Phil Lord and Chris Miller reflect on “Solo: A Star Wars Story”: “No matter how it turns out, they can’t take away what you’ve learned.”

Project Hail Mary directors reveal how getting fired from Star Wars affected their Ryan Gosling space movie

Phil Lord and Chris Miller reflect on "Solo: A Star Wars Story": "No matter how it turns out, they can't take away what you've learned."

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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March 20, 2026 4:48 p.m. ET

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Ryan Gosling in 'Project Hail Mary'; Alden Ehrenreich in 'Solo: A Star Wars Story'. Credit:

Jonathan Olley; Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired from the *Star Wars** *universe, but still ended up making a massive space adventure movie years later.

The filmmaking duo, who previously helmed *The LEGO Movie* and *21 Jump Street*, were removed from 2018's *Solo: A Star Wars Story* and replaced by Ron Howard midway through production. On Friday, they released *Project Hail Mary*, a sci-fi blockbuster starring Ryan Gosling that marks their first joint directorial movie since 2014's *22 Jump Street*.

In an interview with *The New York Times*, the duo reflected on how their *Solo* experience shaped their latest project.

"We made a lot of great relationships with crew members [on *Solo*] and a lot of them worked on this movie," Miller said. "Every time you make a movie you learn something."

Lord added, "No matter how it turns out, they can't take away what you've learned."

Ryan Gosling in 'Project Hail Mary'.

The filmmakers noted that working with effects artists on their *Star Wars *project helped them develop skills and relationships that led to *Project Hail Mary*'s rendering of Rocky, an alien creature made of rocks that forms a friendship with Gosling's protagonist.

"We met Neal Scanlan and the creature shop team that we worked with to make Rocky, for example," Miller said. "We had such a great experience with them, making these aliens and robots together. That experience made us very confident that we could get a lot of Rocky's performance through puppetry."

Lord also noted, "Sound department, costume department all came from the *Solo* crew."

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The filmmaking duo, who won Oscars for producing 2018's *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse*, previously commented on losing *Solo* in 2017, a year before the *Star Wars* spinoff movie hit theaters.

"We had the most incredible cast and crew and collaborators," Lord said at Vulture Festival in Los Angeles in June 2017.

"I think in terms of us leaving the project, I think everybody went in with really good intentions and our approach to making the movie was different than theirs," he added. "That was a really big gap to bridge, and it proved to be too big. Sometimes people break up, and it's really sad, and it's really disappointing, but it happens and we learned a lot from our collaborators and we're better filmmakers for it. We're really proud of the work we did on the movie and we wish everybody the best."

Phil Lord and Chris Miller in New York City on March 18, 2026.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty

Miller later discussed leaving *Solo* in an interview with KCRW's *The Business* in 2022.

"As negative as the ending of that was, and deeply misunderstood as I believe we felt, the lasting memory is of the great collaboration we had," the director said. "We shot 90 days on that movie. You can't take the experience away from us, you can't take away the pencil miles from us — a term we use in animation — and we had a very fruitful, creative time on that with all the departments and with one another, and we became better filmmakers for it."

He continued, "In a funny way, it isn't a debacle. It's actually just on the continuum of learning and becoming a great filmmaker."

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*Project Hail Mary* is now playing in theaters.

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