GUYS GUYS GUYS IM WATCHING THE MAKING OF PROJECT HAIL MARY AND ONE OF THE PEOPLE COMMENTING ON THE PROCESS JUST SAID "Project Hail Mary is answering the question.... can adult men make friends if the universe is depending on it" THATS FUCKING INSANE AND HILARIOUS THAT THEY ACKNOWLEDGED THE SELF-IMPOSED MALE ISOLATION ELEMENTS DIRECTLY IN AN OFFICIAL INTERVEIW. IM GOING TO FUCKING DIE
URL to timestamp for those who wish to see for themselves: https://youtu.be/EeUyot032b0?t=196
Elaborating more on why I find this so striking: so we all know that Weir kind of sucks. And I think most of us are aware that the PHM novel was intended as Weir's self-insert story, about a man who is tragically misunderstood and betrayed by an Earth which doesn't value him, and makes an idealised male friendship among the stars and leaves Earth forever. And how, due to Weir's complete lack of self-awareness, the story instead becomes the story of a man who is chronically unable to recognise when people value him, and deliberately self-isolates and shields himself from his own lonliness with logic. I think we all know this.
But building on this, the two directors of the PHM movie saw this read, prioritised it over Weir's intended read as both more accurate and more compelling, and built the movie around that read as a basis. Particularly striking to me is a moment from an interveiw about the movie's score. One of the directors says that, intially, they tried ominous and scary music to accompany Grace waking up on the ship, but it didn't feel right. So they instead alighted on a piece of music that said, in the director's words: "Poor thing. He's going to be alright. He just doesn't know it yet."
This quote is hugely important to me, because it underpins the dialogue between the book and the movie, and can almost be interpreted as a direct dialogue between Weir and the directors. Weir writes a book that says: here is the world. It rejects me, and I don't feel valued. I deserve better than this, and instead of examining why, I choose to externalise the blame. And the director, another man, but one with a more healthy mindset, looks at this worldveiw that Weir has presented to him and says "poor thing. you're going to be alright."
So this is why saying "Project Hail Mary is answering the question…. can adult men make friends if the universe is depending on it" is funny to me: because it's acknowledging that dialogue between them in a very explicit way that leaves little room for interpretation. It's acknowledging that this is about adult men having issues with making friends and forging emotional connections, due to their own self-imposed limitations, and thereby also acknowledging that Weir has these limitations. It's very bold. And the funniest thing is, for it to have made it into the cut, it must've flown completely over Weir's head.
#YEAH. good addition. i dont think its an INTENTIONAL self-insert so much as he feels most comfortable writing one kind of guy. which just #happens to be the exact type of rationalist american stem guy that maps onto his own social background. #which ironically means the way he constructs grace as a character is. as you point out. just as ignorant as grace himself is #in-universe. #he wants to have his cake and eat it too. ie grace has to be the Specialist Guy who couldve revolutionized his field or w/e. but he has to #appear sympathetic & relatsble to the reader so he cant think of himself that way. so what happens is you get a character who is seemingly #deliberately obtuse & even disinterested about the people and events unfolding around him. because you have to resolve that tension somehow. #and what happened with the adaptation is. like you say. they honed in on that emotional dissonance and that tension and correctly #identified it as the emotional core of grace as a character. and extrapolated from that a version of the character as seen through EXTERNAL #narration rather than the very narrow view we get through the internal focalisation in the book. #and while weir crafted a compelling story overall. the creatives involved with the movie are MUCH more aware of its emotional arc and what #makes grace compelling in the first place. which IS his distorted self-image and social alienation. they took the ugly guts of the book and #spelled them out in bright neon colors. this is a LONELY loser who desperately longs for yet cannot allow himself human connection. lets #put him on a space ship and make the fate of two whole worlds depend on his ability to form a special bond with a rock spider. #INSTANT BOX OFFICE HIT. #sorry eru i did not intend to word vomit in your tags. you already spelled it out perfectly. #dont know why i did that. #also i havent consumed much promotional material and i refuse to listen to weir talk but afaik. he HAS complained #about some of the choices made by the filmmakers. or at least expressed doubt. unsure if that pertained to characterization though. <- prev
