This Is What ‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Thinks About the Movie

At a panel at Book Con in New York City in April, Andy Weir discussed book-to-movie adaptations alongside authors Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven), May Cobb (The Hunting Wives), and Robinne Lee (The Idea of You). He discussed the struggle of adapting Project Hail Mary, his hopes and fears during filming, and what adaptation might be next for him.

A familiar process

Not all authors get to be closely involved with their adaptations, but Andy Weir is no stranger to the process—or to Hollywood. His book The Martian became a 2015 blockbuster, and Weir was a producer on Project Hail Mary.

“I feel a certain amount of ownership of the movie, because I was there for the whole shoot,” said Weir to the packed audience. “I was giving notes and feedback on the screenplay before that, giving notes on the edits, and I saw all the cuts. That feels good because I feel like I was one of a team that made this movie, which I think came out really well. So I’m very happy with the adaptation.”

It also doesn’t hurt that Ryan Gosling is even hotter in person, he joked.

Adaptation challenges

A fear of flying kept Weir away from the set of The Martian, so he had plenty to learn about the difference between writing and producing with Project Hail Mary.

“When you’re writing a book, you’re a dictator. You have absolute and total control over every single aspect of the story,” he said. But working on a movie is both a team effort and a living, breathing process that evolves with the actors.

“I was really surprised at how much the script is just sort of a vague suggestion,” said Weir. “Maybe half of the movie is basically ad-libbed. The actors are part of the creation of the story, and that was a big learning experience for me.”

Not every scene Weir loved in the book made it into the movie: “In the book, they nuke Antarctica. I still maintain we could have done it. But it’s a really long movie, and they didn’t want to add five minutes to the runtime.”

But the scene Andy Weir was the most nervous about filming was the first contact between astronaut Ryland and alien Rocky. “Everybody knew, from the bottom to the top, that the movie was gonna live or die on its presentation of Rocky. So the introduction of actually seeing Rocky interacting with Ryland, that’s what I was nervous about,” he said.

Adapting that scene was a particular challenge because Andy Weir didn’t know what Rocky looked like before seeing him brought to life in the movie. “I’m pretty far along the aphantasia scale, which means I don’t have a very visual imagination at all,” Weir explains. “If I close my eyes and try to imagine an apple, I imagine sort of an icon of an apple, not a detailed image. When I’m writing my stories, I couldn’t tell you what the sets look like. I couldn’t tell you what the people look like. It’s all very vague in my mind.”

When the movie team asked for more details about what Rocky looks like—did their puppet match Weir’s mental image of the alien?—Weir had to say he didn’t know because he couldn’t picture it.

“It ends up being kind of convenient for me, because most authors, when they see their work brought to screen, they have to deal with a cognitive disconnect between what was in their mind versus what shows up on the screen. Whereas I didn’t have anything in my mind anyway.”

What’s next for Andy Weir?

The author teased that there might be another adaptation in his future: an earlier book of his, Artemis.

“Now that Project Hail Mary has done really well, they’re saying, ‘Well, maybe we should make a movie out of Artemis.’ They bought the film rights a long time ago,” he said.

But if Artemis does get the movie treatment, it’s going to be a less faithful book adaptation than Project Hail Mary was. “I have, in the intervening time, identified a bunch of problems in Artemis, places where the writing is weak or the character development is weak.”

“With the film, I’m gonna give the directors a bullet point list of an alternate plot sequence for Artemis. I’m in an enviable position where I get to basically make editorial changes to a book that got published almost 10 years ago.”

For now, he’s enjoying the success of Project Hail Mary and enjoying the prop he took from set—one of the xenonite tchotchkes made by Rocky, which has joined the clapboard he has framed from the filming of The Martian.

If Artemis is indeed next, we can’t wait to see it.