So there was a Los Angeles Times piece that suggested the ending had changed. Were there significant changes to the film in the editing room?
No, not really. What’s missing from the film now, which I was happy to cut—I went a little bit rogue in the Mars section where he encountered very surreal stuff that was about a scene and a half long and another four minutes. That was removed, but you can imagine that structure of this linear journey. You can’t really do anything radical to the structure. With three weeks left, my wonderful visual effects supervisor told me that I had 306 shots left to approve, like that was a good thing.
Oh, maybe I’m mistaken about the end? I thought I had read something [*Very specific spoilers about the ending of the movie here*]
Oh, no, you’re talking about something totally different—about literally the last 40 seconds. The film was supposed to end where he gets let out of the capsule. That was the way I wanted to end it initially, but it didn’t quite land as a transcendence for Roy. It’s still in the movie exactly where the ending is and for the same exact length. We just added that brief coda with Liv Tyler. This kind of film is very much a collaboration and which doesn’t mean that the film is not mine. But that last beat was very much a collaborative thing because Brad and I wanted to make sure that it was clear that he had been able to function in a world and had moved on a little bit. But the scene with Brad leaving the capsule, which was my own personal preference, which—again, it’s still in the movie anyway— was really open-ended.
Too open-ended for some?
You just didn’t know what the hell happened to him. But that’s the only thing. The rest of the movie is pretty much what it was. We did shoot the post capsule thing at the end as an additional scene. We had to wait for Brad to grow his beard out. So that wasn’t done in principle photography, much later because we had to wait for Quentin Tarantino‘s movie to finish. We did that and a small thing with Tommy Lee Jones where he’s getting dressed. That was all shot at the same time, but it’s part of the design to leave room for pick-ups and whatnot.
How was working with Tommy Lee Jones? He sounds kind of terrifying.
I loved him. I loved working with him. I’d heard all these things, he’s tough, he’s terrifying. And? The guy is crazily committed, knows every single line, and is a total pro. I also really liked him personally. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but he’s brilliant, and I was tremendously fond of him.
There’s something really melancholy, tragic, and devastating about his scenes with Brad. Finally meeting your father as an adult and….
I thin, he’s fantastic. When he says, [Gray adopts Jones’ Southern twang], “I admire your courage coming all this way — following me here. We should have gone together. We should keep going together.” You know, he’s both mentally ill, and yet you can see the idea that he doesn’t want to give up this Don Quixote-Can dream. And I love what he did. I loved him.
Yeah, that could go down as one of the most underrated face-offs in movies this year. It’s really subtle and emotional.
And Brad, he’s fabulous. He doesn’t say anything. He only says one thing at the end. “We’re all, we’ve got, we got to go back home.”
And that’s really the movie.
It’s got to mean something. Everything else is fantasy. What, you’re going to set up the life on Goldilocks Planet 79AU3? That’s too far; we’re never going to get there. We are all we have; this is it, this is all we have. I don’t think that’s pessimistic.
Nor is it dystopian like most of these movies.
Well, we were very obsessed with not doing that. We didn’t want to do a dystopian or utopian movie. Some, there’s been some significant progress, but in the end, this is what matters.
I think simplicity matters too. There’s something about simplifying that really comes into perspective—and it’s such a cliche, but it’s true—when you have children. There’s a famous quote—which I can’t remember, but I’m going to try and paraphrase— from the Japanese artist Hokusai, which is something like, ‘when I’m 120 years old, may God grant me the ability to find the beauty and just the leaf,’ and I’m obsessed with this notion right now because my son will show me a grasshopper or a praying mantis. He loves bugs, and there’s beauty in that. I would have been bored 20 years ago. But the idea has become everything.
By the way, are you going to the New York Film Festival?
I am.
I’m very excited about Marty [Scorsese’s “The Irishman”]. I’m predicting masterpiece. I want to come here to see it badly, but at this point, I don’t think I can.
If we want to come full circle to New York or Queens, it sounds like you’re coming home with your new film, the one about your high school experience and it has some allusions to the Trump dynasty in New York I believe?
When I was in public school, in the late 1970s, I was in a cross-grade, because the system had no money. I was in second and third cross-grade, and then fourth grade was its own grade. Anyhow, my parents decided to get my brother and me to a private school, and that changed my life, but it also made me aware of class, race, gender and anti-Semitism, and all these things I wasn’t aware of in public school. Because in public school—this is Queens—half the class was Jamaican, a quarter of the class was Asian and a quarter of the class Jewish. It was a very weird mix, but helpful because I didn’t think anything of it that aspect of American life. But in private school, it was all white. I’ve very privileged, that experience taught me that, and it taught me about that world. And Fred Trump was the head of the board of trustees of the school and a symbol of that. I had been looking at [Federico Fellini’s] “Amarcord,” and Mussolini’s a potent force hanging over that movie. All these people can act silly [in that movie, and obsess over the peacock and throw snowballs and all that, but we know World War II is coming and the country is going to be devastated.
And that’s what lends it, its power because you took all these people that are whistling and enjoying merriment and all these terrible things are happening—the storm cloud are gathering. So, I feel like that’s what I’m after: the gathering storm clouds of the Trump administration, what we face as a country, having to confront a real ugliness about class and race. It’s about my transition from public school to private, and we’ll see if it makes any sense. We’ll see if it’s my next movie, I still don’t know the answer to that.
It sounds like an intimate, very personal story, with some grander moral texture underneath.
Everything’s a risk, and there’s no art without risk.
“Ad Astra” is in theaters nationwide now. This interview and its first part have been edited for length and clarity.
