‘Project Hail Mary’ Directors Screened a Nearly Four-Hour Cut to Other Filmmakers and Were Told to ‘Get It Way Shorter’: ‘It Was Embarrassing’

“Project Hail Mary” directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller recently appeared on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast and revealed they showed a nearly four-hour cut of their space movie to a group of director friends. However, the results were “embarrassing.”

“Our first official test screening went great, but we do a lot of earlier screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers,” Miller explained. “This movie was massive. When we finally got the assembly cut down to under four hours long, we subjected some filmmaker friends of ours to a three hour and 45 minute cut of the movie, which was embarrassing.”

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Lord noted that the feedback the directing duo got was unanimous: “Get it way shorter.”

“You just don’t know how the scenes are going to land with an audience,” Lord said. “We thought everything was charming, but some of those charming things didn’t land. It made it really easy to get it down to three hours.”

“Then we had to slowly, slowly work our way down to 2.5 hours,” Miller added, which is around the final length of the movie’s theatrical cut.

“Project Hail Mary” is based on Andy Weir’s book of the same name and stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher and former molecular biologist who is recruited by the government to help save the Earth from dying. Ryland then unwittingly finds himself on an interstellar mission that includes meeting the alien Rocky. The movie was a blockbuster success in its opening weekend with $80.5 million at the domestic box office, the year’s biggest opening so far and the top debut in Amazon MGM’s history. The movie has since crossed the $100 million mark domestically ahead of its second weekend of release.

Watch Lord and Miller’s full interview on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in the video below.