Project Hail Mary screenwriter learned one important thing on The Martian

Drew Goddard, writer of Cabin in the Woods and Bad Times at the El Royale, on working with Andy Weir again, and hard science vs. big emotion

But Goddard tells Polygon that working on The Martian gave him complete confidence in audiences' ability to handle the science, and didn’t want it simplified or glossed over in the movie.

“Honestly, I learned on The Martian that we don't have to dumb it down,” he says. “If anything, the opposite was true. The audience liked that we treated them like they were smart. They really responded to that. So we went into this movie with that wind at our back.”

Project Hail Mary follows a lone astronaut, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) on an interstellar mission to try to save Earth’s sun from a parasitic infestation. Between scenes of him carrying out that mission, flashbacks show how Ryland was pulled into the scientific project to identify and understand the parasite, which he dubs “astrophage.” He’s responsible for some of the biggest discoveries about what astrophage is and how it works — but his lab work isn’t the stuff of normal blockbuster sci-fi cinema.

“This movie deals with complicated science,” Goddard says. “Some of the most important breakthroughs of the movie deal with Ryan and a microscope. We're not afraid to embrace the science, and if you don't understand it, that's okay, too — I don't always understand it as the screenwriter. But I can tell you what emotions we're going through. And I think when you put those two things together, it leads to what makes this movie so special.”

Goddard says he focused on bringing “the emotional soul of the movie front and center,” and trusted Weir, who was closely involved with the production, to explain Ryland’s experiments and discoveries.

“That's why Andy and I work so well together,” he says. “He’s got the science covered. There's nobody better at that, so I don't have to worry about that. And I see these beautiful humanist themes in his writing, so I feel like my job is to bring those humanist themes out and shape them into the movie.”

Part of shaping Project Hail Mary involved cutting some of Weir’s material about the Earthside fight against astrophage — Goddard and Weir both told Polygon they regretted the need to trim a sequence about Earth’s governments nuking Antarctica.

“Every adaptation, you have to cut things,” Goddard says. “Part of my job is to make really hard decisions about what to do. I always try to find the soul of the book, so I can at least put the feeling I felt when I read it on the screen. That's my guideline. I never want to dumb it down, I just want to say, ‘Here's what you need to know.’”

That decision-making also included radically reducing the amount of time Ryland spends figuring out how to talk to “Rocky” (James Ortiz), a spider-like alien engineer who’s also trying to solve the astrophage problem for his homeworld. In the book, Rocky communicates via musical tones, and learning how to interpret his language takes significant time. The Project Hail Mary movie zips past that process, largely in montage and ellipses. Goddard says a lot of the movie’s six-year development process went into figuring out what Rocky should look and sound like, and how to not bog the movie down in the early stages of Rocky and Ryland’s relationship.

“We didn't want to make it easy,” he says. “We didn't want to make Rocky suddenly understand English and speak. We knew every step along the way had to be challenging. They played around so much with how he looked, how he sounded, how he moved. We've been working on this movie for six years. And that is a long time to be doing it, but it took that long to figure him out, to do the character justice. Because if we took the easy way out of any turn on this movie, it wasn't going to work.”

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Project Hail Mary is in theaters now.