‘Project Hail Mary’ Composer Wants to Bring You to Tears: ‘I Spend So Long Trying to Make People Cry’

In “Project Hail Mary,” music bridges gaps in communication. Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace makes friends with an alien, Rocky, who speaks through song. Before Grace goes off on his mission, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) performs Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” to him, an acknowledgement of everything left unsaid between the two.

“Communication is a really big part of this story and this score,” Daniel Pemberton, the film’s composer, told TheWrap. “That communication between Rocky and Grace early on sets the groundwork in some ways for the sound of the score later. When Rocky first turns up, the score starts using this kind of treated electronic vocal experiments that I did. There’s a kind of call and response backwards and forwards between Grace and Rocky that’s really reflected in the music. It’s almost telling you things that you don’t necessarily need to see or hear on screen because it shows you how this language between them and this bond is developing.”

While composing the film’s score, Pemberton — who previously worked with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller on the “Spider-Verse” films — knew he needed to communicate with the audience in the same way, to help them feel a myriad of emotions on the epic space odyssey.

In particular, he wanted to bring audiences to tears.

“I am 100% trying to make people cry. I spend so long trying to make people cry,” he said with a laugh. “It’s very interesting, the level of time you can spend trying to make people cry, because it’s very delicate and hard to do. It can be very small things, like one note just moving. Some cues are quite robust.”

“When I get it right, I will probably cry while writing.”

Pemberton has a long-standing relationship with Lord and Miller, collaborating on not just the two “Spider-Verse” animated features that the duo produced, but also their Apple TV murder mystery series “The Afterparty,” which Miller co-wrote and directed and Lord produced.

“All of us have a desire to do projects where we get to really push at the edges and try and do something quite different,” he said.

And different it was. When Lord and Miller first approached Pemberton for this larger-than-life sci-fi blockbuster, they wanted the composer to build a score out of a single wooden block in a nod to Rocky. (“Nah, that’s not gonna happen,” Pemberton said.) Instead, the composer built what he called the “most complicated score I’ve ever made in my life.”

“I consciously try not to go for ‘cinematic epic’ or these huge, over-the-top approaches to scoring that people might expect on a film like this,” he explained. “All the way through this process, one of our biggest things was how do we make this sound different, and how do we make it feel unique and feel like this score could only belong to this movie.”

Rather than assembling a traditional orchestral score, Pemberton folded in a number of unique sources to find “Project Hail Mary’s” sound: steel drums, the cristal baschet, a friend’s leaky faucet and, yes, a wood block. Pemberton also employed a classroom of kids from Wells Cathedral School for his percussion, recording them slapping, clapping and stomping for the score.

“The human body and the human voice is a huge part of this score,” he said. “The more noise I could make out of the human body, I used, because I wanted this kind of subliminal connection to humanity,” Pemberton said. “It was really about trying to make something that connected you to the universe.”

“I wanted stuff that connected you to the cellular nature of the world. The more it felt unusual, the more you’d think about the world around you.”

Pemberton described the process of writing new scores as “starting a new band,” assembling teams to meet the needs of each project. While he called his upcoming score for “Masters of the Universe” an “insanely maximalist score,” he noted that his music for the Robert Pattinson/Zendaya vehicle “The Drama” involved only three flutes and four hours of recording.

To see the broadest scope of the band he assembled for “Project Hail Mary,” Pemberton suggested listeners check out a track called “Time Go Fishing,” played during a climactic spacewalk sequence in the film.

“I definitely have a habit of over-adding stuff and then knowing when to pull out some of those sounds. I always like to see how far I can push things, to be honest,” he said. “It’s not always good to add, but on that score it really works to add and add and add. In some ways, that cue is a culmination of the entire score beforehand.”

Pemberton spent a lot of time trying to make audiences misty in this space epic — and even he’s not immune to the tears. The composer pointed to a track called “The Moment,” played over a stunning section of film where Ryland Grace witnesses the full beauty of the dazzlingly pink Petrova Lines at the film’s center.

“That is a really important sequence for me because I’m trying to let the music allow you to feel the beauty and wonder of that moment,” he said. “That’s a really strong moment of awe, and the music is there to help you experience that in the same way Grace is experiencing it.

“I’ve heard this cue a million times, and it still makes me cry.”

“Project Hail Mary” is now playing exclusively in theaters.

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