Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller recently appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and revealed that they showed a four-hour cut of the space movie to a group of their friends. However, the results were “embarrassing”.
“The first official test screening went well, but we’re doing a lot of screenings earlier on for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers,” Miller explained. “The film was huge. When we finally cut the length of the gathering to less than four hours, we had our filmmaker friends cut three hours and 45 minutes of the film, which was embarrassing.”
Lord said the feedback he received from the directing duo was unanimous: “We want it to be shorter.”
“I don’t know how that scene will be received by the audience,” Lord said. “I thought everything was fascinating, but some of the fascinating things didn’t work out. That made it very easy to cut it down to three hours.”
“Then we had to slowly and slowly reduce it down to 2.5 hours,” Miller added. This corresponds to the final length of the theatrical cut of the film.
Project Hail Mary is based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir and stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher and former molecular biologist recruited by the government to save the planet from destruction. Ryland then unknowingly finds himself on an interstellar mission that includes an encounter with the alien Rocky. The film was a huge success during its opening weekend, grossing $80.5 million at the domestic box office, making it the biggest opening of the year so far and the highest debut in Amazon MGM history. The film then surpassed $100 million domestically before its second weekend of release.
You can watch the full interview with Lord and Miller on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in the video below.
