‘Project Hail Mary’ Cinematographer Says Film Was ‘Challenging’, But Was Helped by Cheap Amazon Filter

Project Hail Mary has been a massive success, grossing $420.7 million so far. Part of the appeal is the incredible photography, which comes off effortlessly. But the cinematographer, Greig Fraser, says it was anything but.

In fact, Fraser, whose credits include Dune and The Batman, tells Variety that Project Hail Mary was the “most challenging film I’ve ever done, by far.”

Project Hail Mary relies less on CGI and more on real sets. The spaceship that most of the film is set in was actually built so that Ryan Gosling, who plays science teacher Ryland Grace, could really move around in it.

For Variety’s regular feature Inside the Frame, Fraser recounts a particularly challenging scene: when Grace first meets his adorable co-star Rocky. Not to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but Rocky belongs to an alien species known as Eridians, who have made a fictional material called xenonite. When Grace first meets Rocky, he walks through a tunnel made of xenonite, which is a kind of solidified gas.

“We had to discover what this thing was,” he says. “The Sun has to come through it, but that provided a couple of challenges because this tunnel was 70 feet long.”

Lighting a tunnel is complex and very difficult. If it were a normal tunnel, then Fraser could have just lit it through a window. But since this is a fictional tunnel made from translucent material, it was all affected by the Sun. So Fraser and his crew built a giant rig with lots of lights.

“We physically couldn’t get enough LEDs,” he tells Variety. “They’re all old school tungsten lights, and we pixel-mapped them, so it meant that the Sun can rotate around in any sort of configuration that we want.”

Another issue was Rocky the alien, who is literally a rock with granite-like limbs. Rocky could not emanate any light and had to be front-lit since his side of the tunnel was dark.

“Not only do we light this character with the front light, we light a character with a front light with no face, that looks like a rock, that looks like a spider,” Fraser says. “The challenges were compounded. It was front lighting a rock with no face that emoted just through puppetry.”

“It wasn’t just a challenge. It was a challenge on a challenge, on top of a challenge, under a challenge, through a challenge,” he adds.

Cheap Amazon Fix

There is a multi-colored flare that appears frequently in the film. Remarkably, Fraser reveals that this was done via an inexpensive filter he bought from Amazon.

“It’s a rainbow filter,” he explains. “And it causes these beautiful rainbow streaks to the highlights, and that became a theme throughout the film.”

Despite all the challenges, Project Hail Mary has been a major success, entertaining millions of fans all around the world. At the end of the movie, viewers may notice that a series of exquisite deep-space photos that play behind the end credits. PetaPixel recently spoke with the photographer behind the images, Rod Prazeres.