Known for his gritty New York stories about family (“We Own The Night,” “The Yards“) filmmaker James Gray, has been seemingly getting further and further away from those roots in recent years. While the prescient “The Immigrant” (2013) is set in New York, it was a minor-keyed period piece set in the early 1920s. Similarly, the delicate and intimate “The Lost City of Z” took him as far away from the five boroughs as he’d ever been, across the pond to England and then suffocating in the jungles of the Amazon. His latest movie, the epic space drama, “Ad Astra,” starring Brad Pitt, takes another bold step into the far reaches of outer space and Gray’s comfort zone, superficially.
But for all its scale, size, budget, and scope, James Gray has made a James Gray movie—a thoughtful, meditative odyssey about a man, his greatest fears, vulnerabilities, and self-discoveries (that yes, contains a lot of thrills and horrors too). “Ad Astra” centers on Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), a kind of extraordinary, special forces astronaut. But he’s good at the superhuman stuff—keeping his heart rate down in the middle of chaos and piloting space ships cooly under duress. The human stuff, keeping down a relationship, communicating and loving people, not so much.
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“Ad Astra” centers on a great mission. When mysterious solar flare menace the Earth and start disrupting the planet, McBride is set to the Moon, then Mars, then Neptune, to uncover the truth about his missing father and a doomed expedition that now, 30 years later, threatens the very existence of humanity.
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Yet, as far as Gray seems to be moving away from his roots— like the protagonist of the movie who has to travel to the unforgiving, hostile outer edges of the solar system to find his humanity—”Ad Astra” is in many ways a homecoming of all the themes of family, fathers and sons, and notions of melodrama that the fine director confronts in almost all his work.
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Using the Trojan horse of genre, the Kubrick-ian outer-space film, Gray crafts a movie that is his most ambitious to date, but just as intimate and human, this time, also hopeful and deconstructing the myth of the American hero and what that means for American masculinity. It’s a terrific thoughtful film that doesn’t sacrifice insight for entertainment or thrills for thoughtfulness which is kind of its own most special effect and magic trick. It’s also one of Brad Pitt’s most soulful and restrained performances ever.
You can read my review of “Ad Astra” here. I sat down with Gray over dinner earlier this week before the film’s opening weekend release.
You’ve worked with relatively big-named actors before, but Brad Pitt is something else. He’s a movie star.
Oh god, entirely. It’s like hanging out with one of the Beatles. I was just with him in Washington D.C. Dude got fucking mobbed, and this was in the Washington Post building! He could not take three steps when we did not go in the back. It was a fucking disaster.
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But he’s seemingly down to earth and normal, or as normal as one can be despite it all.
Yes, I love him, and he’s great guy, but I’m not sure he’s able to leave his house like you and I. I had my birthday in a restaurant in a mall in L.A., and he came, and he joked, “I want you to know how much I love you because I’m at a mall in public,” but it was true. About an hour in we had to leave because someone because it became a mob scene. It can be a little weird.
You guys had almost worked together several times a few years back, “The Gray Man,” the original version of “Lost City Of Z.” I take it he was an admirer of your work.
Yes, but way before then. I’ve known him since 1995. He and Gwyneth Paltrow saw “Little Odessa,” at Sundance. He really responded to it, and he called me out of the blue, which is what he does. And it was little strange to receive that phone call at that time during the height of his fame, but welcome, obviously.
He produced “Lost City Of Z,” as you know, which was a wonderful experience, and he said, “What do you want to do next?” I gave him the script, and he said, “I want to do it.” The timing too. I think the timing was right also artistically— if I used that dirty word— because he was ready to do something where he was very vulnerable. I think his work here is beautiful and I think that’s probably because he was ready emotionally [editor’s note: Gray never says it, but I really took it like he was implying the fallout of his divorce and what that did to his family]. He’s a very, very fine actor and very underrated. It’s weird; in some sense, his beauty is a curse because people don’t see the vulnerability right off the bat. He has an excellent reputation as an actor now, but I think it took time for that to coalesce.
What’s it like working with him?
He’s very similar to Joaquin Phoenix in the way they work, which surprised me. He’s extremely intelligent, extremely gifted as an actor, on a very, very high level. I think he’s great, very vulnerable; it’s very subtle, very restrained work. I have absolutely no idea what the wider world will think of the movie and that subtle performance, but in some sense, I don’t really care because I know what he did and I loved it.
I honestly think it really works and the restraint pulls you in closer to trying to figure out who he is.
Put it this way; if it doesn’t work, it’s my fault, not his. It’s not a showy performance, there’s no yelling in every scene, so maybe, maybe that will confuse people. Maybe not. Who knows? But he’s made himself so naked and vulnerable in the movie— you have to be grateful of an actor who is willing to do that, especially a movie star.
On the surface, “Ad Astra” is an immense space epic, very different for you. But when you get to the heart of it, under the hood, the themes, emotions. It’s kind of hard to escape yourself even with the Trojan Horse of genre.
Well, what you really want, is the ability, freedom, the good fortune to keep making the same movie over and over again in a different way. It’s peculiar because sometimes I think it’s an issue of style because the themes— you can’t hide from who you are. What’s different here is the style and genre.
When you look at a movie by Stanley Kubrick or Federico Fellini, you know who it is. Look at a film by any director we all love and the signs are right there, and it’s really all you can hope for as a filmmaker, that recognition. Is “The Wolf of Wall Street” really that different from “Goodfellas“? I can tell who made it: the same guy. So you aspire to that because it means that you’re being honest and being yourself and there’s only one of you. You do the best you can to reveal that part of yourself.
You’re right, that this has the trappings of a big Hollywood movie—but actually in Hollywood terms, as insane as it sounds, it’s really quite modestly budgeted. These movies cost $400 million today!