Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.
[CLIP: The spaceship Hail Mary’s operating system (played by Priya Kansara) speaks in the Project Hail Mary trailer: “Please state your name.”
Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling) responds: “Ryland Grace. I just woke up from a coma. I’m several light-years from my apartment, and I’m not an astronaut. I’m not an astronaut.”
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In a different scene, Grace speaks to Eva Stratt (played by Sandra Hüller): “I’m not an astronaut.”
Stratt responds: “If you don’t go, you die—with the rest of us.”]
Pierre-Louis: That’s the new sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary, where Ryan Gosling plays a science teacher thrown into space with no idea how he got there.
The film is based on the novel written by Andy Weir. SciAm associate books editor Bri Kane flew out to L.A. to chat with him about the movie. Here’s their conversation.
Bri Kane: Andy Weir, I’m so glad to be able to talk to you today about Project Hail Mary. It is not your first foray into Hollywood, though—you also got to work with Matt Damon on The Martian. So what’s it been like working with Ryan Gosling?
Andy Weir: Well, it’s pretty cool. In The Martian, they just gave me money and told me to go away, which is absolutely fine with me. But this time I’m a producer, and so I’ve been there for every step of the way, from casting to, like, the actual principal photography and postproduction and watching cuts as they came in, and so it’s been really cool to be, like, an integral part of it. Now, I’m not any big boss guy; I don’t get to tell anyone what to do. But I’m, but I’m there.
Kane: That’s amazing. I mean, you’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you actually developed the biosphere of Rocky’s planet before developing Rocky themselves. I would love to know about your process there.
Weir: Well, I started off with a real exoplanet [candidate], 40 Eridani Ab, which is about eight times Earth’s mass. It orbits the star about every 46 days; it’s closer to its star than Mercury is to ours. And so I said, like, “Okay, if that’s gonna be the planet, then what do I have to do to make this a place where life could exist?” And within the context of the story, there was a panspermia event, so it has to be, like, water-based life. And so I’m like, “Well, to have liquid water that’s really, really hot, you have to have a really high atmospheric pressure,” because the higher the pressure, the higher the boiling point of water. So: “Okay, they’re gonna have a big, thick atmosphere.”
But if you’re gonna have a big, thick atmosphere and you’re right next to a star, the star is basically gonna sandblast your atmosphere away. The only way to retain it is to have a really strong magnetic field. So now I know, “Okay, they have a really thick atmosphere, and the planet spins really quickly; their day is not very long.”
If they have an atmosphere that thick, I figure maybe light doesn’t make it all the way to the surface, so there’s no benefit to evolving vision because there’s no light on the surface. And I figured their biosphere is almost like an ocean. It’s like, there’s life-forms that absorb light and live that way up at the upper levels of the atmosphere and then things below that that eat those and things below that, just like we have life-forms way deep in the ocean where there’s absolutely no light.
So that’s kind of like what I came up with. The surface gravity would be about 2.1 g’s, so I figured Eridians have to be pretty strong. I decided the atmosphere is made almost entirely of ammonia, that means there’s not free oxygen in the atmosphere, which we rely on, right? So I figured the inside of their body is like a biosphere: they have plantlike cells and animal-like cells that keep in balance—they go back and forth—and all they need to do is add energy to the system via food.
An Eridian is almost like—it’s only got about a kilogram of actual biological matter. The rest of it is all just stuff that those little worker cells built. So an Eridian is kind of like a beehive that can move. The ma—vast majority of it is inorganic matter. It’s just a container for this biosphere that exists on the inside.
Kane: That is so cool. I mean, the movie overall is really about empathy and collaboration through science, and why was empathy so important to your development of Rocky’s character?
Weir: Well, I made a list of everything that I thought was necessary in order to become an intelligent species and be able to make spacecraft and stuff, and I figured, “Well, you need to have a certain amount of intelligence, right? That evolves. Then you have to have a pack instinct. You need to be a lot of entities working together because one individual can’t go from Stone Age technology to inventing spacecraft.” So—and they need to have language, the ability to communicate information back and forth.
And when you have all of these things, it is inevitable that you have to have empathy and compassion for your fellow Eridian. Like, pack animals take care of the wounded or sick members of their pack. It’s not just humans; it’s wolves, everybody else. So now, in order to meet in space at all, the alien that you meet has to have language, has to understand the concept of a collective and has to have, like, the concept of empathy and compassion.
Kane: You’ve mentioned in interviews previously that you don’t have a particularly visual-centered brain, but you created two amazing spaceships in this story, and I wanted to ask about what that’s like and what your creative process is.
Weir: Well, I mean, so in my mind things are kind of like blobs. I don’t have, like, complete aphantasia, but it’s like things are very blobby to me in my imagination. What I’m seeing in my mind are just—almost like a list of, like, “These are the things this ship can do. This ship is big, and this one’s small.” And, like, I couldn’t have told you exactly what Rocky’s ship looked like or exactly what the Hail Mary looked like.
Kane: I mean, what’s it like seeing them brought to life on the big screen, then?
Weir: Well, this is where it gets really handy because, since I don’t have, like, a really strong idea of what these things look like in the first place, I don’t have the problem that a lot of authors run into when they see their books adapted to the screen, which is where I don’t have a cognitive dissonance that I need to deal with in, like, reconciling the screen version with what was in my mind ’cause there wasn’t anything in my mind.
So I see the screen version, and that just becomes canon in my head. I’m like, “Oh, so that’s what the ship looked like. Oh, so that’s what Rocky looks like. Oh.” So now if I think of Ryland Grace, I just think of Ryan Gosling. I didn’t have an image in my head. When I finished the book, I couldn’t have told you what color his hair is, anything like that. So now it’s just retroactively—it’s like, “Okay, that’s Ryland.”
Kane: Your writing is really known for the scientific rigor that you bring to every story, but that makes me wonder, was there some science you were worried about bringing to the big screen?
Weir: Not particularly. The science in Project Hail Mary is all pretty firmly grounded. There’s some BS all the way down at the quantum level, where Astrophage cell membranes can keep neutrinos in—that’s not a thing that we know how to do, but maybe “super cross-sectionality” is a thing that could happen—and of course creating neutrinos and annihilating neutrinos in order to make light and stuff like that.
But outside of that, everything else just follows established physics and science. So I broke the laws way down there at the quantum level and then just worked from there.
Kane: Well, that’s the “fiction” part of science fiction, I suppose.
Weir: Yeah.
Kane: And the movie overall seems like a real love letter to science teachers and how they inspire us. Was there any science teacher that you’ve had that inspired the character of Ryland Grace?
Weir: Not that inspired the character of Ryland Grace—there were certainly teachers that had, like, a big effect on me. Mr. Fong, if you’re out there watching this, hi. He was my trigonometry and calculus teacher in high school. But I wouldn’t say that Ryland is based on any person I know, and for the first time, he’s a character who’s not based on my own personality.
So Mark Watney in The Martian is based on me. He’s just me with all of my good qualities magnified and all of my bad qualities erased, right?
Kane: [Laughs.] Perfect.
Weir: Jazz Bashara from Artemis, also known as Andy Weir’s other book, she’s a 26-year-old Saudi woman who grew up on the moon. So naturally, she’s also me—hard to believe, but it’s true because she’s more like the way I was when I was her age. I was theoretically smart, yet still making really bad decisions. I was kind of my own worst enemy. Most of my problems were because of poor decisions that I’d made in life. And so I projected all that into her in the hopes of making her a more complex character.
And so for Ryland, it was the first time I made a character up out of whole cloth, without trying to base him on myself. So I said, like, “Okay, he’s conflict-averse. He’s a little naive. He’s a little scared.” I mean, I’m scared; everybody’s scared all the—but he’s—that’s, like, one of his core [traits]. And so I tried to make a character for once that wasn’t just a rip-off of my own personality.
Kane: [Laughs.] Nice. Give it a whirl.
Weir: Give it a whirl.
Kane: Were there any particular science-fiction stories you were inspired by when first writing Project Hail Mary?
Weir: Hmm. I’ve had a life of reading science fiction, so it’s hard to pick one out. I did like—it doesn’t quite fit, but there’s, like, that movie Enemy Mine with Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr. But they were enemies in a war, and they shut each other down, and then they have to work together to stay alive on this hostile planet and stuff like that. I thought that was kind of cool, but I mean, that’s not what’s going on here. I mean, Rocky and Ryland work together, cooperate from day one, so it’s not quite the same thing, but I like that.
Kane: For all the marbles today, I have to ask you: Andy Weir, would you volunteer for this space mission?
Weir: Oh, hell no.
Kane: [Laughs.]
Weir: No, no, no, no, no. I would not even just do a normal, like, go into space.
Kane: What is it about space that you’re not particularly interested in experiencing?
Weir: I’m, I’m just a—I have anxiety issues, and I, I have to take pills just to fly. Like, so to fly here from Chicago, I took pills and then had to spend the first day I was here kind of sleeping ’em off. And they’re prescription, just so we’re clear.
Kane: [Laughs.]
Weir: So I write about brave people. I’m not one of them.
Kane: Yeah, the depictions of zero g in this movie are really incredible, and astronauts have even said that they agree—it’s pretty accurate.
Weir: Yeah.
Kane: But are you interested in experiencing zero g? [Laughs.]
Weir: No.
Kane: It doesn’t sound like …
Weir: I am not. No, I’m not. I don’t wanna get on a Vomit Comet flight or anything like that. No, no, no. No, thank you.
Kane: And if you got to meet an alien like Rocky, what do you think are the first things you would want to learn from them or that you would want to ask them about?
Weir: This presumes we’ve conquered the language barrier.
Kane: Yes, we’ve already exchanged our 250 words, so we can chat a little bit.
Weir: [Laughs.] I would start trying to figure out what technologies they have that they’ve worked out that we don’t know yet. On purpose within the story, I didn’t wanna make, like, one species is, like, way more advanced. I mean, broadly speaking, the humans [have] the more advanced technology than Eridians within the story. But Eridians have much better materials technology and stuff like that. So it’s spiky.
I think a good example of this would be like in real life, in the ancient world, like in Asia, they knew how to make extremely fine, extremely delicate, accurate porcelain …
Kane: Mm.
Weir: Like ceramics and stuff like that. Whereas in the West, they needed to be able to see how their wine was fermenting, so they made their bottles and stuff out of glass. And because they made their bottles and stuff out of glass, they ended up inventing optics. And so Westerners had, like, glasses, which extends the useful duration of your, like, learned class because they can read and write for longer and stuff like that. But meanwhile, Asians had these extremely fine and accurate woodworking, calligraphy and all this stuff. So when these two cultures met, it wasn’t like one of them was better at everything than the other. They both had their areas where they were more advanced than the other, and then they learned from each other.
So the long-winded answer to your question is: I would try to say, like, “What do you do way better than us? And I wanna learn how to do that, too.”
Kane: Yeah, I mean, Rocky is an incredible engineer. Is there anything you would ask Rocky to engineer for you?
Weir: I would just say, like, “Gimme some of that xenonite juice. Just tell me, tell me how you make xenonite from scratch,” ’cause that would really be awesome.
Kane: We are also really interested in how he made xenonite …
Weir: [Laughs.] Yeah.
Kane: If there’s a follow-up on that, I would love to know.
Weir: Yeah, I, I never defined it.
Kane: Yeah. Thank you so much for your time today, Andy. It is always wonderful speaking to you.
Weir: I’ve had a great time talking to you.
Pierre-Louis: Project Hail Mary is out now in theaters. To see more of Bri’s adventure in L.A. and her conversation with the film’s star, Ryan Gosling, check out our YouTube channel. You can find a link in the show notes.
That’s it for today! See you on Monday for our weekly science news roundup.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Kendra Pierre-Louis, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was co-hosted by Bri Kane and edited by Alex Sugiura and Marta Hill. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Kendra Pierre-Louis. Have a great weekend!