First Contact and Building Empathy

Ground control to Script Apart listeners – today on the show, we’re blasting off into the cosmos with three formidable sci-fi storytelling talents. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are the writer-director-producer pair responsible for films like Into The Spider-Verse, Across The Spider-Verse, 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, The Lego Movie and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Screenwriter Drew Godard, meanwhile, you may know from movies like Cloverfield, Cabin In The Woods, World War Z and Bad Times At The El Royale, which he also directed. 

Project Hail Mary is their new film, directed by Lord & Miller and written by Drew, and it’s one of the most entertaining and defiantly hopeful spectacles of the year so far – a tale of empathy and communication as a weapon against adversity, and another story of an astronaut adrift among the stars, adapted from an author who’s made that kinda his specialty. In 2015, Drew worked with Ridley Scott on The Martian – an adaptation of a novel by Andy Weir. A decade later, Drew teamed with Andy again on a film that, from the outside, might look like The Martian Part II. Project Hail Mary, though, is in fact a brilliant inversion of Andy’s breakthrough book, and of other similar-sounding space adventure yarns.

It stars Ryan Gosling as junior high teacher Ryland Grace – a man who wakes up one day alone on a space shuttle with amnesia, and no recollection of what put him there. Soon he discovers himself to be at the centre of a mission to heal our solar system’s dying sun. This dude in a nice cardigan is somehow humanity’s last shot at salvation.

“So, a bit like Sunshine by Danny Boyle?” I hear you ask. Not really! Despite the cosmic high-stakes involved in that premise, Project Hail Mary has a hilarious lightness of touch about it, and a message about friendship at its core that’s remarkable. In the spoiler conversation you’re about to hear, first with Drew, then handing over to Phil and Chris, you’ll hear exactly how the filmmakers arrived at that tone. Collectively, we break down every twist and turn in Project Hail Mary – including the inspirations behind Rocky, a character that let me be very clear, I would die for. Drew also gives me a couple of insights into what he’s cooking up with The Matrix 5, following the announcement a while back that he’s going to be helming the next instalment in that saga. 

Support for this episode comes from Final Draft's Big Break screenwriting competition.

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