“We’re trying to film the universe,” says the Oscar-nominated writer, who talks about the Ryan Gosling space epic, his top-rated TV series ‘High Potential’ and the making The Good Place.
Goddard first penned the script to Ridley Scott’s 2015 version of Andy Weir’s The Martian, a screenplay that earned him Oscar nomination.
A decade later, he’s back with Weir’s Project Hail Mary. The Ryan Gosling vehicle, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, opened on Friday to great critical and commercial success. Like The Martian, the film is about one guy in space talking to himself.
Project Hail Mary cost $248 million ($200 million after tax credits), and Goddard suggests that the money is on screen in a way that will hopefully lure people to the cinema. “I don’t want to sound fully optimistic,” says Goddard. “It is sad what’s happening with theaters, but we’re going to go down swinging.”
The Martian and Project Hail Mary
Not many actors can hold audience’s attention for such long time
Budget concerns
Cabin in the Woods
We wrote it before, and sold it as a spec. I think if we had pitched it, it would have terrified them. We just took the budget and shoved it in the third act. We found Chris Hemsworth in a casting audition. None of the actors were expensive at that time, we tried to be smart about it. Hemsworth and then Cynthia Erivo on Bad Times at the El Royale. I’ve been very fortunate man.
Project Hail Mary on IMAX, financed by streamer
Don’t give up on any medium, whatever the medium is. If you look at my resume, at every turn, I’m not afraid of doing something different each time. At at the very beginning, procedurals were all anyone was doing in the CSI era. I was like, “I’m gonna stick with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m gonna do Alias.” These weird serialized shows weren’t nearly as popular as they are now. Then they blew up, and I started doing sitcoms. I started doing movies. I started just jumping around. TV suddenly became six hours every three years. And these six-hour things are probably just two hours worth of story. I really started to miss the episodic nature of network TV. I just missed that every eight days we’re shooting 60 pages. There’s an energy to that. It forces you to not overthink it and just go. I don’t really worry about if something is fashionable or not. If everyone tells me something’s dead, it probably makes me want to do it more.
I’ve learned behind the scenes, you have to take care of your cast and crew. There is length where it just becomes too much. There’s diminishing returns. There’s probably a spot somewhere between 13 and 18, depending on the year, on the life. I have a feeling that if we said we would give them 22, the network would be delighted. But I’m trying to make 7 years of this. Sometimes the smart thing to do is be thoughtful about how many episodes you’re doing each year.
