🎧 Drew Goddard, ‘Project Hail Mary’ Whisperer

The Oscar-nominated screenwriter on adapting Andy Weir novels into blockbusters

TOUCHDOWN Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary, written by Drew Goddard: “I just try to write the best story I can. The spectacle and the emotions — those are all inherent to the tale.” (The Ankler illustration; Amazon)

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Drew Goddard, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have all built Hollywood careers making the kinds of movies that people don’t quite know how to explain — sometimes even the people who agree to make them.

“I get super stressed when people tell me ‘yes,’” Goddard, the screenwriter behind massive, genre-bending successes like The Cabin in the Woods and The Martian, tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “After they say yes, the next question I always ask is, ‘Okay, tell me what you think you’ve bought.’”

Goddard, 51, first befriended Lord and Miller (The LEGO Movie, 21 Jump Street and its sequel) back when they were working on separate boundary-breaking TV shows in the early 2000s — Goddard on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lord and Miller on Clone High — and they bonded as they moved into making movies that were way more than they appeared on the surface. The year after 2011’s The Cabin in the Woods broke through as way more than a horror movie following its debut at SXSW in Goddard’s home state (he was born in Houston), Lord and Miller’s live-action directorial debut, 21 Jump Street, similarly exploded at the Austin-based event and was praised for breaking beyond its TV reboot elevator pitch.

As Goddard puts it, “The thing that we had in common at every stage of our career is that we’ve had people asking us, ‘What genre are you working in?’ And we don’t have a great answer for it. I think that’s why we like each other.”

DREAM PROJECT From left: Goddard, Project Hail Mary author Andy Weir and directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord at San Diego Comic-Con last summer. (Eric Charbonneau/Amazon MGM Studios via Getty Images)

The three of them had always wanted to find something to work on together, Goddard says, and a few weeks into the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, they found it. Andy Weir, whose novel The Martian earned Goddard an Oscar nomination for its 2015 adaptation, had a new manuscript and wanted Goddard to adapt it. In some ways, the project came together quickly from there — Lord and Miller were announced as the directors and Ryan Gosling as the star of Project Hail Mary in May of 2020.

But on its way toward becoming a massive, world-spanning hit, Project Hail Mary endured a studio sale, an executive shuffle and all the rewrites and adjustments you might expect on a project of this size. I talked to Goddard about all of it, and some of his bigger ideas about how the movie business works these days for writers, from getting a greenlight to finding the people you actually want to keep working with.

“To do movies of this size, you need everyone’s resolve. It’s not just our resolve as filmmakers,” he tells me. “Frankly, you need the marketing department’s resolve; you need the studio’s production side. Otherwise, you’re spending your entire time battling when it’s hard enough to make the movie. You need to be spending all that effort just making the best movie you can.”

Today’s episode of the podcast is very Project Hail Mary-focused; in the first half, you can hear me talk about my enthusiasm for the film with fellow PHM fan Christopher Rosen, and we even indulge in a little Oscar speculation. (For much more on that, don’t worry — our 2027 Oscar predictions are coming next week!) Catch it all on today’s new episode, and for much more from us, join the fun at Prestige Junkie After Party, where we’re about to start a month-long 2006 flashback series in April. See you there!