Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser took time out of shooting Sam Mendes’ The Beatles films to reflect on how he and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller crafted the visuals for summer box office hit Project Hail Mary.
Fraser spoke to Deadline during the ToruńCamerimage Film Festival and said that working with Lord and Miller had been a long time in the making.
“I’ve known Phil and Christopher for a while in passing but we hadn’t worked together yet until this film,” he said. “What I love about them is that there is definitely a thread that runs through their films but genre-wise, they are completely different in everything they do. They are like these savants that just keep flicking between different formats and ratios and stories but there is an underlying theme in their work. What I think is beautiful about their work is that we all grew up on the same films and he same cartoons and we are all influenced by the same series of things.”
Fraser noted that pop culture references from the 1980s featured heavily in the discussions about how to portray the look of the Ryan Gosling starrer and he specifically noted Lord’s mention of Scooby-Doo when they discussed conveying the story’s transitions from space to Earth.
“It gave me the idea in my head about the Scooby-Doo transition of the wobbly lines when there was a flashback,” he says. “I knew exactly what he was talking about. I also knew that in no way, shape or form would any film that we all contribute to have wobbly lines, and he said the same thing. So, then everything became a translation of how we do what we felt in the 1980s from films like E.T. or cartoons from pop culture. How do we translate that into what we’re creating now as filmmakers.”
To achieve this look, Fraser, whose credits also include the first two instalments of Dune and The Batman, said he shot with a mis-timed shutter to create image streaking when transitioning the scenes.
Project Hail Mary is an Amazon MGM film, which sees Ryan Gosling play a science teacher who wakes up in a spaceship light years away only to discover he is humanity’s sole hope to save Earth from a sun-dimming parasite. The film, which is based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, splits across two alternating timelines – present-day space and flashbacks on Earth.
Fraser outlined the reasoning behind making the space scenes feel a “bit cooler” and the Earth scenes “a bit warmer.”
“It was a fine balance to strike because you could absolutely go on a trope of space being cold and fluorescent lit and all kind of sci-fi,” he said. “And Earth is this thing that they are fighting for, and this is why he’s up there. So, you needed to be warm with the memories, and you need these things to be lovely memories.
“But, at the same time, the Earth is dying because the sun is dying and you don’t want to sit through two and a half to three hours of a film where you want to jump off a building. You really need to come out and enjoy his experience, and he needs to grow from the experience.”
The Australian DoP added that the opening scene, where Gosling’s character wakes up in space unaware of where he is, was crucial. “We specifically did not want that to feel like a space film,” he said. “He couldn’t wake up in a laboratory. I wanted him to wake up in a high-end hotel or what was effectively a high-end health retreat, so the audience is kind of discombobulated about where he is and what he is doing.
He continues: “There’s a CG shot, which we all designed, where the camera goes past revealing him as this tiny person in this little window [in the spaceship] and this is another pop culture reference where we referenced The Empire Strikes Back as there’s a scene at the end of that film where you’ve got these little figures in the window. We liked that idea that he’s on a journey going past.”
ToruńCamerimage takes place November 7-14, 2026.
