Summary

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with Phil Lord and Chris Miller for Project Hail Mary.

Lord and Miller discuss runtimes, Sandra Hüller’s impromptu song becoming the film’s anthem, deleted scenes, and more.

The duo also share the status of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and Nicolas Cage’s unique inspiration for Spider-Noir.

Academy Award-winning filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller are exchanging comic books for a bestselling novel (for now) with their upcoming adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary. After wowing audiences with their soon-to-be trilogy, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, these two powerhouse directors shot for the stars, and according to early reviews, they’ve created yet another masterpiece. In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling stars as middle school teacher Ryland Grace, who wakes up aboard a spaceship, light-years from Earth, with no idea how he got there. Soon, the memories began to piece together, and he recalls the unbelievable mission he’s on to save Earth from our dying sun. Now, he’s completely alone, except for Rocky (James Ortiz), his alien companion and engineer, on a journey to save worlds. The movie also stars Sandra Hüller, Ken Leung, Lionel Boyce, and Milana Vayntrub. In this interview, Lord and Miller discuss staying true to the science, honoring Weir’s “brand,” deleted scenes, and share how Gosling came to them about Hüller’s singing, and how her song choice for Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” became the “heart” of the film. They also update us on the status of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, why they’ll never stop making animation, and reveal the unique inspiration Nicolas Cage brought to Spider-Noir.
Lord & Miller Promised Hayao Miyazaki They Wouldn’t Stop Animation

“No pressure.”

Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of Studio Ghibli.Custom Image by Samantha Coley

COLLIDER: Let me start with the most important thing. What do I need to do as a fan of your work to get you to make more live-action movies? CHRISTOPHER MILLER: [Laughs] We are on it. PHIL LORD: We plan to. MILLER: As soon as we finish this last Spider-Verse, we’ll make another one. LORD: We’re busy. Can I hold you to that? MILLER: Yes, absolutely. We like to do both. LORD: Yes, we like to do both. And we promised [Hayao] Miyazaki we would keep making animated films. Wait, when did you talk to him? MILLER: Many years ago. LORD: Many years ago, when he got an award at the Governors Awards. MILLER: He said, “I know you do live action, but don’t stop making animation.” LORD: No pressure. I will tell you, and I don’t mean to put myself in this interview, but I never take pictures with people or ask for autographs when I do interviews. I view it as unprofessional, but Miyazaki was here… MILLER: He’s not around a lot. I interviewed him, and after, I said, “Sir, I am the biggest fan. Could I please get a picture with you?” and it’s just me wall-to-wall smiling. MILLER: [Laughs] I can’t believe it. I broke the rule because it’s Miyazaki. LORD: You had to.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller Reveal Nic Cage’s Wild ‘Spider-Noir’ Inspiration

The duo also share an update on Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse.

Nicolas Cage crouched on a desk in-costume in Spider-NoirImage via Prime Video

I have a lot of questions, but since you already touched on it, I’m obviously a huge fan of the Spider-Verse movies. What can you tease people about it? Where are you in production? LORD: We’re in the middle. The story’s wonderful. We have great collaborators. We brought on Alice Brooks to DP the show, and she’s shooting it virtually, which is really exciting. And some great new cast mates. Sorry to be so coy. MILLER: It’s very emotional. Do you view this as the last Spider-Verse film? MILLER: It’s the last of this trilogy. LORD: The last of this trilogy, for sure. The other thing I’m so looking forward to is Spider-Noir with Nic Cage. MILLER: It’s a delight. LORD: That trailer is great. They did a wonderful job. He’s amazing. He had this great idea, which was, “I want to play this like a spider pretending to be a person.” [Laughs] MILLER: Right. Like, “After what happened to me, I’m more spider than person, and I have to act like a human in public, and in private I can be my true self.” LORD: So he sometimes goes to the movies, his character, and practices and studies what the actors are doing so he can use it in his real life. The footage I saw looked like it was shot like a noir. LORD: Yeah. MILLER: It was. Can you talk about that? LORD: We shot it natively with black and white, and then after the fact, for fun, we created this weird sort of Technicolor hybrid thing that we call “true hue.” We basically create our own weird, old-timey color style, and so you get to watch it twice if you want. MILLER: Every director was very excited, too, and were noir aficionados, and had been dying to do something like this. It was an opportunity to do something artistic with shadows and Dutch angles and all the crazy things that you associate with noir, but people also sometimes just do it as, like, a filigree, and this was like the heart of it, the storytelling, was there. Do you view this as a one-season thing, or could it go on? LORD: It certainly could. MILLER: A Spider-Man thing telling more than one story? I don’t know. LORD: Impossible! [Laughs] MILLER: It cannot be done!
‘Project Hail Mary’ Embraces the Science

“That’s the Andy Weir brand, is competency porn, right?”

Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace in Project Hail MaryImage via Amazon MGM

Jumping into Project Hail Mary, I want to say this just so everyone can hear it: This movie is fucking spectacular, and it looks amazing in IMAX, so thank you so much for the IMAX part of it. LORD: Oh, yeah, and you’ve also got to see it in 1.43. Yeah, I’m planning on seeing it again. You don’t have to sell me on watching this one more time. What I want to know is what did you learn watching The Martian that you’re like, “We need to take this with us for Project Hail Mary?” LORD: Gosh, I love The Martian. I think it’s a brilliant film. I have to be honest, we did not rewatch or study The Martian in anticipation of this, because we wanted this to be really distinct. The thing about The Martian that I loved is that it doesn’t dumb down the science. MILLER: For sure. And that’s something that you guys embrace in this. I’m just curious if that was allowed or if the studio was like, “Oh yeah, you can do this.” LORD: Oh yeah, that’s definitely allowed. MILLER: That’s the Andy Weir brand, is competency porn, right? People want to see a person who’s good at their job doing a job well, and it’s one of our favorite genres of movies. LORD: It’s like a heist film, like Rififi or Thief. You just want to watch them, like, dig a hole or break into a safe. MILLER: Or Spotlight or All the President’s Men or Ghostbusters — people coming together and doing a job well and people who are good at their job. What’s tricky about this is that in the book, Ryan’s character has his thoughts, and we get to hear all of his thoughts. In the movie, we have to find a cinematic way to tell you what he’s thinking, what problem he’s trying to solve, and how he’s going about that, without him doing some cheesy voiceover or something. So, that was the hardest part about making the science not overtake the movie, but just be something that supported the character’s story and the adventure that we were going on, and being something that you are interested in. How is he going to solve this problem? And then finding it along the way.

Related

Here’s Why Ryan Gosling’s New Sci-Fi Adaptation Will Be the Year’s Biggest Surprise

Directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord break down the highly anticipated film.

I love long movies, mostly because with a movie like this, you can have characters breathe and have small scenes that add so much depth. When the movie’s 90 minutes or 120 minutes, it’s all just fast-forward. You can’t slow down. So my question is, going in, did you guys know, “Well, this is going to be a 2:35,” or did you think, “We might get to three?” How did you figure out, ultimately, what the runtime was going to be? LORD: We just tried to figure out what that character story needed, and it meant that Ryan’s developing over two timelines. He starts the movie as a chicken who’s afraid to connect with anyone else. He makes a relationship with Eva Stratt, played by Sandra [Hüller], and he makes a relationship with an alien. So, it did require quite a bit of backstory. We didn’t want to shortchange the pathway to get there. We didn’t want to turn that stuff into a montage. MILLER: But we don’t really think about, like, “We’re trying to hit this target length,” because I’ve seen movies that are three hours that I was riveted at and couldn’t lose a second. I’ve seen movies that are an hour and a half that were interminable, right? [Laughs] I have, too. LORD: It was just about making it feel like it was the right length. But we did know that the story had an epic scale to it. As intimate as it is, we wanted it to feel epic. MILLER: We also want to make sure that you’re moving along and you care about the audience’s time. LORD: Hopefully, it feels quick, like you want to go back in and see it again. MILLER: You never want to feel like, “Okay, I’ve seen this before. Let’s move on.” You want to be like, “Let’s keep moving. We have a lot of story to tell.” And there’s a lot of story in this movie. How long was the cut of the film where you’re like, “It’s never getting shorter?” LORD: Every cut. We did an assembly that was… I don’t even want to tell you how long it was. No, I do want to know. MILLER: We started showing people when we got it down to 3.5 hours, and we’re like, “Okay, we’re almost to the length of what a human bladder can accommodate.” And then we continued cooking it down, like a balsamic reduction, sweet and beautiful. LORD: You can’t imagine it being shorter than three hours, and then you watch it with an audience, and you go, “Oh, I can hear them shifting.” I saw three people go to the bathroom. They don’t want to be here right now. We have to cut big on this thing.

As a fan of the film, I like seeing the longer version or the deleted scenes. LORD: We have a lot of those for you. [Laughs]

Do you have a longer cut of the film that you could see on Blu-ray at some point, or do you envision this as the ultimate cut, and you will do deleted scenes? MILLER: This is the best version. LORD: This is definitely the best cut. There are extended cuts, but I wouldn’t call them a “director’s cut,” if that makes sense. MILLER: This is the version that we like the best because it tells the story, and the audience stays engaged the whole time. It’s something that you get to have a nice emotional experience, and you get to laugh, you get to cry, you get to be excited, you get to be scared. You get all the things, and we don’t overstay our welcome. But there are a lot of things, moments and scenes, that are, on their own, delightful. LORD: That I love. Yeah, I’m excited for people to see the stuff that was in the four-hour cut. MILLER: Things that, for pace, you just can’t do. I would like to see these scenes, so please, release them at some point. LORD: We will. We will. I got to go.
How Sandra Hüller’s Harry Styles Song Became the “Heart of the Movie”

Lord and Miller explain how an unscripted moment became crucial to the film.

A still from Harry Styles: One Night in Manchester.Netflix

One of my favorite sequences in the film is Sandra doing karaoke, and apparently, this was not in the script. LORD: Nope. It was Ryan hearing her sing. I need more info on this. LORD: So we’re doing a scene where Ryan is feeling alienated amongst the camaraderie of all of the other astronauts and scientists, which, the idea is, he doesn’t fit in here; the person he fits in with he’s about to meet in outer space in five years. MILLER: And he’s about to go talk to Sandra’s character about how she needs to remain apart from those people because camaraderie is not what she’s there for. LORD: Right. So, they both are sort of alienated from these guys singing, and that’s what they connect over, right? MILLER: And Ryan came to us, and he was like, “She can sing amazingly.” And we’re like, “We know. She sings in between setups,” and she’s got a beautiful voice. LORD: “It’s a crazy missed opportunity that we’re not putting her on camera doing this.” And we’re like, “You’re right. What if we…?” And then together we came up with this idea of, like, he challenges her, kind of like, “Why don’t you go down there?” And she gives him all the reasons, and then… MILLER: She comes down there. LORD: She comes down there and shows him that, like, “You may think I am cold, remote, tough, but I have a soul and a heart, and I love all of these people, and I love you, and I believe in you, and I just want to find a way to express that.” Then at the end, she goes, “That’s enough.” She shuts it back down because she’s got a tough job.

Ryland Grace is being briefed while standing next to Eva Stratt.Image via Amazon MGM Studios

MILLER: What was crazy is that we talked to her about it, like, “I know we’re only on the ship for a couple more days.” And she’s like, “If I get to pick the song, I’ll do it.” And we’re like, “Great!” And she picked this Harry Styles song, and she comes in and sings it, and everybody on the set was gobsmacked. LORD: Everyone shut up. MILLER: Because it was so perfectly appropriate for the message that she was giving to everybody, and everyone was absolutely floored. We were like, “Well, that’s going to be the heart of the movie.” LORD: Yeah, and that’s the thing, is if you create the right climate on set, people feel comfortable pitching stuff. The crew knows when you’re asking for something extraordinary, which is, “We’re on this boat for three days, can we come back in and shoot more here?” They know when it’s going to mean something to the movie when you pitch them the idea. They go, “Oh yeah, I want to watch Sandra sing. Let’s go. We’ll move heaven and earth to make that happen.” Project Hail Mary opens in theaters and IMAX on March 20.

Release Date

March 20, 2026

Runtime

156 Minutes

Director

Christopher Miller, Phil Lord

Writers

Drew Goddard, Andy Weir

Producers

Ryan Gosling, Amy Pascal, Andy Weir, Aditya Sood, Christopher Miller, Phil Lord, Rachel O’Connor