Greig Fraser says Project Hail Mary was harder to shoot than Dune or The Batman
The Oscar-winning Australian says Project Hail Mary beat Dune and The Batman for difficulty. The $200 million film, built around a puppet on tiny sets, has made $684.5 million worldwide.
Greig Fraser has shot Dune, The Batman, Rogue One and Zero Dark Thirty. The Australian cinematographer says none of them was as hard as Project Hail Mary.
Speaking at Deadline's Contenders London event alongside production designer Charles Wood, Fraser called the Ryan Gosling space film "the most complicated film I've shot". Every day, he said, was the most complicated day. The problem he kept coming back to was filming a puppet without a face, inside a rolling circular set, with no gravity, and then adding stairs.
The film he was describing has made $684.5 million worldwide.
Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a science teacher who wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As it comes back, he works out his mission: solve the mystery of a substance that is making the sun die out, and save everything on Earth. Along the way, an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.
A $200 million film built mostly for real
Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, opened in North America on March 20, 2026, and played for a long time. The Numbers' figures:
- Opening weekend: $80.5 million from 4,007 theaters.
- North America: $344.1 million.
- International: $340.4 million.
- Worldwide: $684.5 million, against a $200 million production budget, or 3.4 times its cost.
- Staying power: its North American total is 4.27 times its biggest weekend, an unusually long run for a blockbuster.
- Running time: 156 minutes.
Fraser and Wood both described a film that avoided visual effects wherever it could. Many of the sets were only eight to 10 feet in diameter, Wood said, so the camera was on everything, and everything in front of it had to feel real. The alien Rocky was largely a puppet, operated live on set. Wood admitted he had not realised when he joined the film that it would essentially all be live action.
Fraser said the logic ran all the way through the design. Nothing on the ship was there just to look good; every piece had a reason for how it operated, starting from the science, the way Weir's book is written. Wood's aim was simpler: to make the audience feel they were really on that ship with one man, heading into eternity.
Fraser accepted the comparison with E.T., another film remembered for practical creatures rather than computer graphics. Where VFX were used, he said, it was for a good reason.
Two details in the coverage don't hold up
The first is small. In Deadline's write-up, Wood is quoted saying "Greg's camera was on everything". The cinematographer's name is Greig.
The second is physics. Wood described the team meeting NASA astronauts, and one story stuck with him: an astronaut so overwhelmed by the sight of Earth that he cried, but his tears would not fall, leaving his view of the planet blurred. Deadline's account says the tears stayed put "due to gravity". It is the other way around. In orbit, astronauts are in free fall, and tears have no weight pulling them down off the eye. They stay because nothing makes them drop.
For a film whose designers say everything started from scientific honesty, it is a fitting slip to catch.
Who Greig Fraser is
- Born: October 3, 1975. He is Australian.
- Oscar: Best Cinematography for Dune (2021), presented in 2022.
- Other nominations: Lion (2016) and Dune: Part Two (2024).
- Lion: won him the American Society of Cinematographers award and the AACTA Award for Best Cinematography.
- Other credits: The Batman, The Mandalorian, Rogue One and The Creator.
- Early career: a 2003 AFI Awards nomination for the short film Cracker Bag.
Wood's credits include Spider-Man: Brand New Day and the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy films. Project Hail Mary's producers are Amy Pascal, Gosling, Lord, Miller, author Andy Weir, Aditya Sood and Rachel O'Connor. The cast includes Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub.
A sequel nobody told the cinematographer about
Andy Weir, who wrote the novel, has talked about writing another book connected to the story. Asked about a possible follow-up film at the London event, Fraser said it was the first he had heard of it.
What is still unknown
- Whether Weir's next book becomes a film. No sequel has been announced.
- Whether Fraser would return. He had not heard of it.
- How much of Rocky was digital. The team stresses the puppet; the exact split between puppetry and VFX has not been published.
The film that made $684.5 million was shot on sets ten feet wide, around a puppet. Its Oscar-winning cinematographer calls it the hardest job of his career.