with zero-gravity improvisation and interstellar pratfalls. Big budgets and copious special effects are usually kryptonite to comedy, but “Project Hail Mary” gives Gosling, a not charmless performer, room to riff.

“What we’ve learned throughout our career is that spontaneous moments are magical,” says Miller. “Our job was to prepare and prepare and prepare, but make sure there was room to play and room to chase an idea that might be inconvenient.”

“No one ever walked out of a movie going: ‘Wow, that seemed so well planned,’” says Lord.

That included suspending Gosling in a spinning ring that allowed him to move where he wanted within the spaceship, designed by Charles Wood. And it involved following instincts. In one scene set at a karaoke bar, Gosling, after hearing Hüller sing, felt her character needed a song. Hüller picked Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” and the filmmakers rushed to secure the rights within 48 hours.

But their most important innovations had to do with Rocky. Weir had written him, he says, intent on going further than a humanoid creature with funny prosthetics. “I wanted my alien to be truly alien,” he says.

“The part of the book that made me go, ‘Oh, god, I don’t know how we’re going to realize this,’ was Rocky,” says Goddard. “He doesn’t have the usual crutches that you have for loveable aliens. He doesn’t have a face. He can’t even exist in our atmosphere. He speaks in whale songs. He looks like the kind of alien that would normally be eating everyone.”

Goddard, a filmmaker, too, was happy to leave the problem-solving to Lord and Miller.

“I knew Chris and Phil could figure it out,” Goddard says. “I knew from their background with animation and creating delightful characters out of thin air, they could do it.”

A gift from Spielberg

To give Gosling a scene partner that went beyond a mop in a dress, Lord and Miller opted to hire a puppeteer to manipulate and voice Rocky. To find the right match, they even did chemistry reads between puppeteers and Gosling. James Ortiz got the role, and “Project Hail Mary” lives off his and Gosling's interplay.

“You never would have gotten that if you were like, ‘OK, there’s a tennis ball and a stick that’s an alien here. Now be delighted by it,’” Miller says.

Hollywood loves to make merchandise of cute little aliens. Faces are usually a part of that. But the unique challenges of “Project Hail Mary” were what most intrigued Lord and Miller. The common denominator to their movies, Lord says, is that they all begin with a thought process of “It’s impossible,” followed by “unless …”

“Even ‘Spider-Verse’ was like: Oh, this is going to be the seventh ‘Spider-Man’ movie. Nobody wants this — unless …” says Lord. “Audiences want to watch a movie put itself in a box, and wiggle out of it like Houdini.”

The alien sequences worked well enough that Steven Spielberg urged the filmmakers to insert a nod to his own sci-fi classic of first contact: “He was like: ‘You should have the alien do the “Close Encounters” theme,’” Miller says. “If you say so, Steven.”

It’s one of several references peppered throughout (another is to “Rocky”) by Lord and Miller, who have maintained the “Lego Movie” ethos of taking neatly constructed sets apart and rebuilding them in their own fashion.

“It’s having it both ways,” Lord says, smiling. “Making an original thing out of unoriginal parts.”