Entertainment
After ‘Project Hail Mary,’ Andy Weir and Drew Goddard Are Ready To Team Up for More
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary.]
Summary
Much like the visionary directors behind Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, audiences have seen the powerful collaboration between author Andy Weir and screenwriter Drew Goddard on screen, even before critics began raving about Ryan Gosling‘s breathtaking space mission. In 2015, their first seven-time Academy Award-nominated alliance on The Martian showed audiences what could be done with a whip-smart script and the guts to put it to screen, and they’re ready to recreate that magic again.
Project Hail Mary is topping the charts with Gosling starring as Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher on a mission to save worlds with his cohort, a rock being and engineer Grace affectionately dubs “Rocky” (James Ortiz). The movie also stars Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller, The Bear‘s Lionel Boyce, Milana Vayntrub, and Ken Leung.
In this interview with Steve Weintraub, Weir and Goddard discuss their interest in a third team-up, how Gosling got involved with the project, and Weir’s approach to writing epic science fiction. Goddard shares the biggest lessons learned while working on The Martian, the pair discuss why Project Hail Mary‘s on-screen ending had to have minor adjustments, and tease what’s next for them.
Andy Weir and Drew Goddard Talk Future Team-Ups
“We’d be happy to just keep cranking ‘em out.”
COLLIDER: After watching The Martian and now watching Project Hail Mary: You two need to do more together.
ANDY WEIR: That works for me
DREW GODDARD: We agree.
More. And it needs to be more than every 17 years.
GODDARD: Absolutely. From your mouth to God’s ears. Yes.
WEIR: All you’ve got to do is make sure studios are willing to give us, like, $150, $200 million to make a movie, and we’d be happy to just keep cranking ‘em out.
GODDARD: Also, you need to keep writing faster.
WEIR: I need to write faster.
GODDARD: But then again, I’m not the fastest either. [Laughs]
WEIR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we waited for him. We had to wait months for him. We weren’t interested in having any other screenwriter do this, so we actually just held up the project because he was busy on something else. Our list of potential screenwriters was one: Drew Goddard.
GODDARD: Thank god they waited.
I say again, thank you. I really mean this when I say the movie is spectacular, and in IMAX, it’s just incredible.
WEIR: Spectacularer?
The IMAX experience, when it goes full frame, is really just like, “My god, this is why I go to the movie theater.”
GODDARD: Honestly, I hadn’t seen the finished version until last week at the full IMAX. I’ve watched this movie hundreds of times at this point, and I felt like I was seeing it for the first time. It’s stunning. You just see the majesty of what Chris [Miller] and Phil [Lord] were able to do. It was a magical experience.
Guillermo Del Toro Praises Upcoming Sci-Fi Film Adaptation With “Beautiful” 10/10 Review
The ‘Pacific Rim’ director took to social media to share his praise.
Ryan Gosling Chose ‘Project Hail Mary’
“That’s even better.”
Getting it into real specifics, [Andy], you sent this to Ryan [Gosling] in 2020 and said, “I’d like you to be the star, and I’d like you to produce.”
WEIR: Didn’t quite work that way. I think Ryan approached us. Or I did not personally do any of that. MGM, which at the time was just MGM before Amazon bought them, I think maybe approached talent with it, but Ryan was the one who said, “I want to do this.” So, that’s even better.
When you were writing the book, did you envision a certain actor in mind? How does that work?
WEIR: So there are two things to say on that. First off, I don’t have a very visual imagination, so in my mind, I just see sort of blobs of characters, blobs of this, blobs of that. When I’d finished the book, I couldn’t have told you what color Ryland’s hair was or what color his eyes were or anything like that. When I’m writing a book, and this is advice I give to any writers, you’re writing a book. Don’t think about movie adaptations. Don’t do that. If you want to write a movie, write a screenplay. Go for it. But if you’re writing a book, take advantage of the enormous space and infinite canvas you have on the book. Don’t try to think about things in terms of a potential adaptation.
What did you learn making The Martian in terms of the screenplay that you took with you to this, that sort of helped give you confidence in certain scenes? What were those big lessons learned?
GODDARD: I think the biggest lesson from The Martian was we learned from the audience that you don’t need to dumb it down. In fact, the audience likes it when you speak up to them, when you assume they’re smart enough to figure it out. That just gave us strength. Because I think you have this natural feeling of, “Well, we need to make sure everything gets explained,” and we learned it’s okay if you don’t understand everything, because audiences prefer that, because then they can learn. People love to learn, right? It’s part of the movie. This movie is a celebration of teaching, and it’s like, “Don’t be afraid. Just put it out there, and the audience will come to it.”
Andy Weir and Drew Goddard Fought to Keep ‘Project Hail Mary’s Ending Intact
“Thank God they did.”
With the ending of the book, was it always that ending, and how did you come to that? There are slight changes in the movie ending, so how did you determine what you wanted to do?
WEIR: Well, for writing the book, I knew what the last scene was going to be before I wrote the first words. I absolutely knew that’s how the book was going to end. There was never any other option in my mind. That is exactly how I wanted it to end. As for the film adaptation, I don’t know how spoilery we’ve been getting, but I think it’s exactly the same.
GODDARD: There are some minor differences, for sure.
It’s very, very close.
WEIR: Very minor.
GODDARD: It’s funny because there are like four scenes in the book that I was like, “Oh, I’ve never seen anything like this. This is why I want to do this.” The ending is definitely one of them. I also knew this was going to take some fights. People are not going to want this because people get scared when anything’s different, right? So we had to sort of gently remind our studios along the way of why this ending was so special and powerful. I think they did come around, and thank god they did. But any changes that were within it were to maximize the effect of the ending.
You’re making this on a budget, obviously, and you have a lot of money, but it’s never enough. So when you’re writing the screenplay, how cognizant are you in terms of budget?
GODDARD: It’s always in the back of my head because I want to make sure we can do it. The problem is that Chris and Phil are so visionary, and they come from animation, so they always figure they can figure it out. They always do. So, I think that push-pull between us led to what is on the screen. I cannot say enough about the visuals they put on the screen. I was there, and I still don’t know how human beings did it.
I said to Chris and Phil that they need to make more live-action movies. They’re incredibly talented.
GODDARD: Without question.
I obviously have to ask you as a fan, what are you currently writing or thinking about? Are you writing something that is not being talked about? What’s going on?
WEIR: I’m working on my next book now. I’m not talking about it publicly. I can tell you it’s science fiction, and it’s another standalone story. It’s not a sequel to anything I’ve written.
How long ago did you start writing?
WEIR: Well, this one I probably started about a year ago, and it hasn’t been going very fast because of a combination of duties on the Project Hail Mary film and having a toddler. So, those two things. [Laughs]
GODDARD: It does slow things down.
WEIR: It slows things down. [Laughs]
What else are you working on this year?
GODDARD: Right now, it is all Hail Mary all the time, so I am excited for this movie to come out.
Project Hail Mary is in theaters and IMAX now.
- Release Date
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March 20, 2026
- Runtime
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156 Minutes
- Director
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Christopher Miller, Phil Lord
- Writers
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Drew Goddard, Andy Weir
- Producers
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Ryan Gosling, Amy Pascal, Andy Weir, Aditya Sood, Christopher Miller, Phil Lord, Rachel O’Connor
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