Andy Weir reveals his fun and frantic creative process behind 'Project Hail Mary'

Hi, I'm Tim Bidiumius and this is NPR's book of the day.

By now, you've probably heard something about Project Hail Mary.

The buzzy film, starring Ryan Gosling, has already nabbed the honor of having the highest

grossing opening weekend of 2026.

But years before the film dominated the box office, it was a best-selling book by writer

Andy Weir.

In it, the protagonist ends up adrift in space and is tasked with saving humanity.

We're spoke about his inspiration for the novel with here and now host Indira Lakshmanan.

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In the new film Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a middle school science

teacher who wakes up on a ship in deep space with no memory of who he is, where he is, or

how he got there.

And he's all alone.

His two crewmates are dead.

As his memories return in a series of flashbacks, Grace realizes he's the only survivor of a

desperate Hail Mary mission, a last-ditch attempt to save life on Earth.

If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct, including us.

Dr. Grace, the world is counting on you.

Hmm, not big stakes there, huh?

How can one man save the planet?

Hail Mary opens in theaters this Friday.

It's based on the best-selling book by Andy Weir, who joins us now.

Andy, welcome to here and now.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So for those who haven't read your science fiction bestseller, let's fill listeners in

on the basics of the plot.

The power of the sun is being sucked away by microscopic life forms called astrophage.

If they're not stopped and fast, Earth's temperature will drop so low that it can't sustain

life.

Ryl and Grace and the rest of the crew are set 11 light years away in a spaceship called

the Hail Mary to investigate astrophage and see if it can be stopped.

All right, so I have to ask, where did you get the Let's Face It?

Pretty depressing idea for the story.

Well, let's start off with, I wanted to come up with an idea where humanity gets a hold of

some sort of mass conversion-based fuel.

Because if we could do that, we could easily colonize the solar system.

There's all these amazing things we could do.

Then I was like, okay, great.

But if they find that fuel, then they use it up, then it's gone.

How do you make more?

And I said, like, well, maybe the fuel itself can make more.

You shine light at it, it'll absorb the energy and make more of the fuel or something.

And then I thought, well, that kind of sounds like life, right?

Something that absorbs energy and makes copies of itself.

It would have to be like alien, but I'm comfortable with that if it's just a microbe.

But why would it need to store so much energy inside of a little cell?

Why would it need to do that?

And where would it get that much energy?

And those two kind of answered themselves, I'm like, well,

it could get that energy by living on the surface of stars.

And then maybe it needs that energy to spore out to infect other stars,

because it's basically like mold.

Oh, inside note, in the back of my mind, we'd have to make really sure

not to let any of this stuff get onto our Sun.

Because that would be catastrophically bad.

And then I'm like, oh, wait, no, go back.

If that stuff's in our Sun, that's the story.

Wow, okay.

So that's the weird way I backed into it.

I asked what I thought was a simple question.

But got a really complicated answer.

I have to say, I feel like I just got a view into your creative process.

Yes, I always feel like I have to apologize to anyone who sees the inner workings of my mind.

It is complicated in there.

Well, let's focus on Ryland Grace.

He's an unlikely hero for a deep space adventure.

He's a middle school science teacher.

He's not even an astronaut.

We discover in the course of the story that he didn't even want to go on this mission.

So what inspired this character?

Well, I wanted to write a character that people could empathize with.

And I don't know about you, but I have a tough time empathizing with the really brave characters,

because I don't think I'm that brave.

I think we all, to some degree, feel this way as we go through life,

like unprepared, unqualified, and reluctant.

Yet important things are relying on me, so I have to come through.

And also, I wanted to make a character for once that wasn't just based on my own personality.

My first two books, the characters, are based on aspects of my own personality.

Grace, I made up from whole cloth, and I said, okay, what are his central conflicts?

How is he going to grow? How is he going to change?

Well, you say you made him up, but Ryland Grace actually reminded me of one of your previous heroes,

Mark Watney, from the Martian listeners may remember the 2015 movie adaptation of your book

that starred Matt Damon. Watney was stranded on Mars when his team was forced to abandon their

mission. And what we discover in both stories is that Watney and Grace are kind of regular

guys with a dry sense of humor. They manage to survive against overwhelming odds.

They both mageyver the heck out of every problem they face in space. Tell us why this kind of hero

appeals to you. There's something that really appeals to me, and I hope to the audience of

person versus nature stories. It's interesting when you're watching a movie or a story that has

an antagonist in it, you know deep down that that antagonist is going to fail. Probably going to

fail. The only question is how much damage they do on the way down, right? And so I find myself in

the middle of the movie weirdly rooting for the antagonist because I know he's good at what he's

right. So I wanted to get a few good looks in before he goes down. Nobody roots for nature to kill

the human. There's no divided royalties. So you immediately go like, okay, this guy needs to

survive. Let's see how he does it. We're speaking with author Andy Weir, whose best-selling book project

Hail Mary is the basis for the new film starring Ryan Gosling. All right, I hate to drop spoilers,

but if listeners have watched the trailer, they already know that Grace's ship has been sent to

a planetary system that's unaffected by astrophage. And he discovers an alien on another ship who's

on the same mission and the two decide to work together. Talk a bit about how this part of the

story came to you. What were you trying to explore with having two creatures? Let's call them that

collaborate across species? Well, I wanted this to be a first contact story right from the get-go.

I mean, I was thinking about the, you know, mass conversion fuel, but that was also sort of a

mechanism by which I can cause a first contact. Then, as you say, you know, Towsetti is for some reason

immune to astrophage. It makes sense that we would send a ship there and I'm like, oh, it makes

sense that if there are any other intelligent species around, they would probably come to the

same conclusion. So yeah, I wanted it to be about a couple of alien buddies saving their worlds.

Well, it is a buddy film. There's a scene from the film where the alien, who Ryan Gosling's character

names Rocky, first comes inside the Hail Mary spacecraft. He's encased in a protective bubble

because Rocky and Grace can't breathe from the same atmosphere. And Rocky is eager to see and

discover everything he goes barreling through the ship as Grace chases behind him. It's quite humorous.

Let's listen. Hi, Grace. You're in a ball. So Rocky, no, Diane, Grace, atmosphere. I come up.

Oh, you're coming up. Far and muddy. Detected. Grace and Rocky, big science. How to kill

astrophages together. I keep going this way. This room boring.

Rocky, buy it. They buy it. They bear it. Good slam. What's that sound here?

Okay, so it reminds me of countless buddy movies over the decades. At times,

they find each other annoying, but they need to work together and ultimately their friendship

becomes so strong. It really transcends life and death. Tell us more about this relationship.

Yeah, that's the core of the story is their friendship and their relationship. They're kind of like,

almost in a way war buddies. They're like two soldiers who had to share a fox hole during an

assault. They'll be friends for the rest of their lives because they've been through something

so catastrophic together. The trauma bonded, I guess. And they also just developed a great

friendship with each other working together. It's like, okay, there's you and there's me,

and then there's nothing for many light years. So we're going to work together now.

Now, obviously as a novelist, you have an incredibly rich imagination. I mean, these were all

your ideas. But what was it like to see the images you had in your own head of the Hail Mary

spacecraft and of Rocky himself brought to life visually on the screen in IMAX, in high death,

what did that feel like? Well, it feels great. You know, it's always amazing to see a bunch of

world-class talented people spending a year of their life making something that fell out of my

brain come into a reality. I also have one kind of secret hidden advantage that most of their authors

don't have, although someone would say it's a disadvantage, I don't have a very visual imagination.

So when I'm writing my story, I don't really see it playing out like a movie. There's just like

concepts like Rocky as a blob. I'd worked out his morphology, but I couldn't have told you if his

legs were thin or fat or if they were bumpy or smooth or anything like that. And Holly would

brought it to life for you. So it all worked out. Well, the nice thing is that when I see it on

screen, I don't have the cognitive dissonance that a lot of writers have because they imagine one

thing in their head and then on the screen is something else. For me, I'm just like, oh, so that's

what it looks like. Now I know. Yay! Well, Project Hail Mary and the Martian both seem to be about

maintaining optimism in the face of dire circumstances where death basically seems inevitable,

but in both cases, our heroes don't give up. I also noticed that in both of your stories,

cooperation that in the end saves the day transcends borders. Now, let's take ourselves back to life

in 2026. We're not exactly living through a moment of cross-border cooperation. And so I have to

ask, does your story in a way seem too polyannish in our current geopolitical climate?

I, as a person, am probably too polyannish for any point to the history that I've experienced. I

am just a very optimistic person. Those books are a reflection of how I see humanity. I really do

think that we're an amazing species. And I think that we accomplish great things, and we work

together a lot more than people give us credit for. If you look at the pandemic as an example,

you have pharmaceutical companies that under normal circumstances would have private armies

to guard their secrets, openly sharing everything they had on the disease so that they could

collaboratively come up with vaccines as quickly as possible. I mean, it was really a phenomenal

period of cooperation for humanity that we somehow look back on and give ourselves like a C-grade

on. But I think if you ask historians 200 years from now how well we did, they're going to give us

pretty high marks. Andy Weir is the author of Project Hail Mary, the best-selling book on which the

new film starring Ryan Gosling is based, Project Hail Mary the Movie opens in theaters this Friday.

Andy Weir, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.

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