My Cousin Phil Lord, His Co-Director Chris Miller, & the Entire "Project Hail Mary" Movie Team REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY Want You to Go See Their Movie in a Movie Theater
Twelve different video formats, $1.5 million a minute in world-class expert filmmaking craftsmanship, & I got to see where some of that $1.5 million a minute went by watching a small slice of the post-production fussing-over…
I think those of you who do so will be in for a real treat. Big screen beats small screen. Crowd collective-effervescence beats isolated experience:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLDida6fglw>
I have seen the first ten minutes of it. (It took an hour and a half: they were doing “color correction”, changing lighting and balance so that at every single cut and thereafter your eyes were immediately drawn to what they most wanted you to see at that moment in the scene; thus in a minute they would advance the film by seven seconds, trying always to gauge what someone who was seeing that frame for the first time would see.) I do not think it too much to say that those first ten minutes are Oscar Best-Picture Caliber Work.
I hope for their families’ sakes that Chris and Phil did not commit the same amount of focused time to every stretch of the movie that they committed to the beginning. But they are both fully crazed workaholics. And when you are spending $1.5 million per minute making the film, adding in nine of your minutes to make sure that viewer eyes see the film in the best way possible does not seem so much.
Not just stars, spectacle and effects, but fanatical attention to how a first-time viewer experiences each frame. I sometimes wonder if Phil Lord and Chris Miller are very special in Hollywood these days because they came up through animation. Thus where other people, conscious of other demands on busy people’s lives, would tend to say “that’s a wrap”, they tend to say: “I wonder what it would look like if…? Let’s do another very different take, and then compare them to see”. And they tend to expect others working on their movies to take the same attitude.
And it works: who else would have taken a concept for a two-hour toy commercial and turned it into a genuine work of art and culture, and in the process include the only Aristophanes shout-out I have seen on the big screen in a generation.