Project Hail Mary: The Rejected Idea For Daniel Pemberton's Score
Project Hail Mary composer Daniel Pemberton
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When filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller first called Daniel Pemberton about Project Hail Mary, the conversation started with wood blocks. Not metaphorically — literally. The directing duo had an idea that the entire film could be scored on a single percussion instrument. Pemberton loved the spirit of it. He also told them, with his characteristic directness, that it probably wouldn’t sustain a two-and-a-half-hour film.
That exchange says something about how this particular creative partnership works. And why it keeps producing results.
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Andy Weir had already proven that his brand of rigorously researched, deeply human science fiction could fill a movie theater. The Martian, his debut novel adapted by director Ridley Scott in 2015 with Matt Damon, grossed over $630 million worldwide and earned seven Academy Award nominations. When Project Hail Mary was still in manuscript form, Ryan Gosling moved quickly, acquiring the rights from Weir to star in and produce the sci-fi adaptation.
Lord and Miller, the creative duo behind The Lego Movie, the Jump Street franchise and the Spider-Verse films, came aboard to direct while Drew Goddard, who had written The Martian screenplay, returned to adapt Weir’s latest work.
Project Hail Mary follows Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher who appears in the film’s early scenes addressing his students about a fast-growing solar drainage crisis, intercut with that same teacher aboard a spacecraft light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there. Where The Martian split its narrative tension between a stranded astronaut and the team scrambling to reach him, Project Hail Mary turns that structure inward, with Grace’s returning memory serving as the mission control, gradually assembling the stakes around him. Sandra Hüller co-stars as Eva Stratt, the international project director who put Grace on the ship in the first place, while James Ortiz oversaw the puppetry for the alien Rocky, and provided the voice as well.
Pemberton was no stranger to the world of Lord and Miller, having scored both 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse for the duo as producers. He also scored their Apple TV+ genre-hopping series The Afterparty. But Project Hail Mary’s gravitational pull brought Pemberton deeper into the process than their prior collaborations. Pemberton relocated to Los Angeles, writing beside the editing suite as Lord and Miller refined their cut again and again.
A composer who has never stayed in one genre long enough to be defined by it, Pemberton spoke with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the score’s unlikely sonic building blocks, the eight-minute cue that contains every musical idea in the film, and what to expect when he shifts from scoring the saviors of the universe to the Masters of the Universe.
Your working relationship with Phil Lord and Chris Miller has covered a lot of ground, the Spider-Verse films, The Afterparty, and more. But this is the first feature they’ve directed with you scoring. How did those early conversations go?
I got involved quite early, reading the script and writing ideas that got played on set with Ryan (Gosling). Making the score feel very organic through the prism of space meant finding ways to connect the audience to the Earth and to humanity. We recruited a bunch of school kids to Abbey Road Studios and recorded them clapping, stamping their feet, slapping things, etc. We also used voices and manipulated some electronically, trying to emulate the “making it up as you go along” spirit of the film. Ryland Grace’s improvisational techniques to save the planet is kind of the way I tried to take the score.
The choir almost sounded like you were creating your own language, and communication is such an important aspect of the film. What exactly are we hearing there?
We did a lot of experimentation early on with vocals and vocal ideas. For some of those, we built very unusual kinds of electronic instruments that gave me the power to be expressive in a way that was quite unique and hadn’t really been done. I would merge synthetic voices with real voices. I wanted something that connected Ryland and Rocky.
Because Rocky is from this other planet and his communication is different, I wanted a sound world that subconsciously would connect you to this othe