Project Hail Mary is the blockbuster du jour at the multiplex box office this month. A space odyssey starring Ryan Gosling and an unexpectedly charming walking, eventually talking rock formation, the film is a certified crowdpleaser – intended to be seen big and heard loud.
Daniel Pemberton – Tristan Bejawn
Your viewing experience will benefit greatly from finding a screening with a good soundsystem. There’s nuance, rich detail, and an unusual texture to Spiderverse composer Daniel Pemberton’s score for the film. Pemberton has been scoring film, television, and games for over twenty years. His credits include Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and LittleBigPlanet. Ethereal, twinkling, and playful, his Project Hail Mary score utilises a remarkably percussive palette, accompanying and accenting Gosling as he slides down ladders, flicks buttons, and waves a tentative hello at a friendly alien.
Pemberton made use of copious woodblocks, children’s choirs, niche instruments, and his own body in bringing Project Hail Mary home. A week on from the film’s release, Soundsphere had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss the long journey.
To start us off, could you tell me how you were brought on board this project? You collaborated with Lord and Miller previously – were you considered the go-to guy for this project?
I hope I was! They went around every other composer in town– no, no, I’ve got a really good relationship with Phil and Chris. We’re friends outside of films, and we all have a desire to make work that’s very special and unexpected. I think we all have the same mission statement, in what we’re trying to do as artists. We’d been talking about this ages before it started shooting. For me, it was quite a terrifying project to come onto because I was aware that I couldn’t phone it in – not that I ever try to. This project is flying the flag for original, big, ambitious filmmaking, and we had the opportunity to do something that was very ambitious and very different musically. I was conscious to rise to that challenge.
It’s a very unusual score. There have been lots of fantastic scores for big sci-fi films, but they’ve rarely had to do anything that’s got humour as such a huge part of the the score, or lightness, friendship – there’s a lot of there’s a lot of complicated, different emotional beats that the score has to contend with.
What’s your personal history with space movies? Are you a big fan of them?
As a kid, I loved space, I was obsessed with the space shuttle. I actually saw the space shuttle at the Intrepid Museum in New York, and I got insanely emotional seeing it. I was amazed at how evocative just seeing this thing was. So yeah, I grew up with a lot of love for space. Definitely big sci-fi movies – 2001 is probably my favourite. I remember going to see that at the Curzon Mayfair. When you see a great movie, you remember where you saw it, and Mayfair has these carvings on the walls, which are like something out of 2001. One of the things that’s very exciting about why cinema can be so effective is that you create very strong memories when you see something that hits you and connects with you. You remember where you saw it. You remember the location, you remember leaving, and how your life has changed a little bit after seeing it. It’s one of the reasons why I push to do more theatrical films.
Do you have a different approach to scoring for streaming to when you score for theatrical?
I mean, every film is different, so you go with the film. On a film like Project Hail Mary, a film that’s going to be seen best in a big cinema, you can go to a level of detail that you probably wouldn’t go to on streaming – because on streaming people will never hear the detail. A great example is the ‘Time Go Fishing’ cue. It starts off with a single woodblock.Donk, donk, donk. One of the things that’s been very important for me in this score is a sense of touch and humanity and feel. With that cue, I was like, I can’t feel the touch enough on this wood. So I recorded myself lying on the floor on my back in the studio, just tapping the wooden floor for seven minutes in time with all the wood blocks.
It’s a tiny detail that no one will notice, but I went to see it at the IMAX and you can hear it. You can hear me. You can hear my fingers tapping on the floor very, very subtly. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t there, but it’s details like that which make the cinema experience so much more unique.
Do you want the score to be noticed, or do you want it to be more subconsciously ‘felt’?
There’s a stupid saying that a good film score you shouldn’t notice – which is a ridiculous idea. It’s like saying a good actor shouldn’t be noticed. Sometimes you want to be a supporting actor and you don’t even want to be noticed. Sometimes you want to be Tom Cruise running around while something blows up behind you, and you want to be a big feature. I like both.
In this film, it’s more of a Tom Cruise element. There’s quite a few big moments. There’s also a lot of subtle moments where you’re supporting. It’s trying to make those big moments as powerful as they can be, and the way to do that is slowly feed things in, or move towards it like maybe half-an-hour earlier – so when it lands you’re ready for it.
This is a very talky film. There’s a hell of a lot of dialogue, and your score spans most of the film – the album is 2 hours and the film has a 2hrs 36 runtime. The score is a near constant.
It’s a delicate balance. At its core, this film is one man on a spaceship talking to a puppet for two and a half hours. Amazing performances. You’re adding a different level to what you’re seeing on screen, you subconsciously add humour, scale, threat, stakes, but you’ve got to do it in a way that doesn’t step on everything.
At what point in the process did you start scoring?
I started very early in the process. I’d send things to Phil and Chris, and they’d play them to Ryan on set. Ryan had a playlist that he’d have in his headphones, and he’d sometimes use that when he was acting. I was involved all through the process. I was working here in London, and then I ended up pretty much living in the edit suite in LA for half a year, writing the score next to them in the room next door – which is a kind of crazy experience.
It’s quite an ethereal score. Curiosity feels like the defining emotion that you’re evoking here. Could you tell me about some of the instrumentation that created that?
I wanted to try and create a very unusual orchestra of my own. There is a traditional orchestra in this also, but I wanted something that felt very human, very organic, and very visceral – in the sense that you could feel the touch. Touch was very important. Anything that connected you to being a human, connected you to earth, connected you to the dissonance of cellular structure.
There’s a great instrument called the Cristal Baschet, from the ‘50s, which is a really fascinating, amazing instrument. It’s basically these glass rods – which you play with wet hands – that go through these metal speakers. And it’s almost like a sort of synthesizer before synthesizers were invented. It has an amazing player called Thomas Bloch, who I went to Paris to record for a bunch of days. It’s a really key instrument.
There’s obviously loads of voice work. There’s choral work. A lot of manipulated voices. I recorded a whole bunch of experiments where I would work with singers to try and create strange textures that I could turn into sample instruments, which I could then play expressively.
We’ve got a kids’ school playing, clapping and doing body percussion. A lot of the percussion is people stomping, clapping, and playing their bodies. I wanted to get as much of a human feel into the film as possible. And then there’s things like steel drums. I wanted to use steel drums because I felt that the Hail Mary is basically a big steel drum with a load of rocket fuel in it.
There’s tons of woodblocks – Phil and Chris were very keen for me to try and utilize them, and they became a big part of the score. I used this disparate array of instruments to create a palette to write with – and that has a lot of limitations, but also a lot of excitement, because you’re exploring this new world where you don’t know what it is because it’s not really been done before. And that’s what gets me excited, when you get to do something that’s unexpected.
I like this parallel a lot. Ryan Gosling’s character is constantly experimenting, inventing, and trying to problem-solve, and you’re doing the same with the score that accompanies him.
Yeah, I can definitely connect to the ‘kind of slightly out of his depth making it up as he goes along’ approach, because that was somewhat the approach of the score. I’ve done loads of film scores, so I always try to approach them in a new way [each time]. Something I haven’t really tried before always puts me on the back foot and makes me not know what i’m doing – it keeps me intrigued by everything around me. You’re always exploring something for the first time, and Project Hail Mary was a huge undertaking for that.
The sound of space films is often very grand. We talked earlier about you being a bit ‘lighter’ with what you’re doing here. I’m curious about how you approach space as a topic and as a presence within the film – it feels almost like some space films treat space as older or more mysterious, this feels younger somehow and more hopeful.
Hope is a big part of this film. Phil and Chris both use this phrase, ‘hopecore, as what the film is about. It’s quite difficult to write two hours of very optimistic, positive music and not have it sound cheesy. That was a big challenge. But yes, it’s interesting, because a lot of space music is big, and in some ways not about the person – it’s about something that’s way bigger than a person. What I think is interesting in Hail Mary is that while there are definitely elements within the score where I’m trying to play up the scale and wonder of the universe and the unknown, and the size of it, a lot of this film is about a relationship between two entities – the bond and the friendship and how that develops – which is a very different thing. The score is there to help you connect with those characters and connect with their story.
That movement between epic awe of space and then quite intimate friendship blossoming – they’re quite different ideas from a film scoring point of view. It was definitely a huge challenge to pull those together into something that felt like it had some coherence.
This film contains visual nods to an array of past space cinema. Were you consciously nodding to those classics in your score at all?
Not really. I try to consciously not connect to things that have been done before. I’m always interested in trying to do something new. It’s very hard, because I will have grown up with a language. There are scenes in this which I think are very unexpected musically. There’s a track titled ‘Erratic Maneuver Detected’, which is when Rocky’s ship first turns up. It’s a pretty weird piece with lots of woodblocks, weird vocals, and woodwinds. We found that, if we did that over the whole film, it became slightly tiresome. You need those moments of majesty and wonder, which you get in cues like ‘A Moment’ or ‘You Were Loved’. When you start leaning on certain emotive ideas, you can end up in territory that has been walked before. I’m conscious of trying to give the audience something new and not reheat what they’ve had before.
I’d love to hear more about the motifs that you use with Rocky’s ship, because one thing that’s quite striking about that visually also is that it’s trying to evoke something entirely new and entirely unknown – which must be a challenge to approach because you don’t, as you say, want to evoke anything known.
Yeah, it’s definitely difficult because if you go too weird, it’s hard to connect with. You need something with it that you can latch on to – some core emotional value. It was a lot of research and development, and I gave myself space to fail. Failure was a very important part of this process – being able to come in early enough to write things and throw crazy ideas at scenes, which might or might not work. You’d be amazed at how many of them ended up sticking.
Project Hail Mary is in cinemas now.