‘Project Hail Mary’ Writer Drew Goddard Always Knew He Had to Have That Ending

Drew Goddard knows you’ve probably been wondering where he’s been.

The writer — who turned a “Six Feet Under” spec script into stints writing for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its follow-up “Angel,” along with “Lost,” “Alias” and “The Good Place,” before also becoming one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters with projects like “Cloverfield,” “The Cabin in the Woods” and “World War Z” — hasn’t made a movie since 2018’s “Bad Times at the El Royale,” which he also directed. Goddard created 2024’s “High Potential,” which is still on the air, and wrote its pilot, and served as an executive producer and sometimes director on “The Good Place.” But still – it’s been too long.

Thankfully, he is back with his script for “Project Hail Mary,” which is out in theaters now. Like his Oscar-nominated screenplay for “The Martian,” “Project Hail Mary” is based on a novel by Andy Weir, and like that earlier project, it follows a lone protagonist, a middle school science teacher named Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling) tasked with an impossible mission – to discover the origins of a microbe that is eating our sun. Thankfully, he teams up with an alien he dubs Rocky from a planet that is similarly impacted and together they hash out a plan.

Like Grace, Goddard said that he was a victim of circumstance.

“This is the benefit of having a long career, that I can look back and realize it’s always been a volatile business we’ve been in, and movies and shows can take a while, and so as long as I just keep working, sooner or later, they’ll find the right fit or the right time, certainly like with ‘Hail Mary,’” Goddard said.

He’s been working on the project for six years (“Which sounds very long,” concedes Goddard), but within those six years was a global pandemic, along with a writers’ strike, along with the shifting schedules of Gosling (who was both the star and producer) and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. “Life was throwing curveballs,” Goddard said. “It feels longer in hindsight than it felt in the moment.”

The first email that Goddard got was from Weir. It was April Fool’s Day, two weeks into the shutdown. He worried that it was an elaborate prank. But Weir informed him that he had a new book and that it had already been set up with Gosling, Lord and Miller. “I was like, That’s a dream team right there. But I was also scared. I didn’t want to let them down,” Goddard said. He told Weir, “Look, let me read it and let me make sure that I feel like I’m the right person to do this. As much as I love you Andy, I never want to be doing this if I feel like it’s not the right fit.”

Goddard said that he learned long ago that he has to love whatever he’s adapting, or he won’t do it justice.

“Halfway through the book, I realized, Oh, crap, I love this. Now I’m going to have to do this. It was thrilling, because when you love a book, it’s fun, but it’s also scary, because this book was really ambitious and really hard, and I knew that that was going to be the case,” Goddard said. Still – he thought back to the dream team that had already been assembled, of Gosling, Lord and Miller. “I realized I wasn’t alone. We were all going to be in this together, figuring it out,” he said.

When Goddard is working on an original idea, he starts with scenes and moments that are inside his head. He puts those on the board. When he is adapting something, he writes down things that he loves – “whether it’s a moment or a scene or a plot turn or a line of dialogue.” Afterwards, he’ll look at the board and think, Okay, what do I see here? How do we make a film out of this?

With any adaptation of a novel, he said, you get about 5% of the word count. “You have to make some tough calls.

“I try to just start with, What do I love about the book? What I noticed very quickly, on this proverbial board, that the soul of the movie was Ryan Gosling meets an alien on the other side of the galaxy and they have this story. And I then also noticed that Sandra Hüller’s character Eva Stratt was also on the board. And so I realized this movie is a triangle,” Goddard explained. “It is really fundamentally about three characters. And my idea is we just design it around that, and everything else that we need will find its way in. And we’ll obviously try to get anything else that’s important in there, but when in doubt, it’s going to focus on this triangle. I think that that’s what we stuck to, and that’s what’s on the screen.”

Structurally, “Project Hail Mary” was tricky, since it starts with Grace waking up on the spaceship and suffering from temporary amnesia. As he pieces together his life before the mission, back on Earth, we see those moments. They are less flashbacks than they are memories. Goddard said that he had a lot of “training” on how to handle flashbacks on shows like “Buffy” and, in particular, “Lost,” a show that was similarly structured around flashbacks to before the characters were on the island (and, in later seasons, flash-forwards and flash-sideways).

“I think where people go astray with flashbacks is they think of these things as two stories, they think of it like we’re just filling in the gaps with flashbacks. And I think the important thing is, you’re telling one story, even though you’re telling it out of chronological order. It needs to feel like one story, especially in film. If you do it that way, it will make the film transcend the normal flashback structure, at least that’s the hope,” Goddard said.

Together with Lord and Miller they laid out the structure, which didn’t make things any less tricky to figure out.

“This movie is, from a just a pure screenwriter’s point of view, both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is, when the book is great, it makes your life easier. The curse is the ambition of the book is – it’s a story about a human and an alien from the other side of the galaxy who can’t exist in our atmosphere, doesn’t have a face, doesn’t have expressions to emote with, speaks in whale songs, it’s not a humanoid alien,” Goddard said.

“This whole story is an emotional story based on empathy and compassion. And so you have to find a story that can be told with two individuals, one of whom does not have the normal emotional tricks to play with. I think that was really scary, but I also knew that the very thing that made it scary was going to make it matter and make it feel different, because the challenges would become part of the narrative.”

One of the biggest question marks, as a fan of the book, was whether or not “Project Hail Mary” would maintain the novel’s ending.

Spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen the movie yet (and, really, what are you doing? Go now!), but Weir’s novel ends with Grace marooned on Rocky’s planet. Everything is fine since they have stopped the star-eating bacteria. But Grace cannot go home. So he goes back to doing what he loves – teaching. Only this time, it’s little kid rock aliens, who look just like Rocky. It’s much easier to visualize on the page than it is to imagine on the big screen. But for Goddard, it was always there.

“The ending was on the board,” Goddard said. He thought he would spend the next few years having to “fight about this with people,” not Gosling, Lord or Miller but executives who get nervous. “Anytime something’s different, people get scared. They just do. They want it to feel familiar. And so the very thing that I loved about it was the very thing that was going to make it challenging,” Goddard said. “But I trusted that when I read it, I felt emotion and passion, and I knew, Okay, my job is to convey the same emotion that I’m feeling, to others.”

The same line of thinking applied to the novel’s very dense science, which he learned while adapting “The Martian.” “Let me streamline this in an emotional way to say, if you don’t want to follow the dense science, here’s the emotions that are important to understand. But we’re still going to do the dense science if you do want to see it,” Goddard said. “Something I learned with Andy’s work on ‘The Martian,’ is that we don’t want to dumb this down. It’s a lot about parallel storytelling and saying, This will play for the people who really care about the science, and it will also play for the people who don’t.”

In both cases, it worked out — “Project Hail Mary” is nearing $300 million at the worldwide box office and Amazon MGM Studios has a massive hit on their hands. But Goddard and Co. had a feeling the film could be a big hit after their first test screening.

“Project Hail Mary,” from the very first test screening, played “through the roof.” This was odd considering that most of the visual effects were not finished for that screening. It can usually impact scores. But this time, it didn’t. “That put a different pressure on us, because now we have to figure out how to make the best version. We all started to realize what we had on our hands – and by we, I mean the studio. We always knew, we always believed. But I think everyone started to believe, Oh, this could be really special, based on those early reactions,” Goddard said.

“And Chris and Phil, because they’re from animation, they’re constantly trying to make it as good as they possibly could. That’s part of what unites us, because I’m similarly obsessive about, let’s keep working until they pry it out of our hands. The truth is, if this movie didn’t have a release date, we’d probably still be working on it. That’s why it was such a good collaboration, because just never stopped.”

Lord and Miller are also working on an adaptation of another Weir book, “Artemis.” But Goddard has not been contacted yet. “I’m always here to be helpful, if I can be,” Goddard said.

We wondered when Goddard would get back to making another movie that he could direct himself. Both “The Cabin in the Woods” and “Bad Times at the El Royale” became cult classics, revisited by a group of die-hard faithful. He said the trick is to be smart about budget. Something like “Project Hail Mary,” for example, required a large budget (“We have to appeal to a bigger audience, or it’s not going to make sense for a studio to make this, I take that seriously”).

But for his own projects, Goddard said, “I want studios to be calm about the business side of it, because I know that if they’re calm, they’ll let us be more bold. They will let us take chances.’El Royale’ and ‘Cabin’ we both made for cheap. I remember, even at that time, because you can look at the comps of noir movies and there’s a very limited ceiling,” Goddard said about “Bad Times at the El Royale.” “But these movies always make money. In libraries, noir does very well. Don’t worry about it. As long as you keep it at this low budget, we’re going to be fine. I think that’s quite calming. I don’t know what I’m going to fall in love with next, but I will be reasonable.”

At least for the moment, Goddard’s next project as a director will be a movie set within the universe of “The Matrix.” So it could be a directorial project that also costs $300 million. No pressure.

“I would equate it to how I felt the responsibility to Andy,” Goddard said of the Warner Bros. project. “It’s how I started my career at ‘Buffy’ – I approach these things as a fan and I feel the responsibility. I feel a responsibility to myself as a fan,. And part of it is just don’t say yes unless you love it. I love Lana and Lily’s work. It’s not just ‘The Matrix.’ I love all of their movies. I love what they do. I feel  a responsibility to them. I feel a responsibility to the fans. I feel responsibility to the work. And I’m just in my writing cave, working on it, and sooner or later, we’ll either come up with something that feels worth our all of our collective time and energy or it won’t be ready yet. If I sound like I’m being coy or not, that’s just where we are in the process. I’m just writing. That can take a while.”

Sometimes he can stay in his writing cave and the work can never come out.

Take, for instance, “Sinister Six,” which was meant to be a “Spider-Man” spinoff film kind of an, Oops, all villains installment in the franchise. The film was in development as Sony readied “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” for release.

He compared his “Sinister Six” script to the Summer Annual, an issue of the comic books that Goddard loved as a kid. The regular issues would be about the ongoing issues Peter Parker would be facing, but the Summer Annual would be “a giant-sized issue that was just its own standalone story of something insane – usually something that you couldn’t do in the normal world of Spider-Man because it was too bananas.”

Goddard’s pitch to Sony was, “Let’s do a Summer Annual. I want to feel like a Summer Annual, because I was feeling that comic book movies had become too much about the connections with other movies. I do like the serialization, don’t get me wrong, but there was a part of me that said, ‘I would love it if we just yank Spider-Man out of his life and do something bananas.’”

And to their credit, Sony let him do it. Amy Pascal, a producer on “Project Hail Mary,” was then head of Sony.

“We were in full pre-production. I really love the script, to be honest. It’s wonderful,” Goddard said.

He was feeling optimistic … until the Sony hack happened.

“As FBI agents were swarming through the building and helicopters were flying over Sony, I realized, Uh oh, this is not good. I don’t know what’s happening. And so from that period, I remember it was a Wednesday before Thanksgiving that happened, and from that Wednesday through the holidays, is where the escalation and figuring just how bad this was, it’s a thing that I don’t know that even the outsiders understood how bad that was, and watching the ramifications, one of which was the movie went down because of all that,” Goddard said.

One of those ramifications was also the removal of Pascal. “Sinister Six” was dead.

As a fan of Spider-Man, Goddard was thrilled to see him properly enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “It was a weird situation, because I absolutely understood that that was the best business decision for Sony to make. And as a fan, I’m delighted. I want to see Spider-Man in The Avengers, but it also took my movie down. And so that was sad,” Goddard said.

His ”Sinister Six” movie was “designed” to exist within the framework of any version of Spider-Man. “I know they’ve got their plans for Spider-Man right now, but that door is always open. I love that movie so much and I’m a very patient man,” Goddard said. When we suggested that the movie could exist in an animated Spider-Man universe, Goddard said that was also a possibility – especially considering Lord and Miller oversee the “Spider-Verse” franchise. “If only I knew two visionary directors,” Goddard teased.

There’s also the possibility that Goddard will re-team with his “Martian” director Ridley Scott, this time on an ultra-violent western called “Wraiths of the Broken Land,” written by S. Craig Zahler. “There’s no movement right now but that’s another script I love,” Goddard said. “It’s a probably the polar opposite end of the spectrum from Andy’s writing and yet I love both authors so much.”

For now, though, Goddard is headed back into his writing cave. Or maybe a better analogy will be that he’s orbiting a far-off planet in his spaceship, waiting for the friendly knock of an alien creature. That sounds good too.

“Project Hail Mary” is in theaters now.

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