In “Project Hail Mary,” Ryan Gosling shares the screen with an adorably high-strung alien called Rocky, because of his rocklike body. Rocky’s jittery personality is one of his most charming traits, but it was initially based on a mistake by the lead puppeteer and voice actor, James Ortiz.
After reading Andy Weir’s novel on which the movie is based, Ortiz thought that time on Rocky’s planet, Erid, moves faster than time on Earth.
“As an actor, I went, ‘Oh my God, what a great piece of information, that’s his internal metronome, that’s his heart, his little hummingbird energy,’” Ortiz said in a video interview. He shot for months with that concept in mind. Only later did Ortiz hear Weir on set saying that an Eridian second is actually 2.5 seconds slower than an Earth second. Oritz must have misread.
“At some point, I went, ‘Well, Andy, he’s just going to be anxious, OK?’”
Rocky’s anxiety has proved quite captivating. Gosling might be the celebrity draw for “Project Hail Mary,” which grossed more than $80 million in its first weekend of release, but Rocky is its breakout star. In the film, Ryland Grace (Gosling), a science teacher stranded in space trying to figure out why the Earth’s sun is dimming, meets Rocky, another lone traveler. He quickly realizes that the alien has the same goal: To save his planet from the microbe destroying its star.
On the page, Rocky’s skin is “brownish-black rock.” He’s about the size of a Labrador with five legs and a carapace that’s “roughly a pentagon.” He doesn’t have a face. Onscreen, he’s positively cute and brought to life through a combination of puppetry and visual effects.
“Toward the end of the movie, like when we were watching sequences, all of us said the same thing, ‘I can’t remember if this is puppet or CG,’” the visual effects production supervisor Paul Lambert said. “It was just a testament to the two worlds coming together.”
The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were adamant that a practical version of Rocky, maneuvered by a performer, would be on set, allowing Gosling to riff with a physical creature and the cameras to capture something that was really there. In designing him, Lord and Miller tried to hew as closely to Weir’s text as possible, with some creative additions.
They gave Rocky Eridian versions of tattoos carved on his body, imagining specific meanings for each. One is a family crest, another is like a wedding band and a third is a ruler because he’s an engineer.
“We thought, ‘Let’s give the audience as much help imagining a person in this rock face, kind of the way you look at what was formerly the Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire before it fell down,’” Lord said. “You could imagine a face there. We kept saying, ‘This side is the grouchy side, this one is the open side.’”
The directors, who are known for their work on animated films like “The Lego Movie” (2014), did what Lord called “chicken-scratch sketches” that they would give to the creature effects creative supervisor Neal Scanlan, a “Star Wars” veteran who won an Oscar for his work on “Babe” (1995).
From there, Scanlan and his shop of concept artists tested various iterations of Rocky. When the designer, Stefano Cordoli built a Rocky out of polystyrene based on their conversations late one afternoon, Scanlan realized they had hit upon what was going to work.
“You responded to him emotionally like you do to something that you really love in an animal,” Scanlan said.
But before the Rocky puppet was even finished, Lord and Miller set about hiring a Rocky puppeteer. They put performers through extensive auditions to discover who would be the best scene partner for Gosling. That ended up being Ortiz, an Obie Award winner who designed the cow Milky White for the recent Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”
“He had this amazing chemistry with Ryan in the read and he had this confidence to put Ryan on his heels,” Miller said. “You could just see that he was Rocky from the beginning.”
Ortiz had built a small version of Rocky for the audition process, and once he was hired, Scanlan invited him to collaborate on the final design. Ortiz said Scanlan told him, “Think of it this way, I’m going to treat you like you’re Frank Oz, but our job is to make Yoda for you.”
During filming, Ortiz had a crew of puppeteers, which he called the Rocketeers, who would be on call to help him with Rocky’s legs. Ortiz was always in charge of Rocky’s main body. “I’m basically almost hugging him to my chest,” Ortiz said. The set of Grace’s ship, the Hail Mary, had holes in the floor so the puppeteers could hide. Scanlan’s team also built an animatronic Rocky that was used throughout production.
Ortiz instructed his team to avoid making Rocky move too much like a spider or a crab in a way that would seem too “eerie.” Lord and Miller didn’t want Rocky to come off as too “witchy,” like a Louise Bourgeois sculpture come to life. Instead, Ortiz drew inspiration from TikTok videos of baby owls.
“This sort of birdlike movement of the face became the language for how to communicate his feelings,” Ortiz said.
Body language is one thing; Rocky’s voice is another. In the book, he communicates in musical tones that Grace eventually understands. Miller said he, Lord and the screenwriter Drew Goddard considered subtitles or the kind of communication that Han Solo and Chewbacca use. But they ultimately decided that it would be easy for Grace to autotranslate Rocky’s chirps into English through his laptop, where he is already creating a dictionary of the Eridian language.
“We experimented with different voices, but what ended up being most successful was basically James being James,” Miller said. Ortiz, meanwhile, added in a bit of Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit” (1986) and Tik-Tok from “Return to Oz” (1985).
Even when a shot required Rocky to be entirely digitally animated, Ortiz was there to shape the performance. For instance, when Rocky rolls around in a transparent ball to protect himself from the atmosphere of Grace’s ship, Ortiz would deliver his lines while pushing around an empty ball as if driving a lawn mower.
When it came time to animate Rocky, the task fell largely to Arslan Elver of the effects company Framestore, which was responsible for Rocket Raccoon in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Miller said Elver was “also like the spirit of Rocky.”
“One thing we noticed very quickly is actually his emotion comes through motion,” Elver said of his faceless muse.
The animators found that they could make him seem really happy by using all of his limbs. He comforts himself with his claw-like fingers. For a crucial moment where Rocky does jazz hands, Elver presented Miller and Lord with 120 poses from which to choose.
Still, the directors were careful not to make him too cute. And that also went for his personality, which is a little tougher than your average adorable sidekick. Ortiz, for his part, tried to play Rocky very seriously.
“He doesn’t understand that a joke is happening,” Ortiz said. That, plus his impatience is what makes him endearing. “He’s sort of guileless despite the fact that he is so smart and so capable.”
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