Daniel Pemberton Wanted the ‘Project Hail Mary’ Score to Do Something AI Wouldn’t (or Couldn’t) Think Of

On the wall of film composer Daniel Pemberton’s studio in London is a row of stringed instruments: two electric guitars, an electric bass, dobro, and mandolin. A visitor might wonder if they represented the roots of his music, which has made him a highly regarded creator of wildly diverse movie scores, most recently for the massive sci-fi hit Project Hail Mary.

His earliest musical experiments as a teen were actually in electronica during the 1990s, ultimately leading to his creating music for hundreds of TV shows, and launching a career in film, from 2015’s Steve Jobs to last year’s Eddington. In fact, he dismisses his own guitar-playing skills, even if he pulled off accompanying Mick Jagger for the growly opening credits of Apple TV’s “Slow Horses.”

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It says something of his extensive range as a music-creator, and why the likes of Ridley Scott, Guy Ritchie, and Aaron Sorkin have each worked with the composer multiple times. Among his other repeat collaborators are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, directors of Project Hail Mary, who recruited Pemberton for its eccentric, emotional score.

The epic science fiction film follows a lone astronaut named Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) into deep space on a mission to save the earth from an alien, parasitic micro-organism. He meets a different alien on a similar mission—a living rock-like creature that Grace nicknames “Rocky.” 

Lord and Miller, who worked with Pemberton as producers on the Spider-Verse films, turned to the composer for a soundtrack that was deeply dramatic, but also comic and weird. A lot of it was built on percussion and natural sounds: wooden blocks, hand claps, voices. Electronic instruments are also part of the mix, with some symphonic elements, while the dominant textures are mostly organic and obscure, created with glass harmonica, cristal baschet (an instrument made of glass rods and metal), and a squeaky water tap.

“There’s so much crazy stuff we did in this film,” recalls Pemberton, smiling broadly in a video call from London. “It is the only time I’ve gone into recording sessions where I have really been like, ‘I’m not sure this is going to work.’”

If all of that was a counter-intuitive choice for a space-faring film, Pemberton welcomed the challenge, while staying focused on the human element at the heart of the story. It’s not an accident, he notes, that Project Hail Mary is the top-grossing film of 2026 so far.

“One of the things that is exciting about how well this film’s gone down,” he says, “is I think there is a real desire for people to embrace science, competence, friendship, loyalty, knowledge, wonder—all kinds of words that feel like they’ve been sucked out of our own universes recently through social media and other things. This film reconnects them with that.”

This isn’t the first time you worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. What do you find compelling about them as filmmakers?

They don’t want to settle for the status quo. They don’t want to just do what’s been done before. They want to try every avenue and they want to push a film as far as it can go. And they’ll put so much detail into everything and so much care that it’s always exciting to work with them. I mean, it’s very tough and it’s a very long process. That can get quite exhausting, but everyone has a different way of making a movie and the end result turns out great. 

Rocky is not a normal creature, so the music must make an even bigger difference in making him relatable.

I remember taking this movie on and saying, “I’m doing a movie that has Ryan Gosling on his own in a spaceship for two hours talking to a puppet, which is a rock with no facial features.” [laughs] You have extra weight on your shoulders in that. The performances are fantastic, but you’ve got to add subtext and different emotional moments in what is quite an unusual cinematic scenario. 

You seem very comfortable working with a diverse range of sounds, from the electronic to the organic.

I sort of went from doing weird electronic music to start scoring TV shows. I did every single TV thing in the U.K. for a while, anything I could do, and I never knew what I was doing. So it taught me a lot by just pretending I could do things, and then I’m just constantly thrown in the deep end. I learned so much through that.

A lot of composers would have approached a film like this heavily with electronics, and this is obviously mostly organic.

There’s a lot of electronics in it, but I’m always trying to approach things like, “How do you make this different?” So while there are a lot of electronics in the score, they are electronics that are basically sample engines we are using to manipulate organic material. My favorite sampled instrument in this entire film is a squeaky tap. My friend has a big house in the countryside where I stayed over once. Because it’s an old house, it has really old piping, and I went to brush my teeth one evening, and the tap just made this horrendous noise. And I was like, “Oh my God, what is this? This is great.” So I pulled out my iPhone and recorded it.

There’ve been some epic science fiction film scores over the last 50-plus years. Was there anything in the past that you had in mind or that you played against when you were approaching this?

There’s a lot of fantastic sci-fi scores, and I’m conscious of that, but I’m also conscious of trying to ignore them. I’m conscious of not repeating what people have heard before, if I can. I always want to make experiences that are unexpected and surprising. The key to great cinema is giving people something new. If you think about all these great moments in 2001 to Close Encounters to Solaris, they were all surprising at the time, and then they get repeated and they lose their potency. It’s easy to repeat. It’s harder to create new—and it’s a lot more time consuming and challenging. You don’t always get it right. But that’s what we were all trying to do on this movie. If there’s a sincerity behind what you’re doing, then people hopefully connect with it. 

How did you first hear about this project?

I’ve worked with Phil and Chris a bunch of times before. We worked very closely on the Spider-Verse movies. One of the things we were all very aware of was we had to fly the flag for original filmmaking, and if we fell short, that would’ve been a real shame. And luckily, I don’t think we did. What’s exciting is just seeing how much that’s responded with people who have a desire for something different when they go into cinema. If you’re paying money and taking your time out to go to cinema, you deserve to really have something very unexpected and unique rather than just reheat a thing you’ve seen before. Sometimes it’s great to reheat the meal you’ve had a bunch of times before that you like, but I’m personally not interested in doing that. 

You’ve described before how the directors initially suggested using wooden blocks for the entire score.

Phil and Chris love crazy ideas. They always try and challenge me, and sometimes I’m like, “Okay, that’s great.” Or, other times, I’m like, “Eh, that’s not going to work.” [laughs] But what that did was lay down an idea that we could really push this in quite a far-out direction. And so that initial idea of just woodblocks would never really work for two hours on a film, but it’s like, “Well, how could you make it work? How could you make that idea kind of interesting?” And another big thing of that was human percussion. We wanted to do a lot of stuff for clapping and stomping. And we actually got a whole class of school kids to come in and play loads of percussion with just their feet and their hands and their bodies. 

Was the music you created for the film aimed at capturing a particular personality that went with the story?

There’s so many different spirits I’m trying to capture with this soundtrack. If you look at the sci-fi films that are seen as these grand benchmarks—whether 2001 or Interstellar—they don’t have to do comedy. Whereas I had to put comedy within this framework, and that’s a difficult balance as a composer to try and find a language that can deal with humor and lightness and friendship and intimacy, as well as dealing with awe and the big subjects of why are we here. How do you go from scoring the absolute wonder and majesty of the universe to, I’m having a joke with my friend like five minutes later?

Another thing I’m very conscious of, in this world where AI can sort of do anything, is, let’s do something that AI wouldn’t think of, or ever do. AI reheats things from the past. And what [we] are trying to do is create something new that gives people new experiences. All great art or great moments you have with art are to do with feeling something for the first time.

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