[Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Project Hail Mary.”]
To hear composer Daniel Pemberton talk about the process of creating the score for “Project Hail Mary,” you might be forgiven for thinking he’s describing the mission Project Hail Mary itself. Pemberton, who’s scored movies as diverse as “Ocean’s 8,” “Eddington,” and his collaboration with directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller on the “Spider-Verse” films, told IndieWire that he’s never done a process where he’s gone into the recording studio so often unsure whether it was going to work, but determined to try it out anyway.
The experimental ethos started early, with Lord and Miller sending Pemberton the script, and Pemberton sending back some initial musical ideas to the set. Ryan Gosling had Pemberton’s music (including a longer version of the cue “Grace Has Mate“) in his playlist rotation to listen to while in character as unwilling astronaut Ryland Grace, the lone (human, anyway) scientist sent 11.9 light-years away to Tau Ceti to uncover a mystery that has a long-shot chance to save the Earth.
Pemberton didn’t want the score to feel especially traditional or even particularly Earth-bound, which meant steering clear of the tropes of both orchestral and electronic music. “I wanted it to have this unexpected texture and feeling to it. So a big part of the score was trying to find different, unusual instruments and approaches,” Pemberton said.
Indeed, any time a score includes a Cristal Baschet, you know you’re in quite playful sci-fi territory. Pemberton went to Paris and to expert Baschet musician Thomas Bloch to record the ‘40s-era organ made of glass tubes of varying length, played with wet fingertips. The score also features a lot of steel drums, useful in evoking the Hail Mary spaceship itself. But most of the texture and feeling came from the ways in which Pemberton used human vocals and choral elements.
“We all had this idea of connecting Grace to humanity back on Earth, as he’s, in some ways, potentially the last human. So we use a lot of voices,” Pemberton said. “But then we did a lot of experimental voice work, trying very unusual techniques out with voice. And some of those, I would use to create unusual electronic, treated versions, which were very good for the interactions with Rocky [James Ortiz] because I wanted Rocky to have a sound that felt familiar but unusual.”
To achieve that sense of familiar but unusual, a connection to the spirit of human (and interseries) collaboration but also the distance of space, Pemberton really stretched the work he did with the two choirs he worked with in London and Wells Cathedral school children’s choir, evoking Grace’s life as a middle school teacher.
“One of my favorite [techniques] is what I called the human drum machine, where we would get 16 people in a circle and almost program it like an 808 drum machine. You have 16 slots, and it goes long, so I’d give the people in the circle different noises, and then we’d cycle around the circle, and each person would make a different noise. We’d create these weird techniques and processes that are super buried in a mix, but they make you feel something subconsciously that you might not even connect,” Pemberton said. “And you know, if you’re seeing the film in IMAX, or a decent cinema, you’re really going to feel it a bit more.”
A lot of the percussion in the score, in fact, is the Wells Cathedral school kids clapping and stomping. “That was a really interesting texture. [We wanted] to make as much stuff connected around the human body as possible,” Pemberton said. “It’s very challenging but exciting. You’re trying to do things that haven’t really been done before, because no one’s been stupid enough to put these things together.”
As with any experimental process, sometimes the ideas would work and sometimes they wouldn’t. But Pemberton said that another thing audiences really feel, whether they’re watching in IMAX or not, is the few deliberate moments the score allows itself to be more conventional — moments of pure orchestral bliss witnessing the majesty of the universe, or moments that root us back to Earth even though Grace may never be able to come home again.
There’s a scene near the very end of the film where we connect back to Earth and see Sandra Hüller’s Eva Stratt again. Pemberton saved electric guitars, present nowhere else in the score, for exactly that beat. “There’s a lot of subconscious sort of writing and ideas that go into this process to make it effective,” Pemberton said. “That’s the only time you really hear a rock guitar. Suddenly, we have [this instrument] which is connected to Earth more, but we haven’t had anywhere in the film because I’m trying to save it for that moment.”
Experimentation, restraint, and deliberate moments of familiarity all help the “Project Hail Mary” score guide the audience through every step of Grace and Rocky’s journey to save their homes. “Everything in this film, from the music to the visuals to the story, is very exciting because I want to make films that sound different, that feel different,” Pemberton said. “I liken [it] to food. Everyone likes burgers and chips or whatever, but if that’s all you eat, it gets pretty boring… And I think cinema, large-scale cinema, has been delivering up a lot of burgers and chips, and I’m excited to be involved in a different culinary exploration, with this film.”
“Project Hail Mary” is now playing in theaters.
