DG: Andy and I both have a real fondness for each other and a real fondness for working together, and it was a very good collaboration. We were always checking in, with the feeling that if it’s the right time, the right fit, and the right project, we should absolutely do this again. That’s certainly how I felt. But there was also part of me that was secretly scared of letting Andy down because I couldn’t have done it better for [him] on The Martian. I don’t want to go into something and not be able to protect [his] work and not be able to have a good experience and not be able to make something that we’re proud of, so that was secretly in the back of my head. I didn’t voice those things, but I felt it. So, I was a little scared when he sent me Project Hail Mary. Then I read it and I was scared for different reasons. I loved it, so it’s like, “Okay, I’m doing this. Now, I’m scared because it’s gonna be really hard to do.” But that falls under “good problems to have” when you love it and it’s hard to do; that’s my sweet spot.
AVC: You had Weir, Gosling, Lord, and Miller as collaborators right from the start. How do you balance all those voices walking into a script?
DG: I’m grateful that I started in TV, specifically that I started in genre TV where every episode—whether it was Buffy, Lost, Angel, or Alias—all of those episodes, we were swinging for the fences every time. And you have to get a whole lot of people on board [when] doing something bold and different every eight days. We were not following a structure or a pattern with those episodes. It was wildly different genres all the time. On Angel, in a four-episode span, we killed Cordelia, then we had a submarine episode, then we turned Angel into a puppet, and then we killed Fred. We did crazy stuff like that. I’ve learned to be clear about what you need to be clear about at each stage of the process, in the sense that you don’t have to solve everything. There’s a tendency to solve everything right away.
It starts with Chris and Phil, because if I can’t convince the directors, it’s never going to happen. My job is to make the directors see it. Also, to listen to what the directors see and merge those two things. What’s helpful is to have a book. When you have Andy’s book, we can start somewhere. I tried to keep it fun and say, “I’ll just list our favorite moments in this book because that’s a good place to start. Let’s not start looking at the problems, but what do you love and let’s put it on the board without judgment? Even if something’s going to be hard, don’t worry about it. Just put it on the board.” And then you bring Ryan into that because you know Ryan needs to be part of this.
AVC: When do you go off on your own?
DG: Once I have a sense of, “Here’s the movie.” With Project Hail Mary, we realized quickly that first and foremost, this movie is Dr. Grace and Rocky. It’s about the main character and the alien he meets on the other side of the galaxy. Right after that, you realize this movie is about Grace and Dr. Stratt, Sandra Hüller’s character; those three form the triangle of Project Hail Mary.
Now I go back to talk to Andy, and I say, “This is where I see the soul of the movie, and these are the areas I may have to cut.” I try to flag anything for Andy early that I think is going to be big so that he has time to wave and say, “No, this is more important than you think it is and here’s why.” I try to have all the hard conversations before I start writing, knowing that there will be time. We’ll be finessing this thing until they pry it out of our hands. But I want to get the big picture, the soul of it right. What I just described was probably a year, off and on, because everyone’s busy with other things.
Then, once I go to write, I say, “Everyone, leave me alone.” I may change all of the things that we’re talking about because now my job is to go make the best movie that I can make. I write the script, give it to everyone else and they go, “Great. We have our own thoughts.”
In [this] case, they said, “Before we do that, let’s let the studio weigh in too, because this feels close enough to the direction we’re heading.” We sent it to [former MGM executives] Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy who read the draft and greenlit the movie based on that. Then we said, “Great, thank you. Now we’re going to change all of it.” Well, the soul was still the same. If you read the first draft, I hope you would see the soul is the same. But what got better and much more nuanced was all of the details. We worked on them for years. Between Chris and Phil, Ryan and Andy, we were just fine-tuning. The thing that’s wonderful about Chris and Phil is they come from animation so they’re never afraid. They’re always like, “If we can dream it, we can do it.” We were constantly trying to push the limits of where the edges of this film was, just trying to find where this thing breaks. It was a thrilling process in that regard, because it felt like pure creativity all the time.
AVC: The book is in first-person, as Dr. Grace works through his post-coma amnesia. Structurally, that has to change for film. Did you pull from your non-linear storytelling at Lost to stitch that together?
DG: I would take it back to Buffy. The very first episode I ever wrote was [telling] Anya’s [past] in “Selfless,” so I am well-versed in those types of stories. Buffy did it and then Lost really did it, and then a whole lot of people tried to copy it. What they didn’t understand, or where people go astray is they think there are two stories. They think of it like filling in the gaps of this other story. But what we try to do is say, “No, no, it’s one story. We’re telling the story out of chronological order, but the emotional story is being told linearly.” That’s the place where people go astray. What we did here, if you just look at it from a scene structure point of view, it actually is a pretty linear story, but the chronological order changes. If you look at where the big revelations of Grace and what he’s going through happen, they would probably happen that way if we were all in one time period.
AVC: With Rocky, you’re writing an alien, and a scene partner, contingent on the mode in which Lord and Miller decide to create him—CG or puppetry. Are you developing Rocky in parallel?
DG: I would have been more terrified had Chris and Phil [not] already signed on. From a directing point of view, the degree of difficulty on Rocky is unlike any character I’ve ever worked on. There’s nothing about him that’s easy to realize on screen. But I love Chris and Phil’s work so much, and I’ve seen them do versions of this in animation. I’ve seen them find emotion where there should not be any emotion. I’ve seen them create delight out of thin air, so I had tremendous trust. They were also honest about how hard this was going to be. If they had said it was going to be easy, I would have been like, “Oh, no.” But they knew how hard it was going to be and that united the three of us.
Ryan really kept us honest, saying, “I cannot act against green screen this entire movie.” Not that I think Chris and Phil wanted that. Chris and Phil love tactile things and if we can build it, let’s build it. But Ryan was so resolute that it forced all of us to sit up straight and say, “Let’s start this process early.”
AVC: I can only imagine how many iterations of Rocky you had to develop.
DG: There were so many different versions of Rocky, and so many versions where you would say, “Well, that looks good two-dimensional but now let’s build something to see how it looks three-dimensional. And now, let’s get a puppeteer.” It wasn’t until we found James Ortiz, our puppeteer, who really could bring life to it. You see the auditions with James and Ryan, and you realize we were onto something special because it doesn’t feel like we’re creating something synthetic.
AVC: Is that why the film kept Ortiz’s vocal performance as Rocky?
DG: We knew that Ryan needed someone to act against, and James was just doing it. I don’t think anyone said, “You’re going to be Rocky’s voice.” It was more organic, like “Let’s do this because it will be helpful to Ryan.” And then all of us were blown away by how good James was at it, and how special he was. Part of us always thought, “Sooner or later, we’re going to put some famous actor in this part.” But halfway through the shoot, I remember thinking, “It should be James. This just feels like the character.” None of us wanted to voice that because of what I just described—the studio and marketing department…
AVC: The studio would’ve lost its mind.
DG: Right? But any of us who were on the ground were like, “It just feels like James. We should just do this.” Slowly but surely, he won everyone over with his performance so by the end, even the studio and marketing [folks], were like, “Of course, it should be him, of course.”
AVC: Is there a scene or character expansion you’re most proud of?
DG: Stratt, because that character resonated strongly with me in the book. I’m not conscious of this when I’m writing, but I’m conscious that something’s resonating, and I don’t know why. Now that I get distance, I realize so much of my career is based on women in power believing in me when I did not believe in myself. It starts with my mom, who’s been a teacher for 50 years. It carries to Lucia Berlin, who was a writing professor and an exquisite short story writer, who saw me in college and said, “Let me take you under my wing.” Marti Noxon, who found me for Buffy, and said, “No, you can do this,” when I didn’t believe I could do it. Then it’s a list: Mary Parent, Amy Pascal, and Emma Watts. All the women I’m describing are in Stratt, and their relationship with a buffoon like me saying, “You can do better.” I’m not conscious of that, but when I finish, I look back and I go, “Oh, my God, that’s what I’m writing in those moments.”
It’s hard because you know you only can get about 5% of the novel on the screen. It’s like Andy has built this wonderful house, but all the lights are off. As a screenwriter, I’m given a flashlight and I’m pointing the flashlight at the things in the house that I think are the most important to understand in the house. The reason Stratt resonated so strongly with me is because of my own life, and that’s why I’m pointing the flashlight at her.
AVC: Since Project Hail Mary wrapped, you’ve had a broadcast hit and you’re developing a new Matrix film. What’s captured your creative heart these days?
DG: It’s fun to look back on a career and realize at every stage, if you wanted to know what I was interested in, it would have been in the movie or show I was making at that time. It becomes this wonderful photograph book of yourself. I can look at Cloverfield and go, “Oh, that’s when I met my wife,” and that’s what that movie is about. I can look at the stuff I did on World War Z or The Martian to go, “Oh, I have kids and suddenly I’m writing about themes that are becoming more parental.”
Right now, I’m clicking away on The Matrix. I’m clicking away on some other things. I’ve learned to be patient. When it’s something like The Matrix, nobody wants to rush this. Nobody wants to do this badly, so it falls on me to come up with something that everyone else decides is worth our time, and worth it to the fans. I feel the same responsibility to Lana and Lilly [Wachowski] that I felt to Buffy. I want to do this well, or let’s not do it. There’s a lot of reasons movies can fall apart so I’m just in that phase of, “Let’s just try to make the best version.” In some ways that’s the most fun, because right now I’m only writing for me. But once I hit send on the document, it belongs to everybody else. Right now, I’m just having fun.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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