“Project Hail Mary” Composer Daniel Pemberton’s Mad Scientist Approach to the Ryan Gosling Hit
Given the right project, Daniel Pemberton plays a bit like a mad scientist as a film composer. He’s scored an array of films, but when the scale of a project like Project Hail Mary comes calling, Pemberton becomes – in his own words – an explorer.
As Grace (Ryan Gosling) and his alien pal Rocky (James Ortiz) journey through the unknown in space to save their planets, the composer went on his own path of discovery. “The parallels are quite close,” Pemberton says. “In the sense of he’s having to work out what he’s doing and how he’s going to get out of this, and I’m doing the same, which does feed into the feeling of the film. Hopefully, you don’t feel that – ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ – but there is an element of me trying to work my way out of this conundrum of how do we make this feel very different?”
The composer behind Project Hail Mary recently spoke with The Credits about how he reached his own destination and made Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s adventure film sound both deeply alien and incredibly human.
When Grace and Rocky are in the upper atmosphere of Adrian and fighting to collect samples, how would you want to build suspense over the course of the seven-minute track?
It’s a long, long cue. “Time Go Fishing” comes from the very first discussions we had about this film. We had this sort of joke, half a joke, about trying to score the whole film on a wood block. I was like, “That will never happen.” That cue starts on a single piece of wood. I wanted to build a cue that started from almost the smallest thing to the biggest thing. It does really start with the smallest thing in the orchestra, which is just someone tapping a piece of wood, and it builds and builds and builds.
What effect did you want to achieve with that build?
The dynamic shape of a movie is very important to me, like where things are, what comes before, and what comes afterward. It’s the first time we get something with that level of threat and tension. What I wanted to do with that is once it starts, you never get a release as the audience until he’s finally on the ship. And so, it’s important for me to pull the audience in and lock them in so they can’t escape. Pretty much every instrument in the score on that cue. It builds and builds and builds.
How many instruments are in that track?
We’ve got woodblocks. We’ve got a whole host of weird percussion that I recorded in a warehouse in LA. We’ve got an electric cello. We’ve got a brass section. We’ve got a string section. We’ve got a choir. We’ve got guitars. What else have we got? A bunch of school kids clapping and stamping, that’s a big part of it. Some messed-up electronics. Every single idea is in this film in that cue.
One idea is an audible human touch in the score, right?
I’d be recording bowls of water. I’d be tapping my fingers in a bowl of water to accentuate certain sounds in a way that you’re not even going to consciously notice, but it’s going to make them feel a bit different. Even the woodblocks you hear at the beginning of “Time Go Fishing,” if you listen really closely, you can hear my fingers tapping the floor of Air Studios. I wanted to get a more human touch rather than it being hit with a stick.
Those are such fitting thematic choices for Project Hail Mary. When you first delved into the story, how did you want your choices to reinforce the themes of the film?
Two things. We all wanted to really connect the audience with humanity. Grace represents humanity’s last chance. We wanted the audience to connect subconsciously with that, with earth, and not with the sort of sci-fi space world. I want to make a score that feels very tactile. So that would be woods, metal, glass, water, voice, and touch.
What’s the second part that was very important to you from the beginning?
I want a sense of imperfection because one of the things that is fascinating about this film and of science in a way, the world is imperfect. Cellular organisms are a big part of this film. They are always quite different, with slight mutations and abstractions. I wanted abstraction, mutation, and imperfection subtly within the score. I didn’t want it to feel slick. What would the purpose be of making it slick? It would sound like a Hollywood film, but that’s just repeating what people have done before. I wanted to do something that would, in some ways, not confuse the audience but would give them a different experience.
What experience were you aiming to give them?
It makes them really think about the world, the story, and the characters. Because I think when you do something that is different, and if you can still support the emotional beats and the story beats, then it’s really effective because you, as the audience, think about it more because you don’t know what you’re being told to think.
Are there any tracks in particular that really highlight those imperfections you wanted?
In terms of crazy tracks, I’d say there’s one called “Erratic Maneuver Detected,” which is the sort of cat-and-mouse bit when Rocky’s ship first turns up. It felt like one of the most bonkers pieces of action scoring I’ve ever done. I was writing that and working in an edit suite next to Phil and Chris’s edit suite in LA. I remember being like, “Guys, you’ve got to hear this. You’re either going to think this is brilliant or I’m going to get fired.” And of course, Phil and Chris, being Phil and Chris, they loved it, because it’s very different.
Given some of the scores you’ve done, like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, it says a lot that you consider that one of the craziest tracks you’ve done.
It’s got all the voices going, “Oh,” and they all double with woodwinds. With the woodwinds, I sometimes try to add slight microtonal tuning to make them sound less clean. You’ve got the steel drums. At one point, I wanted to do a lot of this score on steel drums.
They didn’t fit?
Some things it works really well for. We’ve got these huge oil drums, like massive ones, and they sounded great, but when you started playing them higher up, it started sounding like The Little Mermaid. Now there’s nothing wrong with The Little Mermaid. It’s a fantastic score. I just didn’t want us to feel like The Little Mermaid. When they’re big, they sound great and feel like the ship, because the ship already has sort of metal and tech. Rockets are pretty visceral environments because they’re not these super clean, white iPod spaces. They’re mashed-up bits of technology all shoved together with a lot of metal and other stuff.
How did Rocky inspire your work? How’d you want to give him a voice within the score?
Rocky’s voice is a big part of this score with his playfulness. I used a lot of manipulation. I did a lot of work with vocalists early on in the research and development phase to try to make unusual sounds. I’d resample those and turn them into instruments that I could play expressively, which took a long time. But then that gave you a tone to voices that was unexpected. It’s very helpful because you sort of don’t know what it is. It sounds like a voice, but it doesn’t quite. And so, it has an alien nature to it, which again, helps subconsciously reinforce that this is a different life form from one we used to.
Project Hail Mary is, maybe first and foremost, a platonic love story between Grace and Rocky. As big as the score is, how personal is it to you as well?
There are some cues there which are very personal to me, to experiences in my life, and I’ve just pulled on them to write those, especially the saying goodbye one. It’s saying goodbye to someone you might never see again. It’s interesting, pulling on your own experiences and trying to put those in a film about a guy saying goodbye to a rock in a spaceship.
Does it come more naturally than it sounds?
Finding the language for the film took a long time. Every film I do, I try to make sound and feel quite different, which is exciting for me, but it can be a very time-consuming process. Every now and again, I’ll do a film, it’s like, I know what I’m doing, and I can write straight away. Project Hail Mary takes a huge amount of discovery. I liken it to being an explorer, and you’re going somewhere to find a new land, but you don’t have a map. Once you’ve got a map, it’s easy. You’re like, “We’re going that way.” But you don’t know if there’s anything over there, and you might be, so you need to go in that way. It’s a gut instinct that that’s the right way to go.
A very personal scene in the film is Grace on a space walk – the astrophage space scene, as it’s called. He takes a moment for himself. Your cue, titled “A Moment,” is perfect. How’d you want to support the awe and wonder Grace experiences in that scene?
“A Moment” is probably my favorite bit in the whole film. It was very important to me that the emotion in that scene was powerful. To get to that point, it’s all in some ways about the musicality of the cue before the reveal. When the reveal lands, it pulls a curtain back to reveal something amazing. Sometimes you have cues that are slow builds towards a moment. This is a gradual build, and then it just explodes, which only really works because of what you’ve laid up before.
It’s beautiful.
I called it like the big IMAX moment. For me, I was always like, “This is the big IMAX moment. This is why you’re going to see it in IMAX – for this one moment.” It was a lot of work to get it feeling quite simple. I want that cue to feel very beautiful and very simple and not overly thought out, but it’s not. It’s quite complicated.
Project Hail Mary is in theaters now.
Featured image: Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace in PROJECT HAIL MARY, from Amazon MGM Studios. Photo credit: Jonathan Olley © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.
