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Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller got their start in animation with 2009's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and it's a medium the duo has returned to frequently in the almost-two-decades since.
Their most recent – and ambitious – endeavor has been the Spider-Verse franchise, a visual feast that combines a bunch of different animation styles to convey mutliple alternate universes and versions of Spider-Man (Lord wrote 2019's Into the Spider-Verse, and the pair re-teamed to pen 2023's Across the Spider-Verse and the upcoming Beyond the Spider-Verse).
While their latest movie, Project Hail Mary, a return to live-action for Lord and Miller, the lessons they've learned from animation, and specifically Spider-Verse, were never far from their minds.
"For sure our animation background was a factor in thinking about how we wanted to visualize the movie," Miller tells GamesRadar+. "And the Spider-Verse movies, because they can stick to walls and walk on walls, we were constantly rotating the camera, and we found that the audiences went with it as long as you were engaged in the story. In space, there's no up and down, so we wanted to make sure that our camera was broken from the fixed up and down."
Based on the novel of the same name by The Martian author Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary follows Ryan Gosling's Ryland Grace, a scientist-turned-elementary school teacher who wakes up on a spacecraft bound for a world-saving mission with no memory of how or why he got there.
"I think those movies taught us to trust the audience," Lord adds. "They're really capable of going anywhere with you. And I think Andy [Weir]'s novel does that. It trusts us. You know, with throwing a lot of hard science at us and trusting that we'll follow, and I thought that Drew [Goddard] wrote a screenplay that also respected the audience's intelligence. And so when you watch the movie, you're like, 'Oh, this movie thinks I'm smart,' and it makes you feel good."
"On top of that, we learned from those movies that people want a visual experience they've never seen before," Miller continues. "They want to be surrounded and overwhelmed by the images. We wanted to make sure that we were giving them a spectacle that felt new and fresh and original, and so that was like a real driver for us."
Project Hail Mary arrives in UK cinemas on March 19 and US theaters on March 20. In the meantime, check out our Project Hail Mary review or get up to speed with the other biggest upcoming movies on the way in 2026.
