The last time Phil Lord and Chris Miller directed a film, Netflix, Amazon and Apple weren’t making movies, COVID hadn’t changed theatergoing habits and the existential threat of AI wasn’t upending the industry. (Sony, which released Lord and Miller’s 2014 feature 22 Jump Street, hadn’t even been hacked yet.) Twelve years have passed since Lord and Miller helmed a movie, and on March 20, they’ll be blasting back into theaters with their most ambitious directorial effort yet, Amazon MGM Studios’ $200 million Project Hail Mary.
It’s unusual for directors who’ve spent that much time out of the director’s chair(s) to remain prominently at the forefront of the business. After being dismissed amid creative differences with Lucasfilm over their helming of 2017’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, the duo quickly rebounded, winning an Oscar as the producers of 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and taking the franchise to new heights with 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse, which grossed $690 million globally, almost double the original. They are already deep into writing and producing 2027’s trilogy capper, Beyond the Spider-Verse, as well as a slew of spinoffs, including the Nicolas Cage starrer Spider-Man Noir series (bowing on Amazon in May).
When not actively working on adding to their global box office haul of more than $4 billion, they serve as respected sounding boards for the slew of filmmakers they call friends. “I’ve been showing them unfinished cuts of my films since Baby Driver,” notes Edgar Wright. “They’re both incredibly astute and, most crucially, constructive.” He adds: “A lot of the time you get notes that are hard to address or action, but their feedback is always creative and practical. I remember Chris once said about some unnecessary exposition, ‘It’s the answer to a question no one is asking.’ That’s stayed with me ever since.”
Project Hail Mary, based on The Martian author Andy Weir’s 2022 novel, stars Ryan Gosling as a schoolteacher sent light-years away on a mission to save humanity — a logline that mirrors Lord and Miller’s conviction that originality can save Hollywood from an over-reliance on AI (they have a lot to say on the subject).
Aditya Sood, president of the duo’s Lord Miller banner, discovered Weir’s self-published novel The Martian in 2013 and helped usher it to the big screen as the 2015 Ridley Scott movie. He notes that lessons the Spider-Verse masterminds learned with their animated work informed how they shaped the visuals of Hail Mary. “They’ve challenged expectations visually of what you’re going see in one of these movies,” he says of their animated work, which also includes Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie.
During a visit to THR’s offices in early March, Lord and Miller revealed the half-dozen movies they’re eyeing as directing vehicles, why they had Gosling dance with a mop and Cage’s surprising mantra for Spider-Noir.
Ryan Gosling had the rights to produce Project Hail Mary. Then you boarded the movie in the early weeks of COVID. Did you read an early manuscript?
PHIL LORD In 2020, when we’re all standing around going, “What are we going to do?” Here’s a book where it step-by-step outlines what to do in a [different kind of] crisis. Very simple, mundane tasks.
Mike De Luca hired you to make this for MGM. Then he left when Amazon bought the studio in 2022. While it seems like a Jeff Bezos-friendly movie …
… it’s still an expensive, big swing. Were you worried it wouldn’t happen?
MILLER For sure, because Mike and Pam [Abdy] had been big proponents of it, and they really believed in it.
LORD But we didn’t skip a beat. And then of course our old [Lego Movie] comrades [from Warner Bros.] Courtenay Valenti and Sue Kroll wound up over there.
With the Spider-Verse movies, you famously worked on the scripts until the end of production. You can’t really do that with live action, right?
LORD You just never stop problem-solving. I think by the time we finished, we had screened it 13, 14 times maybe.
MILLER Sometimes for filmmakers and writers, sometimes just for friends and family.
LORD We’re always going, “Oh, they didn’t understand this. They didn’t follow this. They laughed here. They didn’t here.”
MILLER “Oh, I think they’re confused. We can rewrite this line so it’s clear.”
Ryan spends most of his time onscreen with an alien, Rocky. Did you know from day one Rocky would be a puppet on set?
MILLER The whole movie lives and dies on the chemistry between Ryan’s character and Rocky. We did chemistry read auditions with Ryan and several different puppeteers. We had a temporary puppet for them to work with, and James Ortiz came in with his own. It was clear he was Rocky right from the start.
MILLER About 50 percent puppet, 50 percent animation. Some of the scenes we couldn’t get puppeteers to do, like being inside a ball rolling around that set. Framestore did the animation for Rocky. The animation team built on what the puppeteers did and tried to make it move in the same way so that you couldn’t tell what was different.
LORD Even when we couldn’t get the puppet to do what we needed it to do for a shot, we had James Ortiz in a recording booth onstage with an earwig to Ryan so that he was always present.
You got Meryl Streep and others to cameo as different voices on a menu for Rocky. How’d that go down?
LORD Most of it was on set. We gave Ryan an earwig and James one. And then we had different people on set come up at the microphone and didn’t tell Ryan who it was going to be. His kids were on set, so they started doing silly voices.
There was no greenscreen in this movie, which is unusual.
MILLER We built the sets for the [space] ship vertically and horizontally for the two different modes of gravity. We had to shoot with the set tall like a lighthouse and then turn the set on its side like a train car and shoot the other half of the scenes that way. At one point, [DP] Greig [Fraser] and [visual effects production supervisor] Paul [Lambert] were like, “This is the most complex film we’ve ever worked on, and we just finished making two Dune films.”
What does it take on the VFX front to do a movie like this ?
MILLER It’s a massive undertaking, we had 2018 VFX shots on this movie. Led by the brilliant Paul Lambert and Mags Sarnowska.
LORD It’s a huge team of people lead by several different really wonderful VFX vendors, some of the greatest companies in the world including ILM, Framestore, Sony Imageworks. All of these movies take a village and this one is no exception. James Ortiz, the lead puppeteer and the voice of Rocky, and Arslan Elver, the lead animator at Framestore, spent a lot of time together on set. Arslan also spent about two months embedded with us in edit during post production. That way we had a lot of continuity and feedback between the practical and digital effects teams and it really became one performance.
MILLER ILM did all of the spaceship exterior stuff and wide outer space shots. They built digital versions of the Hail Mary ship exterior and Rocky’s ship and all of the planet Adrian and the Aurora. They did everything that happens outside during the fishing trip sequence and did an amazing job of making that absolutely beautiful. This movie couldn’t have been done without all of this amazing work, led by Paul Lambert and Mags Sarnowska.
How do you protect your leading man, given the demands of this role, as he’s the only human onscreen for much of the movie?
LORD You’re trying to do the tough stuff in the morning, the stuff that requires a lot of creative thought. The afternoon is stuff that is still challenging, but you’re not writing as much.
MILLER Ryan is always looking for a scene partner. Even in the parts where he was alone, he still was looking for a scene partner. So we had Armando, the robot arm, which was a puppet that was operated by three people. Mary, the voice of the computer — we had Priya Kansara on set in a little voice booth in his ear. We even made a mop for him to dance with for a beat.
It’s been a while since you directed a movie. Were you surprised by how technology has changed?
MILLER One thing we did on this with Greig, and we’ve started incorporating into this final Spider-Verse, is doing virtual prep with the Unreal Engine and a virtual camera. We had most of the space scenes pre-shot as a virtual animatic.
LORD Josh Wichard, who was an improv performer and an actor, was willing to wear the immodest suit with the ping-pong balls all over it. We’d just improvise a bunch of scenes with Josh and work out blocking and figure out if it worked [long before we got on set].
There is a show-stopping scene that was not in the book in which Sandra Hüller sings a Harry Styles song at karaoke.
MILLER Sandra has a beautiful singing voice, and she would sing in between setups. Ryan came over to us and said, “It’s crazy that we’re doing karaoke and that she isn’t singing. Isn’t there a way that we could have her sing?” But we only had two more days on this set that we were shooting on. We figured out that it could work, but it’s not our favorite thing to ask an actor, “Hey, would you mind singing a song in two days?”
LORD And she said, “Only if I get to choose the song.” And one of the fun parts was to see the entire apparatus around the movie scramble to clear a Harry Styles song in 36 hours.
Bezos tweeted how much he liked the movie. Did you get word that he liked it before that?
MILLER We heard that he and Andy [Jassy, Amazon president and CEO] had seen it and they loved it, which was good. Better than the opposite for sure.
