Every director has a story about the assembly cut that nearly broke them. For Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the directing duo behind The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, that story involves subjecting their filmmaker friends to a three-hour-and-forty-five-minute version of Project Hail Mary and receiving the kind of feedback that makes you question your entire career.
“Our first official test screening went great,” Miller explained on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “but we do a lot of earlier screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers.” This is standard practice for directors who want gut checks before showing their work to strangers. What isn’t standard is showing a cut that’s nearly four hours long to people you respect and expecting them to sit through it without staging an intervention.
The film, based on Andy Weir’s novel about a scientist who wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia and a mission to save Earth from a dying sun, was always going to be massive in scope. It involves space travel, alien contact, and enough science to fill several textbooks. But massive in scope doesn’t have to mean massive in runtime, and Lord and Miller learned this the hard way when their filmmaker friends delivered a unanimous verdict: “Get it way shorter.”
Lord described the experience with characteristic self-awareness: “You just don’t know how the scenes are going to land with an audience. We thought everything was charming, but some of those charming things didn’t land.” This is the eternal trap of filmmaking—the scenes that feel essential in the editing room often reveal themselves as indulgences when actual humans have to watch them. What plays as character development to the director plays as “when is something going to happen” to the audience.
The feedback, brutal as it was, made the editing process “really easy” according to Lord. Knowing exactly what wasn’t working allowed them to slash the runtime down to three hours, then slowly chip away until they reached the final theatrical length of approximately two and a half hours. The result is a film that has grossed over $100 million domestically and become Amazon MGM’s highest-grossing release ever, suggesting that the painful editing process was worth the creative agony.
What’s fascinating about Lord and Miller’s approach is their transparency about the process. Most directors pretend their films emerged fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s skull. Lord and Miller admit that they showed their friends a bloated mess and got called out for it. This honesty is refreshing in an industry that often treats filmmaking as a mystic art rather than a craft that requires feedback, iteration, and the humility to kill your darlings.
The nearly four-hour cut presumably contained extended versions of Ryan Gosling’s science explanations, more flashbacks to his life on Earth, and possibly additional scenes with the alien Rocky that tested the limits of audience patience. What remains is a tight, propulsive thriller that balances hard science with emotional resonance, proving that sometimes the best directing decision is knowing what to leave out.
Experience the final cut—see Project Hail Mary in theaters now and appreciate the editing that turned a four-hour epic into a two-and-a-half-hour masterpiece.
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