Phil Lord and Chris Miller to direct ‘Project Hail Mary’ starring Ryan Gosling
Phil Lord and Chris Miller will co-direct a live-action movie together for the first time since Solo was released in 2018. The science fiction film is called Project Hail Mary, an adaptation of The Martian author Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, and will star Ryan Gosling in the lead role.
The film tells of a solo astronaut who must venture to another star in order to save the Earth from ruin. Discussing the movie and how their previous effort helped to inform it, Lord recently told The Hollywood Reporter, “The Solo experience clarified what was important to us. In the case of Hail Mary, it’s kind of radically benevolent. And it’s going to be hard.”
The biggest challenge Lord and Miller face is that Gosling’s character Ryland Grace will be alone on his spacecraft with no one else to talk to. However, there will be one relationship in the film that will become important, that between Ryland and an alien, even though it will speak in music and not language.
“Having one of your main characters have no face and speak through music is a challenge that’s crazy enough that we would want to take it on,” added Miller.
He continued: “When we were doing Spider-Verse the first time, there was a lot of nervousness at the studio that people wouldn’t understand the concept and that it would be too confusing. And our attitude was, ‘Audiences are smarter than you think.’”
Meanwhile, Gosling is set to star in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie alongside Margot Robbie, which arrives in cinemas this summer. “I only knew Ken from afar. I didn’t know Ken from within, and if I’m being really honest, I doubted my Ken-ergy,” Gosling recently told the audience at a Warner Bros Pictures event at CinemaCom.
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