Before Project Hail Mary became a 156-minute crowd-pleaser, it was a six-hour pile of scenes. Film editor Joel Negron, who cut the Ryan Gosling space adventure for directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, has laid out how that first assembly shrank, and the film’s long-cut story is circulating again among movie fans this weekend.
“The editor’s cut was about six hours long,” Negron said in a long interview on the Art of the Cut editing series. He builds everything first on purpose, he explained, so nothing has to be rebuilt later if the directors want to revisit it.
From six hours to 156 minutes
The next stage was the version that has become a fan legend. “We ended up with a 3:45 cut of the movie that we screened for test audiences,” Negron said. Viewers at those screenings kept saying two things, according to him: “They never get tired of Ryan,” and “Rocky is so lovable.”
The arithmetic shows how hard the trimming was. Six hours is 360 minutes. The released film runs 156 minutes, so roughly 57% of that first assembly never reached theaters. Even after the 225-minute test cut, another 69 minutes had to go.
Most of it did not vanish scene by scene. “Maybe two or three scenes got cut out of the movie. Most of them got shortened,” Negron said, adding that some sequences had run “3 or 4 times the length that you see them now in the movie.” Montages and jump cuts did much of the compressing.
He pushed back on the idea that editing means removing weak footage. “You’re cutting out a lot of good stuff,” he said.
Building Rocky in the cutting room
Rocky, the five-legged alien engineer, was a physical puppet run on set by James Ortiz and a team nicknamed the Rockyteers, who also gave him his voice. Miller has said the finished shots of Rocky are roughly half puppetry and half visual-effects animation, so the edit had to blend both.
Negron described the first meeting between Grace and Rocky as a scene that changed shape in the edit. The team tried making it scarier, he said, but it “didn’t really feel right,” so after the jump scare the scene softens and turns playful as Rocky shows Grace models of their ships.
The probe sequence over the planet Adrian had a nickname inside the edit suite. “We call that the fishing scene,” Negron said. For its most tense moments, the team stripped out both sound and music in places.
Even the karaoke moment with Sandra Hüller’s Eva Stratt was reworked. An early version stayed on Stratt and Grace looking at each other, but Negron said it played too much like a romance, so the cut moved back to the crew’s reactions.
The index cards and a football joke
Negron’s method is old-school. Every scene gets a printed card with a still and a short description, pinned on the wall in reel order, so the team can move flashbacks around and see the whole film at once. One early lesson from that wall: the story stayed on Earth too long, so space scenes were cut in earlier.
His favorite set story came from Shepperton Studios in England, where the film was shot. He asked British crew members what a Hail Mary was. “It’s a prayer,” one replied, and Negron had to explain the last-ditch pass from American football.
Fans who enjoy big-screen versions can compare notes with our story on Star Wars returning to cinemas in IMAX 70mm, or browse more film and TV coverage in our Entertainment section.
The released cut grossed $684.6 million worldwide, and the film’s next stop on the awards calendar is the Gotham Awards on November 30, where it is up for the Audience Award.
Further reading
Image: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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