Project Hail Mary’s Drew Goddard Wrote That Movie to be Expensive

Where many find success in determining their lane and staying inside of it, Drew Goddard has cobbled together one of the more interesting Hollywood careers by doing the opposite. The screenwriter has spent the last two decades defying predictability by bouncing between media and genres, with one major exception: he’s a sucker for Andy Weir adaptations.

Goddard first penned the script to Ridley Scott’s 2015 adaptation of the author’s The Martian, a screenplay that scored him an Oscar nomination. A decade later, he’s back with Weir’s Project Hail Mary. The Ryan Gosling vehicle, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, arrives in theaters Friday. And, like The Martian before it, the film is essentially about one guy alone in space talking to himself.

Project Hail Mary came with a lofty price tag, with a reported budget of $248 million ($200 million after tax credits, per Puck), and Goddard suggests that the money is on screen in a way that will hopefully lure people to the cinema. “I don’t want to sound fully optimistic,” says Goddard. “It is sad what’s happening with theaters, but we’re going to go down swinging. And we’re definitely going down swinging with this movie.”

Speaking during a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter podcast I’m Having an Episode (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple), Goddard discussed the six-year path to getting Project Hail Mary on screen, his strategy for keeping top-rated broadcast series High Potential on the air for a good seven years and lessons learned from a career working in some of TV’s most celebrated writers rooms. (“Everyone who worked on Lost still has a level of PTSD.”)

This is not to ignore the variety in your body of work, but there’s a through line to The Martian and Project Hail Mary. What does it say about you that you excel at writing characters essentially just talking to themselves for two hours?

Other than The Martian and Hail Mary, it’s something I try to avoid. A lot of writers either write from inside out or from outside in. I probably would classify myself as more an outside in, except I love Andy’s work. When I look at what Andy does so well, it’s scary. So much, especially with Hail Mary, is in the narrator’s head — which is not always the stuff of great screenplays. It was terrifying to read the book and think, OK, how in God’s name am I gonna make this work? But that’s also part of what makes it fun.

You could also write it as well as anyone could, but if you don’t have the right actor, it’s impossible to execute a movie like this successfully. Not many actors can hold an audience’s attention for such long stretches of time.

Without question. And in this case, it was a dream. Ryan Gosling was already attached when they came to me. Any fear I had about how we were going to pull this off was instantly allayed by the knowledge that Ryan was doing this with us. He can do anything. Whatever I write, he’s going to be able to pull off. That set a tone of knowing this was going to be really difficult but also knowing we were in good hands with our lead.

When you were writing this screenplay, were you aware of how much money was going to be spent? And how does that awareness impact the choices that you make? There are probably a hundred different ways to write this movie, depending on the budget.

A lot of my worry about the budget goes into the decision to do the project. Before I start writing, I want to make sure that what I think it’s going to cost lines up with what we think it’s going to take. I’ve learned from experience, if they feel comfortable, they’re going to let me be crazier. So, something like Cabin in the Woods was so crazy. I knew we needed to make that for cheap. So I write that to be affordable, because then they’ll let me go bananas in the end. With this one, there was no cheap version of this movie. We’re not making this unless we’re big and swinging for the fences. But it did feel like the type of movie you could do that. It felt like the type of movie that you’re gonna bring your kids to, you’re gonna bring your grandparents to. That’s what you’re looking for to justify the budgets. And when I’m writing it, I try to be thoughtful. But I don’t try to ever undercut the ambition. I have a big imagination. Chris and Phil have an even bigger imagination. Once we’ve made the decision to say yes, we don’t really think about budget. It’s more about what’s going to make the best movie.

You brought up Cabin in the Woods, a movie that, conceptually and visually, just blows up in the third act. It turns into a different movie. Did you know you were going to be able to go that far with the budget when you pitched it?

Yeah, because we wrote it before. We sold it as a spec. I think if we had pitched it, it would have terrified them. Knowing that, it was like, “OK, this is what we’re doing. 90 percent of the budget’s in the third act.” We just took the budget and shoved it in the third act. We found Chris Hemsworth in a casting audition. Like, none of the actors were expensive at that time. We tried to be smart about it.

Oh, yeah, you were really out in front with Chris Hemsworth.

Hemsworth and then Cynthia Erivo on Bad Times at the El Royale. I’ve just been a very fortunate man.

I saw Project Hail Mary on IMAX. And I know we talk a lot about trying to see things on the biggest screen possible, on premium formats, but this is still a movie financed by a streaming service. So what were the conversations like about how big of a theatrical push you’d get here?

I think that we were all aligned that we didn’t want to do this unless we could do it theatrical. From Amy Pascal to Ryan to Chris and Phil, Andy even, we all said this needs to be in theaters. Part of that is just common sense. At this budget, we need theaters. But also, artistically, this is a movie made for theaters. Like you want to see it on the biggest screen possible, we’re trying to film the universe, right? It is an intergalactic movie. We want to embrace everything that that implies. I don’t know if there was ever contractual obligations, but it felt like there were. It felt like Amazon got it.

High Potential is the highest-rated show on broadcast TV. You really cut your teeth there, working on shows like Buffy, Alias and Lost, but that’s an arena that has really deflated this last decade. What is the lesson in High Potential’s success?

Don’t give up on any medium, whatever the medium is. If you look at my resume, at every turn, I’m not afraid of doing something different each time. So at the very beginning, procedurals were all anyone was doing in the sort of CSI era. I was like, “I’m gonna stick with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m gonna do Alias.” These weird serialized shows weren’t nearly as popular [as they are now]. Then they blew up, and I started doing sitcoms. I started doing movies. I started just jumping around. And I think we sort of overcorrected. TV suddenly became six hours every three years. And these six-hour things are probably just two hours worth of story. I really started to miss the like episodic nature of network television. I just missed that sort of every eight days we’re shooting 60 pages. There’s an energy to that. It forces you to not overthink it and just go, go, go. And I don’t really worry about if something is fashionable or not. If everyone tells me something’s dead, it probably makes me want to do it more.

Those long shoots bring a lot of energy, but they can also drain it. Is there a sweet spot for you in terms of episode count? You had on this series 13 episodes in year one, 18 in year two. ABC, I suspect, wants a lot of this show. Could you realistically make more?

Creatively, logistically, we could. However, I’ve learned behind the scenes, you have to take care of your cast and crew. And there is a length where it just becomes too much. There’s diminishing returns. There’s probably a sweet spot somewhere between 13 and 18, depending on the year, depending on the life. I have a feeling that if we said we would give them 22, the network would be delighted. But I’m trying to make seven years of this. And sometimes the smart thing to do is be thoughtful about how many episodes you’re doing each year.

I worry about sounding like a drag when I talk to people about bringing production back to Los Angeles, but it’s notable that you shoot High Potential here. Did you get pushback? I can’t imagine that Kaitlin Olson was going to do this anywhere else.

That’s what did it. I remember having this conversation after I had written the pilot. They said, “We want a name for this.” The role is a mom of three kids — one of whom is in her teenage years. That suggests a certain age range. If you want a name in that age range, they’re not moving. They’re not going to spend the next seven years in some place that has a good tax break for you. They bristled and bristled. We went to Kaitlin. She didn’t really want to come back to network TV. I said, “We can get you home every night.” And she said, OK.

You look at most of the shows that shoot in L.A. or New York right now, and it’s so clear that they’d probably be elsewhere with a less recognizable star.

Those are the things they don’t think about. They look at the Excel document. Yes, if you shot it in Budapest, it will be 20 percent cheaper. No one’s going to Budapest! We’ll do much better work [here]. We’ll put better work on screen. We’ll get better talent. The show will pay for itself because of what we can put on screen. The resources of Los Angeles, in particular, are like no other place. I don’t know how many episodes of Alias we shot, but we were in every country — and we never left Los Angeles, because we have such a deep bench of locations. These are the things that are really hard for people to understand when they’re looking at an Excel document.

Do you have a script — be it a pilot or a feature — that you’ve just never been able to sell but won’t give up on?

There are things that I’ve sold that I never give up on because I think they will just come back around. There’s a spaceship show we were quietly developing for Hulu that I love. We’ll figure it out someday. There’s an animated show that is very near and dear to my heart. We just haven’t done it yet. Like, Hail Mary took six years. We’ve been working on this for six years. At a certain point, you just learn to be patient. I’ve learned to find the joy in each step. So even if you haven’t seen it, I’m still grateful that I get to write something. That’s still fun.

You directed and produced The Good Place, the Mike Schur comedy. That’s five years of spending a lot of time considering ethics and morality. Did that rewire your brain at all?

If I look at the benchmarks of my career, one of the most important things that happened was intersecting with the Mike Schur orbit. He changed who I am as a person and an artist. I started as a PA in 1998. And there was a time in the early 2000s when what we did as an industry was fetishize that the making of art had to be miserable for it to be good. There were so many stories, features or TV, of people working 18 hours a day. They destroyed their family lives to make a show so great. It was awful. And I was definitely on some shows that were hard, without question. Everyone who worked on Lost still has a level of PTSD. And we had shows that were just hard. I had sort of internalized that art needs to be hard. And that intersected with Mike saying, “No, the opposite is absolutely true.” If we, as artists, can take care of each other and make a real effort to do that, it’s going to make the art better. We took the writing of morality to heart on The Good Place. It just made me realize that I don’t have to accept this thing that we had accepted. Luckily, the industry also stopped accepting it. We still hear those stories. Don’t get me wrong. But it rewired me to think that our goal is to make a community here. It fundamentally changed who I am.

If you could join any writers room for a week, which would it be and why?

I have such a deep love of Saturday Night Live. I want to do that Tuesday night all-night writing session. I want to stay up all night, get to that read-through on Wednesday. Saturday Night Live and I are the same age. So, the nostalgia alone to just walk those halls as a writer would be really special. For exactly one week. If you told me I had to do it for two years… that’s young Drew’s business.