Project Hail Mary directors had a radical method to de-isolate Ryan Gosling

'We had never done it that way, but it was Ryan's idea,' Phil Lord says

While the action in Project Hail Mary is closely adapted from Weir’s bestselling novel, Gosling reveals that the looseness normally associated with improv comedy was a vital part of the process for directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and that improv kept him from getting lonely while he was sealed into a small, narrow spaceship set for a long shoot. He and co-star Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) both tell Polygon they used a unique way of working with actors for improvised sequences — having them wear earpieces so Lord and Miller could quietly give them private notes on different options to try mid-scene.

“It was a request from Ryan to begin with,” Miller says. “He is often in scenes by himself, so he asked us if we could be in his ear and offer suggestions and pitches, just so he wasn't doing the scenes alone. The other thing is, we always like to offer suggestions and provocations in the middle of a take, and it's so much more pleasant than yelling it across a soundstage — we can whisper it. The other advantage of it is, the other actor doesn't know what’s coming. [We could] suggest something to Sandra and be like, ‘Ask him about… He seems kind of insecure right now, and he will get thrown, and that'll be a real reaction,’ and vice versa.”

Lord says they used a similar method with James Ortiz, the voice and on-set puppeteer behind Rocky the alien. “We had a microphone to his ear, going, like, ‘OK, say this to Ryan, let's see what he does.’”

“‘And whatever you do, whenever he asks you to not do that with the measuring tape, do it anyway,’” Miller laughs. “Then we could go to Ryan and be like, ‘Ryan, just keep just making him do the measuring tape right. No matter what he does, make sure he looks at the numbers on the measure.’ And so you get to play these games.”

“I asked for it,” Gosling says. “I was so alone — I was alone for a hundred days or something on this film, in spaceships and in spacesuits and on wires, and I needed to have some way to communicate. If there was a note, or I needed to say something, or we needed to talk about the scene, we couldn't take the spaceship apart, or bring me down off the wires and get out of the suit. So I had to have a way to talk to them. But it became this way to have a whole other form of communication with James and Rocky, because James could just ad-lib with me.”

Hüller says she “loved” the earbud method of getting notes. “I've been working with it a lot on stage, because it's very liberating, in a way,” she says. “The responsibility [for character choices] sometimes lies somewhere else. You don't need to listen to everything that everybody says — it's your decision, what you take from what they offer. And I didn't do it all the time, don't get me wrong, it was just occasionally for improv and things like that. So it depends on the situation, it depends on the character, but it can be very, very helpful.”

“[The earpiece method of directing] was my idea, so I couldn't complain,” Gosling says. “James Ortiz is such a great artist, and he understood Rocky so deeply […] Suddenly we could have a real relationship. There's a spontaneity to it, it's alive, you can feel it, and I think that's part of the magic in the movie.”

Gosling says “so much” of the improvised material between him and Ortiz ultimately wound up in Project Hail Mary, because Lord and Miller were looking for that kind of spontaneous energy. “That's what's so beautiful about these directors — that's the stuff they're looking for,” he says. “And so that's the kind of secret sauce of the movie. It feels like it's happening because it is in real time.”

According to Lord, he and Miller had never used earbuds to prompt actors against each other in a scene before, and they were reluctant when Gosling originally proposed the idea.

“At first, we were like, ‘I don't know if we want to be in your ear, it'll take you out of the moment,” he says. “But he's such an amazing actor, and so able to be present in a moment. We also would sometimes play music in his ear that was sort of in the mood of the scene. We even had our composer, Daniel Pemberton, do some early sketches of what the music [for the movie] might be, to play in his ear, to keep him in the mood for the scene. He's such a reactive actor that he can process all of this stuff and then make something real out of it. It was a real revelation — and it was a fun thing for us too.”

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Project Hail Mary is in early-access theatrical screenings now and premieres in wide release on March 20.