Puppets In Space! James Ortiz Talks About Bringing Project Hail Mary’s Rocky To Life.

There was a time, early in development for Project Hail Mary, when directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller briefly considered a splashier actor for the character of Rocky. The arachnidlike rock alien who strikes up a friendship with the film’s human lead, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), would need an affecting voice to bring it to life. Given the directors’ history in animation, there’s another reality in which a seasoned sitcom star would lend a voice to Rocky. But that notion completely changed with the arrival of James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer and performer who’s created marvels in plays like The Woodsman (which he also directed) and a recent revival of Little Shop of Horrors.

From the moment Ortiz was cast, it was clear he was Rocky — but it took a meeting with creature designer Neal Scanlan — an alum of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and the master of many contemporary Star Wars creatures, including the Porgs — for all of that to truly crystallize. Scanlan’s own VFX house built the Rocky puppets we see in Project Hail Mary, all with Ortiz’s performance in mind. As Project Hail Mary launches, and Rocky begins to melt all our human hearts, Inverse caught up with Ortiz to get a sense of his journey and to learn why old-school tech like puppetry is still so crucial to making fantastical dreams come true.

Although hired by Lord and Miller to take on the role of Rocky, Ortiz reveals that the process between him and creature-creator Scanlan quickly became totally collaborative.

“I said to Neal: ‘Are you going to be giving me directions? I’m really down if that’s the case — you're a genius,’” Ortiz tells Inverse. “And he said, ‘No, no, no, James. Think of it like this: You’re Frank Oz, and I’m making Yoda for you.’” If we extend that analogy, that would make Scanlan the modern-day Stuart Freeborn, which is actually just about right.

“You’re Frank Oz, and I’m making Yoda for you.’”

Ortiz still marvels at that story (honestly, who wouldn’t?), but it’s easy to see why his performance became the secret weapon of Hail Mary. There’s a dry, deadpan wit to so many of his stories, but it’s cut with such an unmistakable warmth that he instantly feels like a friend. Perversely, it’s the kind of voice a software company would absolutely program into a language model; that Ortiz is also responsible for the physical nuances in Rocky’s personality makes his multi-dimensional performance all the more impressive.

As Rocky’s voice, the leader of the troupe who operated his puppet body, and the only human presence Ryan Gosling could play against for half the movie, Ortiz might be more than the heart of the film. He’s the glue that holds this entire odyssey together.

The Little Alien That Could

Project Hail Mary follows a hypothetical hard science-fiction concept: that of a new Ice Age threatening the world and humanity’s efforts to reignite the sun before total extinction. Gosling’s Ryland Grace is the only surviving spacefarer on his mission aboard the Hail Mary — but this story really begins when he encounters a friendly alien with the exact same problem.

The star warming Rocky’s home planet, Erid, is dying too, thanks to microorganisms called “Astrophage” living on its surface. If they can work together, he and Grace might both be able to save life as they respectively know it. But the excitement of first contact is complicated by the task of establishing communication. And since this story was originally penned by The Martian scribe Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary gets way into the weeds of speculative sci-fi.

Rocky’s language exists on an entirely different spectrum from our own. His species relies on echolocation to see and speak: It’s all closer to whale song than anything we can plausibly understand. As in Weir’s novel, Grace makes communication easier by building a program that translates Rocky’s speech into English. It’s a tedious process building the library of vocabulary, and a comical one in selecting Rocky’s new voice. But once Ortiz’s dulcet tones come through the speaker, it’s clear Grace’s efforts were well worth it.

It was a similar process behind the scenes, with everyone from Scanlan’s creature shop to the film’s set designers working to make Rocky as practical as possible. “Phil and Chris know something that I’ve known for a long time, which is that a puppet doesn’t work unless all the departments are working together to make sure that character works,” Ortiz says. He was involved in the creation of Rocky every step of the way, sitting in on production meetings to give input about the character’s design and even hand-picking the other puppeteers — or “Rocky-teers,” as Ortiz lovingly dubbed them — that’d help operate the alien.

“Rocky is a thin, thin fiberglass shell, and he doesn’t have many moving pieces,” Ortiz explains. “There was this incredible practical sculpt that … had been digitally rendered and scanned and then printed and then sort of cast in layers of fiberglass.”

The team meticulously painted every corner of the model to allow different dimensions to shine through, giving Rocky an almost skin-like consistency in areas of his body that were more transparent. The alien’s many arms broke off to feature different attachments depending on the scene: One was a “sculpted, closed fist so that he could just walk around,” and another ended with “three little animatronic fingers” that were actually strong enough to grab and move objects.

Multiple Rocky models were also built to serve different purposes throughout the shoot. Ortiz recommended Bunraku — a form of puppetry with origins in 17th century Japan — to create the most “rough and ready” version of Rocky. “It’s this incredible form of puppetry where there’s always a collective of puppeteers operating it at once, and it’s just rods,” Ortiz says of Bunraku. Naturally, he named this model the Bun-Rocky: “We could always just thrust that in a scene.”

Scanlan’s team also built a fully animatronic Rocky for scenes where the Rocky-teers couldn’t follow — like those that take place in the LED-paneled expanse Ortiz calls the “Don’t Go Crazy Room.” (Grace spends a lot of his time there to clear his head and enjoy simulations of Earth.) This animatronic, known as “The Waldo,” would receive movement instructions from yet “another Rocky that we would manhandle and operate offset, and it would mirror exactly what we were doing.”

Each model had tangible pros and cons for the Rocky-teers: “They would provide very different performances, so the exercise was trying to make them seem like the same guy because it was different. They have different weights and different materiality.”

Ortiz also had a kind of hamster ball that he’d use to “run through that space, screaming my lines and knocking into everything.”

Then there were the CGI shots, created by the visual effects house Framestore, which did whatever Ortiz and his fellow puppeteers couldn’t fully perform. They were most useful in the sequences where Rocky traipses through the Hail Mary in a see-through sphere, almost like a hamster ball, filled with the hot, dense atmosphere he needs to survive. Ortiz also had a kind of hamster ball that he’d occasionally use to “run through that space, screaming my lines and knocking into everything.” Otherwise, it’d be the Rocky-teers performing scenes to the best of their abilities with yet another Rocky model “covered in dots, and smaller, a little more flexible.” This puppet would be used to create a “reference table” for Framestore artists — though they ended up adding far more personality than Ortiz expected.

“Sometimes the puppet couldn’t do X, Y, and Z,” Ortiz says, but through endless rounds of tweaks and edits, the VFX artists found an ideal way to bring Rocky to life. “It was amazing to watch the CG Rocky, the animated Rocky, slowly circle back and become way more [us],” Ortiz adds. “You were just seeing the work that we did. There was always a handcraftedness, and there was always a deeply practical relationship to the whole thing.”

Practical Puppets FTW

Keeping Rocky as practical as possible was a major priority for the Hail Mary crew — not only because Lord and Miller have such a reverence for that way of filmmaking, but to give Gosling as much as possible to act against.

“I just wanted to keep the ball in the air because [Ryan] was doing a lot of hard stuff,” says Ortiz. “He was on a wire and upside down… and I know that he was feeling kind of crazy because he wants people to interact with, and he just didn’t have it.” The Frank Oz-Yoda analogy reoccurs here too: Mark Hamill faced challenges acting alone in The Empire Strikes Back, and he has noted many times that he couldn’t have done it without Frank Oz.

Providing something for Gosling to play off of was a priority.

Providing something for Gosling to play off of was a priority for Ortiz from the very beginning. “I made a promise to him on the first phone call I had with him: ‘Puppetry can be really technical. It can be really exacting and slow, but I’m going to promise you that we can always be improvisational together,’” he recalls. “He shouldn’t have to make up character choices for a faceless rock-boy who is maybe there or not there depending on the shot.”

Ortiz was always on set, either leading the Rocky-teers or feeding Gosling lines from a booth just a stone’s throw from the action. It was as thorough a system as it could have been, but the shared love of improvisation — from Lord and Miller as well as Gosling and Ortiz — presented yet more challenges for the puppet operators.

“Truthfully, we improvised so much,” Ortiz admits with a laugh. “Sometimes we did 40-minute takes, just going, ‘Try this. Try this…’ Phil and Chris made us wring out our ideas every day.”

“Puppetry is so exacting.”

Ortiz enjoyed that freedom to play, but it still took some work to build a shared body language that’d make Rocky’s improv look natural. “Puppetry is so exacting, especially group puppetry because you are oftentimes scoring when the breaths are. Like, ‘On this [breath] is when you’re going to take a step.’ It’s so granular, but we knew we wouldn’t really always have that. So we spent a lot of time just getting fluent and fluid with each other so that, if I went in a way, in the dialogue, down a path that we hadn’t planned — which would happen — we would be both following and leading each other. It was really, really special.”

Listening to Ortiz lay out this process so thoroughly, it’s easy to forget that Hail Mary was his first-ever film. It’s not something he takes for granted: “There’s so many times that we have a job where maybe only 30% of us is invited to work. Hail Mary was the first time in my career where 100% of me was invited to work every day. Me as sort of a sci-fi nerd, me as a cinephile, but also me as an improviser and a puppeteer and sort of a team leader.”

As much of a unicorn as this project is, there’s the hope that it won’t be the last of its ilk. Ortiz, at least, sees a pattern between Hail Mary and a general pendulum swing toward more optimistic storytelling.

“I shot this movie almost two years ago, and everything I was doing around that moment — and everything I’ve done since have sort of been circling a similar theme,” Ortiz says. “All the stuff that I was working on seems to be about the expansion of human goodness, the expansion of the human mind… I’ve continually been going, like, ‘What’s in the air?’”

Perhaps the uptick of real-world turmoil has us all turning toward greener pastures. Weir published his novel five years ago, but the idea of Earth rallying toward a shared goal — or a human and alien overcoming every physical difference to strike up such an intimate bond — couldn’t be timelier.

“We are craving stories about connection, about seeing past differences, and also things that are full of love and color,” adds Ortiz. “There’s a reason why those things have existed for such a long time, and that’s something that I’m going to try to keep chasing.”

Levity has gotten him this far, after all — and with some luck, that’s what will keep us all going.

Project Hail Mary opens in theaters March 20. Early screenings for Amazon Prime members begin March 16. Limited 70-millimeter screenings begin March 13.