‘Project Hail Mary’ Cinematographer Greig Fraser on How Filmed the Tunnel Scene

Cinematographer Greig Fraser counts “The Batman,” “Dune” and “Rogue One” among his credits. But his latest film, “Project Hail Mary,” is what he calls his “most challenging film I’ve ever done, by far.”

“Project Hail Mary” is based on Andy Weir’s book of the same name and directed by  Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a science teacher and former molecular biologist who is recruited by the government to help save the Earth from dying. Ryland then unwittingly finds himself on an interstellar mission that includes meeting an alien, Rocky.

The film shatters stereotypical visuals of space, veering away from cold and desaturated colors, and using warmer tones such as orange.

In one scene, as Grace walks through the tunnel to first meet Rocky, Fraser explains that the tunnel itself went through an evolution. “We had to discover what this thing was,” he says, referring to xenonite, which is the material the story says it was made from. “The sun has to come through it, but that provided a couple of challenges because this tunnel was 70 feet long.

Speaking with Variety for Inside the Frame via Zoom from London where he’s shooting The Beatles biopic movies with Sam Mendes, Fraser discussed one of his biggest challenges: How was he going to light the tunnel? “In the past, what people have done to move light is they put a light on a frame and moved it over a window or through something, but we had to have the entire tunnel being hit by the sun.”

“The tunnel had a bit of scariness to it at the beginning. It had to feel a little bit like he was going into a well,” he says. Fraser says he took a lot of inspiration from deep-sea submersible footage where they’re in pitch black, and they’re diving into the darkness, lit purely by the lights from the ship or from a headlamp.

Fraser and his team ended up building lighting rigs using old tungsten lights — a lot of them. “We physically couldn’t get enough LEDs to do that. They’re all old school tungsten lights, and we pixel-mapped them, so it meant that the sun can rotate around in any sort of configuration that we want.”

As for the multi-colored flare that appears throughout, Fraser reveals, “I found this beautiful filter online, on Amazon. It’s a rainbow filter, and it causes these beautiful rainbow streaks to the highlights, and that became a theme throughout the film.”

Once he had figured out how he would light the sun and the tunnel, Fraser also toyed with the idea of “changing the lenses to squeeze vertically rather than horizontally.” He explains, “What we did is we shot with an Alexa 65, which is already a wide screen sensor, but we squeezed it the other way. We squeezed it so that it went taller, for our film, it seemed perfect, because what it meant is that all the flares went vertically rather than horizontally.”

Everything required a close collaboration with the film’s production designer, Charlie Wood. “We worked closely with Charlie to make sure that the finish on the inside of the tunnel allowed enough light through, but not so much light through that it made it look transparent. It was a really fine balance. We did a lot of testing, because too much black finish means that you don’t see light through it, and not enough black finish means that it looks like plastic.”

As for his camera choice, Fraser knew the film was going to have an Imax release. “We looked very carefully at the options of shooting with an Imax camera and shooting different formats,” he says. His visual references were “films from the ’70s and ‘80s. I kept using ‘Solaris,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ as a visual reference for how the film should look.”

It was agreed that Lord and Miller wanted an analog patina. “I think it comes from us growing up with films like ‘E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ where there is definitely a lack of digital clarity to what the images are with those films. So we needed to do the same thing here, because it just felt more human to be more analog.”

He adds that the Alexa 65 turned out to be the perfect camera because “If we shoot Imax, we’ve got three-minute rolls. It’s loud, which might be OK, and if Ryan’s in a helmet, we might be able to get rid of the sounds, but it won’t give us the film that we’re after if we use those particular devices.”

Once Fraser was set on his camera, there were still challenges to overcome. Rocky could only be front-lit; Rocky couldn’t emanate any light; it all had to come from the sun.

“If you talk to any DP, you’ll know that is what we have, we wake up in cold sweats,” he jokes. “Added to that, not only do we light this character with the front light, we light a character with a front light with no face, that looks like a rock, that looks like a spider.”

As adorable as audiences have found Rocky, Fraser had no skin tone or facial personality to work with. He said, “The challenges were compounded. It was front lighting a rock with no face that emoted just through puppetry.” Fraser concludes, “It wasn’t just a challenge. It was a challenge on a challenge, on top of a challenge, under a challenge, through a challenge.”