Duo: A Lord & Miller Story — Interviewing the directors of 'Project Hail Mary'

LEE: Let me just say this was quite the uncanny experience for me. Your adaptation was so spot-on that when watching, I often felt you tapped into my brain while I was reading the book back in 2023. First of all, did you tap into my brain? And secondly, how did you manage to pull this off, and yet make it all your own?

Things started off rather inauspiciously as this interviewer forgot to hit the record button on his feed, having no transcript of the first answer. They lauded the source material from author Andy Weir, as well as Drew Goddard who adapted the script. They also praised lead actor Ryan Gosling for helping them realize their vision to help put the Lord & Miller stamp on matters.

When I admitted I had forgotten to hit record, they were gracious about it. Lord smiled.

LORD: Yeah, don’t worry about that. You don’t need that.

LEE: I love competence movies, watching experts collaborate and solve problems. As a duo, you know a thing or two about collaborating because you've been doing this for decades together.

LORD: Yes.

LEE: How did that inform you from first contact through their friendship at the end?

MILLER: You know, we love making stories about people who work together to solve a difficult problem. You know, whether it was “Jump Street” or “Lego” or “Spider-Verse” movies, they all sort of seem to have this thing about people becoming friends and going through challenging situations.

It's the thing that we're interested in because we're living it every day. You know, this is a movie that takes place on two different timelines. There's an Earth backstory and a present day up in space.

And in both stories, it's about people coming together to solve problems. On Earth, it’s the whole world coming together to try and create this mission. And up in space, it's two totally different beings trying to see the world through each other's eyes so they can solve this thing together. And I think that's emblematic of us, the two of us, trying to see things through each other's eyes to find the tone and feel of the story.

And then the whole [film] crew is like the whole world coming together, all these talented people from all over bringing their ideas and doing something really challenging and new.

LEE: Yeah, I think that's a great analogy. And I say “fists in the bump for everyone,” right?

MILLER: That's right. Yeah.

LEE: When I was watching Rocky, I almost thought Andy Serkis was going to be on the IMDb because it was so much like motion capture. But it's puppeteering, I found out after researching. Were you a hundred percent going full Jim Henson here, or did you consider CGI and motion capture?

LORD: Yeah, Rocky's performance is a great collaboration between James Ortiz, the person that we cast to lead the puppeteering team and a wonderful group of animators at Framestore led by the animation lead Arslan Elver, who came to set, who spent a lot of time with James trying to get underneath his characterization and bring so much of his own self and all the animators' personalities into the performance.

So what you're seeing is the work of like a hundred people trying their best to bring out the humanity and personality of Rocky.

MILLER: And what's cool is that, in the end, even though there was a puppet and James there every day to be a scene partner for Ryan, there were certain scenes that were just not possible with puppetry. Like when he's rolling in a ball, you can't get puppeteers inside of a tiny ball. So we knew that it was going to be a marriage between these two processes, and it ended up being about a 50-50 split between animation and puppeteering. But always the animation was based on the puppet performances, and it became so seamless that it was impossible to tell which was which in the end.

INTERLUDE: Here I asked a couple of questions not worthy of the intelligence of the San Mateo Daily Journal audience. But we did enjoy a handful of laughs and will keep it off the record. Honestly, my main objective was to entertain them briefly, as perhaps a small respite from what I assume has been a long, arduous press tour up to this point. Maybe I wanted to give back for all the joy they have brought to my household over the years.

LEE: I thought the music was the MVP of this movie.

MILLER: Nice.

LORD: God bless.

LEE: Pemberton's score, especially that first-contact scene, I can't wait to get headphones and listen to it on Spotify.

LORD: Oh, it's beautiful. It really is one of Daniel's warmest scores.

LEE: Totally. And then, that karaoke scene by Sandra Hüller, I mean, that somehow brought tears to my eyes. I don't know why I was feeling emotion.

MILLER: She has a beautiful voice and brought so much nuance to the difficult thing that she was trying to do and say to the crew in that scene. And it's a beautiful scene.

LEE: Can you please sell “Project Hail Mary” to my audience in San Mateo County?

LORD: Yeah.

LEE: Why should the Daily Journal's Nor Cal followers go to the theater and watch this movie?

LORD: Well, first of all, I think the movie does have some real California vibes.

MILLER: For sure.

LORD: It’s sort of a long-haired, 1970s version of outer space.

I'd say that, you know, the movie just delivers a kind of breadth and spectacle that you hope for when you schlep to the movie theater, right?

And yet it's so intimate and warm that when you leave, you have a big ol’ smile on your face, and you want to call your friend and tell him you love him (he may have nodded toward Miller while saying that). It’s not just big, poetic visuals that blow your mind. It has that. But it’s also something life-affirming.

LEE: Sure.

LORD: And it rewards you for going to the cinema, getting a sitter and bringing the kids. The other thing is, we made a movie to bring the kids. It really plays for everyone, eight to 80. We just wanted it to be a communal experience. After all, sending a spaceship 12 light-years away to save the planet is a communal experience.

“Project Hail Mary” opens in theaters Friday, March 20.