🎧 Lord & Miller’s ‘Spectacular’ Idea: People Getting Along

As Phil Lord and Chris Miller kick off awards season for their blockbuster hit Project Hail Mary, a general sense of relief surrounds the year’s box office — which has delivered hits large and small and proven that moviegoers haven’t entirely given up on the theatrical experience. Still, it’s easy to forget how different things felt when Amazon MGM opened the film in March, betting big on IMAX and the big-screen experience with no guarantee any of it would work. 

But by then Lord and Miller weren’t all that nervous — if only because they had gotten their nerves out of the way a year earlier. “We tested the movie a lot, as we do for most of our movies. We knew the movie was playing with audiences,” says Miller, 51. Sitting next to him on the same hotel room couch in New York City, Lord, also 51, continues: “I would say the nerves started like a year out, trying to figure out how to bring the movie to market. By the time the movie got released, the work had already been done.”

Lord and Miller have become one of Hollywood’s most powerful creative teams by making hits like Project Hail Mary — which earned an eye-popping $684 million worldwide. As Miller puts it, “It’s a movie that you can’t pitch in two sentences. It takes like four or five.” Breaking through as animation directors with early-aughts cult TV sensation Clone High and their 2009 feature debut Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Lord and Miller then took ideas that sounded too insane to work — a Lego movie, an R-rated 21 Jump Street movie, an animated Spider-Man who wasn’t Peter Parker — and turned them into hits that seemed almost miraculous.

Nearly all of their projects, whether as directors or producers, share the same warm-hearted comedic sensibility that helped make Project Hail Mary such a breakout hit. It’s about an astronaut (played by Ryan Gosling) trying to save the world, but also overcoming fear to befriend a faceless alien named Rocky — and all while the world’s governments somehow manage to work together to send him into space in the first place.

On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, I asked Lord, a Miami native, and Miller, born in Washington state, how they combine that earnest optimism with comedy — especially in a world that’s only gotten more cynical since they started making movies. As they put it, their worldview comes as naturally to them as despair does to the rest of us. 

“I think our lived experience — and the lived experience of a lot of people — is that your day-to-day is full of cooperation and people doing mitzvahs for one another, and people getting on an airplane peacefully,” says Lord. Making Project Hail Mary, he continues, “I want people to walk out of the movie more optimistic than they felt when they walked in. Over our career, one thing we’ve learned is watching people watch movies. The spectacular thing isn’t necessarily watching people in conflict. The thing that is spectacular is watching people get along.”

In our podcast conversation, I ask Lord and Miller to get into the nitty-gritty of how their directing partnership works — where do they stand on set? Who does Gosling come to with questions? When do they let themselves have arguments? I also dig into a detail that has stuck with me through multiple viewings of the film: How does Sandra Hüller, playing the steely head of a global organization trying to save the planet, end up wearing the most comfortable-looking sweaters I’ve ever seen on film?

Credit for that wardrobe choice, it turns out, goes to producer Amy Pascal, who first hired Lord and Miller for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs when she ran Sony, and who also produced Project Hail Mary and the Spider-Verse films. To find the right costume for Hüller’s character, Lord says, they asked themselves, “What do people in power actually look like?” Pascal, whom Lord calls “one of the most important producers in our business,” had practical answers. 

“Amy’s like, ‘You know what? When I was running the studio, I had like five bags and three phones,’” says Lord. “‘And all I wanted was loose-fitting clothing because I had too many things to think about. And comfortable shoes — the last thing I want to do is be finding blisters all day.’”

Hear much more from Lord and Miller — including more details on another key costume from Project Hail Mary — on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. You can also listen to me, my colleague Christopher Rosen and our guest for this week, Joyce Eng, comb through the Oscar history to figure out how this year’s contenders stack up, and what the past might be able to tell us about the present. Sure, the Project Hail Mary Oscar campaign might look a lot like The Martian — they’re both Andy Weir adaptations about a solitary astronaut trapped in space — but can you guess what Matt Damon might have in common with Lawrence of Arabia? Stay with me and listen to the episode; I promise I have a point here!