# Phil Lord and Christopher Miller chat to an astrophysicist | Project Hail Mary

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Dr. Becky
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAWv1_YNWSY
- **Дата:** 20.03.2026
- **Длительность:** 9:03
- **Просмотры:** 11,342

## Описание

How much of the science in Project Hail Mary is actually possible? Because this story is packed with real science! I got to sit down with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to chat about how the science in Project Hail Mary (one of the most scientifically ambitious sci-fi stories ever written) was translated from the book to the big screen. I also sat down with author Andy Weir, and star of the film Ryan Gosling to chat about how you visually communicate difficult concepts like relativity on screen, whilst keeping the human story at the heart. There will be mild spoilers ahead... #projecthailmary #andyweir  @SonyPicsUK   @AmazonMGMStudios   @sonypictures  

Full video breaking down the science of Project Hail Mary - https://youtu.be/lYHCTEnYOr4
My chat with author Andy Weir - https://youtu.be/JOgwM941nV4


Video edited by Dr Becky Smethurst 

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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about black holes, cosmology, dark matter, the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the biggest unsolved mysteries in astrophysics. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


http://drbecky.uk.com

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## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAWv1_YNWSY) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

As part of my video breaking down the science in Project Hail Mary, I got to speak to the directors and producers of the film, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, about how they brought the scientific ideas in the book to the big screen. So, here is that chat for you all in full. So, thank you first of all on behalf of all the science and sci-fi nerds for bringing this story to life. — Our pleasure. My pleasure. Yeah, I'm ready to I feel like I'm about to get busted. — No, not about that. Um, so much of what I do is science communication and getting a very complex idea across to people which I feel like became your job a little bit for this. — We did the exact we are the same. Can you talk about like which areas of science were particularly difficult to get across like what was causing trouble or what was easy? — You know throughout it was about how do you get these complicated ideas about like time dilation or centrifugal gravity or other things like that across to a public who doesn't want uh a lecture hall. They want to be entertained. — And how do you Yeah. How do you get it across in an entertaining way and in a cinematic way? Exactly. you know, and how much can we do without dialogue? — That was going to be my next question was like what informed those decisions on if you verbally or visually communicate an idea. — Ideally, it's visual and that you use as few words as possible. — We basically record a bunch of dialogue but then try not to use it. uh we try and tell the story visually and then what we do is we show audiences and if people are confused we like give just enough so that it is uh so that it's digestible so that they're not confused or frustrated but then also try to use uh humor to like make the medicine go down. Did you struggle with any specific scientific dialogue? Like when you get on set, is it something that like you realize is not translating or how many times were you like, should we go back to a scientist to figure this out again or? — Well, we had a lot of um consultants on set. We had specific consultants for all of the, you know, the chemistry experiments, — right? All the lab work. We also had Andy Weir who had, you know, created all of this stuff in his novel. So he was often on set and if he wasn't he was on speed dial. — He makes a living at making um complicated science uh digestible. — Yeah. Um uh we had a physicist on the visual effects team uh who was also very helpful especially in post. Um, and I'd say the main um the main challenge was to make sure that whatever dialogue we had, it felt like something Ryan would say — and not just simply something that like we that the plot is asking him to describe, right? So that was a big trick and something that Ryan was very keen on um on perfecting — like getting it out to be natural rather than like — Yeah. And something and who's he saying it to, right? So often, you know, it was when he's there's no one else in the scene, he's not telling anybody that stuff, right? But at the beginning he has a whole audience and he's being asked to narrate to Sandra Hooler like what are you doing and so he's you know describing everything — and then later he's got Rocky to talk to. — Yeah. — Can we talk about planet Adrien? Yes, — because first of all it was beautiful. — Oh, fantastic. — There is for my colleagues like some debate about whether actually Taeti E exists or not. We don't know. — At the time that the book was written, — there was a theory that there was a a planet that could sustain life and now — the more prevailing thinking is that it doesn't. — It's just a dead rock. So, but the book was written like seven years ago and uh you know times change. — We don't know for sure. — No, exactly. And what's fun is like the data originally was like okay it's somewhere between maybe a super earth like a rocky thing or like a mini Neptune like a gas giant. I feel like you guys went down the mini Neptune route in terms of visuals. Can you talk through like when there isn't the science to back that up? Is that almost the fun part for you guys because you get to be like well we just get to — We try. Yeah. I mean, for us, it's trying to base it in something that inspires, right? And we for the we never wanted to dumb down the novel to make our lives more convenient, — right? We always wanted it to be inspired by something as real as we could find. That's the spirit of the picture. — And just so happens that one of our good friends from college is an astroclimatologist at NASA. — Excuse me, a paleo astroclimatologist. — That's excellent. That's true. Pardon me. — Yeah. And so our friend Alejandro Sto, who's in the credits, uh we started asking him to help us theorize about what it might look like. — And uh and you know, we had Andy had basically the thought of like it's kind of like Venus but green. — Nice. — And there was some ideas that I no longer remember about what the composition of the atmosphere was like.

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAWv1_YNWSY&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 09:00)

And that was the justification for the color — and that and also the justification for the different colors of the aurora was the sort of the different chemicals that could be in the atmosphere that would cause those. — I enjoyed thinking that through while I watched the film — I'm glad that's just for you 20. — Can we talk about the visuals for Astrophage as well cuz I loved those. Like can you talk about I mean there was obviously like the little cells under the microscope. Was that obviously something that was like filmed something that we have here? I don't know if it was that VFX, but then also the red dots that were amazing and they reminded me of, you know, in Oenheimer they did all those like lights effects similar to that or — the crazy way that we did that. The concept of astrophase, right, is that um it moves around uh using light, an infrared light that's only visible uh with an infrared camera and not visible to the naked eye. And so there's a scene where he's collecting astrophase and you can't see anything, but we switched the camera to infrared, which you do by actually removing a filter from the camera that was blocking infrared, and it turns into this pink thing. And we really did that with a real camera. And what's so lovely about that thought is that, you know, as a scientist, you understand that there are all of these things and forces that exist that we don't witness and we don't think about because they're not in the spectrum of light that we can perceive. So the idea that like when we just remove this sort of like mental block that assumes that the only things that exist are what we can see, right? but not necessarily what we can detect suddenly like the whole world becomes that much more vibrant. So the other thing that um to think about is in this the way that Andy dep you know created this idea of astrophase the way they move is by um emitting uh infrared light and so that meant that like there was you're in this river of light that's traveling in all directions and the idea of how would you photograph that right — um started to come into play. — And what we ended up doing for the close-up shots, we built this chicken wire cage and put a bunch of little the equivalent of Christmas light, infrared lights all around the cage and then had them blink at random intervals and then to the naked eye it looks like nothing. And we — we looked like lunatics. — Brian's there in a space doing this. And our cinematographer, Greg Fraser, is like going around like this. And on the monitor, it's beautiful. these blinking red and pink uh bokeh like — and our producer Amy Pascal walked onto the set like what are you wasting our money on? — Like look at the monitor. — Oh, — I'm so glad you did that real rather than that was amazing. — It has a lot of visual effects in it just to be clear. So we took that and then used that to build everything else and then all the wides of course — are fully visual effects. — Yeah. — And then my last question is I we I finished the film. Yes. — And then I stayed in my seat for a long time because of the nebula that you put behind the curt. Are they real? Trying to figure out if I recognize photographer who uh with a telescope and he — whose name we can get you. It eludes me at this moment. — But uh and he posts these on Instagram. And so we found him and we're like do you how high- res are these images? He's like very high- res. There are many different layers of different, you know, things that he like — filters and tweaks and whatever and then lays them on top of each other, but they're all real. — Amazing. I was like convinced on one and then not on the other. So, I'm so glad you you've like confirmed that for me cuz that was bugging me so much. Amazing. — Thank you both for the film. — Oh, good. Thanks for the work you do. Oh, — thank you. Thanks so much again to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for chatting to me. Check out the book and the film. They're both fantastic.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/15111*