In Project Hail Mary, amateur astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) learns to communicate with an alien he meets on a desperate mission in space. For the film’s score, composer Daniel Pemberton aimed to create a new musical language, sharing at Deadline’s Sound & Screen Film how he developed the sound for the adaptation of Andy Weir’s book, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller.
“This was like trying to build a language from the ground up, which makes it really complicated when you’re trying to build a language with the sound palette,” Pemberton said. “So there’s loads of experimentation when you try things with different sounds.”
One instrument Pemberton wanted to include was the steel drum. However, it proved too similar to another famous movie score.
“I thought they’d be cool and emotive in the score, but then it starts to sound like The Little Mermaid,” he said. “Great score, no disrespect to The Little Mermaid, but not right for this. There’s something in the weight of the steel drums that’s interesting.”
To evoke a similar sound with different aural qualities, Pemberton employed instruments like wood blocks and a Cristal Baschet, a series of glass rods the player rubs with water.
“What I always try and do is use instruments that don’t go together and try to find different orchestra that could be supplemented by this,” Pemberton said. “I just want to people to hear things they haven’t heard before.”
Pemberton admitted that he made his own job harder. After finding the instruments, he had to learn how to compose for instruments that had never been used together.
“You can write for cellos and strings,” he said. “I know what they do. But when you’re writing things that have not been put together before, it’s hard, but it’s very rewarding when it works.”
It worked in Project Hail Mary as the film connected with audiences, earning nearly $700 million worldwide. The film was a sci-fi spectacle, in Imax to boot, but it was the emotional relationship between Grace and the alien, Rocky, that resonated with people the most.
“I’m just always looking for what’s the cool sound?” Pemberton said. “How do you connect with something emotionally? And then how can I put that into this complicated weave of making a film score that has to hit so many emotional beats?”
Pemberton is still working with Lord and Miller, as producers, on Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse. Though cautious about revealing too much, he said he has seen an animated rough cut.
“The last cut I saw made me cry multiple times,” Pemberton said. “When something can do that when it’s an animated and it’s still early, I think everyone’s going to be in for a real treat.”
The composer even went so far as to claim it might be “the greatest ending to a trilogy ever.”
Check out the conversation in the video above.
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