Production team summary: Project Hail Mary

One of my goals in organising this movie club is to get more curious about the people who make films other than directors and actors. In case anyone else is interested in the same goal, I've put together a summary of the production team to save you having to bounce between IMDB and Wikipedia yourselves.

VoxOffice will never assign its members homework - your interest in this information is purely voluntary.

Direction - Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Directors of the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street franchises, Lord and Miller are known for screwball comedies that are genre-aware and play with the fourth wall. They're the creators of the animated series Clone High, and the writer/producers of the Spider-Verse franchise.

Cinematography - Greig Fraser

An Australian cinematographer who has won awards for his work on Dune (2021) and Lion. Other mainstream works include Rogue One, The Batman, and Zero Dark Thirty - say what you want about the plot of those films, the man knows how to frame a shot.

Fraser was the director of photography on season one of The Mandalorian, and helped develop the photographic techniques used to film the StageCraft soundstage that production pioneered.

Fraser has described Project Hail Mary as the most technically-difficult project he's worked on to date.

Music - Daniel Pemberton

Pemberton has been a very prolific film and video-game composer since about 2009. His previous work on the Spider-Verse (also a Lord and Miller production) earned him a number of award nominations. Other notable works include the soundtracks of Steve Jobs, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Ferrari, and LittleBigPlanet.

Pemberton's soundtrack for Project Hail Mary is delightful, epic, and sophisticated. One very fun trait is that Rocky's themes are based on a pentatonic scale rather than the traditional heptatonic scale (that is, a five-note scale rather than a seven-note scale) used in the human themes (and most Western music). This references the fact that Eridians are pentapods (five-legged), and that the Eridian numerical system is base-six rather than base-ten.

If you're interested in learning more, there's a fairly comprehensive video by Thistlebard on YouTube. 

Writing - Drew Goddard

Goddard started in serialised television, working with JJ Abrams on Lost and Alias, and on Joss Whedon productions Buffy and Angel. He wrote the screenplays for Cloverfield and World War Z.

Goddard is also credited as creator and producer of the 2015 Daredevil Netflix series - he wrote the screenplay for first two episodes. He directed Bad Times at the El Royale, episodes of The Good Place, and The Cabin in the Woods (which he also wrote).

Original Story - Andy Weir

Andy Weir wrote the Project Hail Mary novel released in 2021. Prior to Project Hail Mary, Weir was most known for his 2011 novel The Martian, adapted into the 2015 film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon.

Editing - Joel Negron

Negron is known for Sleepy Hollow, Pain & Gain, and Thor: Ragnarok. He's previously edited a Ryan Gosling film in Shane Black's The Nice Guys, and has worked with Lord and Miller on 21 Jump Street and the comedy-murder-mystery TV series Afterparty.

Production Design - Charles Wood

Wood has worked as production designer on feature films since 2005 - some of the more commercially popular projects were The Italian Job, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame.

Costume - David Crossman & Glyn Dillon

Dillon and Crossman have worked together on costuming The Batman, Rogue One, and the Star Wars sequal trilogy.

Dillon has independently worked on Kingsman: The Secret Service and Jupiter Ascending.

Crossman is known for Napoleon, Gladiator II, 1917, and Valkyrie - many films credit him specifially for military costuming.