When filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller first called Daniel Pemberton about Project Hail Mary, the conversation started with wood blocks. Not metaphorically — literally. The directing duo had an idea that the entire film could be scored on a single percussion instrument. Pemberton loved the spirit of it. He also told them, with his characteristic directness, that it probably wouldn’t sustain a two-and-a-half-hour film.
That exchange says something about how this particular creative partnership works. And why it keeps producing results.
Andy Weir had already proven that his brand of rigorously researched, deeply human science fiction could fill a movie theater. The Martian, his debut novel adapted by director Ridley Scott in 2015 with Matt Damon, grossed over $630 million worldwide and earned seven Academy Award nominations. When Project Hail Mary was still in manuscript form, Ryan Gosling moved quickly, acquiring the rights from Weir to star in and produce the sci-fi adaptation.
Lord and Miller, the creative duo behind The Lego Movie, the Jump Street franchise and the Spider-Verse films, came aboard to direct while Drew Goddard, who had written The Martian screenplay, returned to adapt Weir’s latest work.
Project Hail Mary follows Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher who appears in the film’s early scenes addressing his students about a fast-growing solar drainage crisis, intercut with that same teacher aboard a spacecraft light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there. Where The Martian split its narrative tension between a stranded astronaut and the team scrambling to reach him, Project Hail Mary turns that structure inward, with Grace’s returning memory serving as the mission control, gradually assembling the stakes around him. Sandra Hüller co-stars as Eva Stratt, the international project director who put Grace on the ship in the first place, while James Ortiz oversaw the puppetry for the alien Rocky, and provided the voice as well.
Pemberton was no stranger to the world of Lord and Miller, having scored both 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse for the duo as producers. He also scored their Apple TV+ genre-hopping series The Afterparty. But Project Hail Mary’s gravitational pull brought Pemberton deeper into the process than their prior collaborations. Pemberton relocated to Los Angeles, writing beside the editing suite as Lord and Miller refined their cut again and again.
A composer who has never stayed in one genre long enough to be defined by it, Pemberton spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the score’s unlikely sonic building blocks, the eight-minute cue that contains every musical idea in the film, and what to expect when he shifts from scoring the saviors of the universe to the Masters of the Universe.
Your working relationship with Phil Lord and Chris Miller has covered a lot of ground, the Spider-Verse films, The Afterparty, and more. But this is the first feature they’ve directed with you scoring. How did those early conversations go?
I got involved quite early, reading the script and writing ideas that got played on set with Ryan (Gosling). Making the score feel very organic through the prism of space meant finding ways to connect the audience to the Earth and to humanity. We recruited a bunch of school kids to Abbey Road Studios and recorded them clapping, stamping their feet, slapping things, etc. We also used voices and manipulated some electronically, trying to emulate the “making it up as you go along” spirit of the film. Ryland Grace’s improvisational techniques to save the planet is kind of the way I tried to take the score.
The choir almost sounded like you were creating your own language, and communication is such an important aspect of the film. What exactly are we hearing there?
We did a lot of experimentation early on with vocals and vocal ideas. For some of those, we built very unusual kinds of electronic instruments that gave me the power to be expressive in a way that was quite unique and hadn’t really been done. I would merge synthetic voices with real voices. I wanted something that connected Ryland and Rocky.
Because Rocky is from this other planet and his communication is different, I wanted a sound world that subconsciously would connect you to this otherworldly being and illustrate how the communication between them is so important. And how communication between all of us is incredibly important in terms of connection. There’s a thing called a cristal baschet, which is this old instrument from the ’40s and ’50s, all made of glass, that you play with water. That’s a big part of the score. We were trying to create this orchestra that was not a traditional orchestra.
Project Hail Mary
Jonathan Olley/Amazon Content Services
I’m thinking about Ryland Grace pre-mission, with his memories intact and an arguably cowardly approach to life, contrasting with the Ryland we meet at the beginning in space, with missing memories and an admirable ability to roll up his sleeves. Thematically, how did you use music to separate those two versions of him?
Ryland changes, as you know, through the movie. When Rocky starts to arrive, that element of the score also arrives. So Rocky, in the same way that he brings his own personality and outlook into the story, also brings a different sonic outlook and melodic outlook. Once they start communicating, the score actually starts going in a new direction, more of these unusual voices. Early on in the film those voices are there, but they’re sparing, then they really come to life after that first connection. We call it the “cat and mouse sequence,” the bit where Rocky’s trying to send the message to Ryland.
Ryland and Rocky’s journey into the upper atmosphere as part of their mission has an intensity that lingers in the audience’s chest. When you’re tasked with writing a cue dealing with that much emotional pressure and tension, while balancing sound design and effects, how do you find the balance?
You’re talking about the “fishing trip.” That’s a huge piece. That’s like eight minutes long and it’s quite unlike the rest of the film in some ways, in terms of its dramatic intensity. That is a great example of our intentions with the film, because that cue starts with a single wood block.
There’s nothing else at the beginning of that cue, just one wood block being hit over and over again. From that one wood block, it builds and builds and it never stops. The idea behind that is it locks the audience into this tension. And the audience might not even realize it, but they need the release of this sequence and we don’t ever give it to them, which makes it so intense. That cue has every single musical idea I put in this film. It’s got kids’ percussion, it’s got electric cello, it’s got cristal baschet, it’s got glass harmonica, it’s got orchestra, it’s got millions of weird bits of percussion.
This score has everything.
I used to joke that this film score has every single sound in it except the kitchen sink, but we do actually have that in this film. One of the earliest sounds I made was a squeaky tap. I was around a friend’s very nice, big house in the countryside, very old, very creaky pipes. I was like, “Oh my God, this is the most amazing, unusual sound.” I wanted to create a language that was very organic and water-based, so I sampled it and turned it into an instrument, because of the organic, unstable nature of that sound.
Was there a particular cue you kept tinkering with as the cut evolved?
I don’t think I’ve ever been on a film where we revisited more sequences than this movie. Every sequence in the film we revisited. I was on this film for a very, very long time. I ended up pretty much living in the edit. I went to L.A. and was writing next to the edit room for quite a long time, because it allowed us to push every idea and boundary to see what would work and what wouldn’t. One of my favorite bits, one I always felt very protective of, is when Ryland turns on the Astrophage collector on the space walk. He presses the button and then he goes into the stars with all the red. I thought it was such a beautiful visual sequence. I was like, “You’ve got to let me do something for that, because this is going to be a very powerful, cinematic IMAX moment.”
Would you say this is the most challenging score of your career, even accounting for the Spider-Verse productions?
It’s definitely the most challenging, most complicated score I think I’ve ever done. It’s interesting when you’ve got a film that is about language and communication, and the ambition in the scoring is to also create a new process with different instruments and different techniques.
That involves a huge amount of experimentation, a huge amount of failure, and a huge amount of discovering weird bits of gold. At one point I was really keen on trying to do a huge amount on steel drums, because I wanted stuff that was very organic, metal that was reflective of the spaceship. And it worked, but only to a certain level. There are tons of tests and things that got binned, but out of each of those experimentations we’d find a little nugget of gold. And that gold would go on the pile and become part of the score writing approach.
When Ryland finds out it might not be a one-way trip, the emotion plays on his face with such intensity amid the quietness, and then you marry that with score. Can you talk about the arc of that scene?
When I’m scoring a movie, if there’s an option to try and make people cry, I zero in on that moment and spend so much time trying to work out how to get it to the most effective that it can be. It’s really fascinating to see how emotions can be pulled out of an audience. You can just raise the volume a tiny bit or bring it down. You can make these tiny little tweaks and it can have a huge difference.
Is originality a north star for you when you’re looking at potential projects?
Wait until you see Masters of the Universe, which is also fantastic. It’s really going to surprise people. I’m just finishing that up at the moment, and even though it’s an IP, the director Travis Knight has been fantastic and we’ve got something really, really fun. I think it invokes the most fun you can have at a cinema.
