But this has got to be your most expensively made movie.
Oh, by far, by far. The problem is, you need the money for scale. Now scale is not critical. It’s the genius of someone like John Cassavetes who could make “A Woman Under The Influence” and the scale is vast. The scale is her soul. But that movie is done, it’s made, and it’s his. I’m just trying to work on another canvas, but I’m happy to say that I had the chance and I did it. Plus, I just turned 50 and if I’m not trying to do this thing now, what, I’m going to try it at 78? It doesn’t work like that. I could fail, I could fail terribly, but at least I’ll try.
I love the escaping-your-life, only-to-find-yourself thing going on here. Whether it’s James Gray, voyaging as far as possible from his gritty New York roots to space, but still making a James Gray movie, to Brad Pitt’s astronaut character who travels to the far ends of the galaxy to avoid his life but discovers so much about himself in the middle of nowhere.
Brad and I loved the contrast of that. We love the drama of going to the edge of the solar system to make the most intimate movie. You have to go to Neptune in order to understand the impact and power of human beings and home. Sometimes that contrast, that juxtaposition helps you with your story.
Solitude is a significant element and the inverse togetherness idea too. Are we alone in the universe, or are we not?
Yes. I say to you, “hey, I like being alone, going to the movies alone, eating dinner alone.” Okay, that’s fine, but if I put you in solitary confinement for 30 days, you start to lose your mind. The forced extreme forces a reassessment, and the truth is not the same thing. Sometimes you only realize things when you’re lacking them. Sometimes you can only understand your desires and cravings when you’re deprived of them So, you’re absolutely right. That was what we tried to pursue dramatically: that our hero says, I want to be alone, and then he has to face that. In actuality, faced with a lengthy trip by himself in a tiny spacecraft, having to confront the abandonment of his father, and then actually face him.
There’s a lot of these great dualities and paradoxes throughout. There’s a lot of nostalgia here, the American notion of the astronaut, that pioneer from a time in American hopefulness and aspiration…
Yes, reverence, the reverence of it all.
But, at the same time, you don’t just romanticize that bygone era of American exceptionalism, and you look at the downside of that masculinity and detachment.
Well, if you would make this movie with Wallace Shawn, for example, in the lead role. He’s a great actor, but there’s nothing to subvert. I mean, if you make a heroic astronaut movie starring Wallace Shawn, that’s the subversion. But what if you took the person who’s an iconic figure and you said, “yeah, you think he’s all at?” Well, he’s actually weak and emotionally fragile. The hard part is to be vulnerable. The rest of it— the ability to operate the spacecraft that he understood how to do— the personal stuff, maybe that’s really the impossible achievement. That, to us, was powerful.
That was the idea, how we felt that we could subvert the genre, subvert the expectations, subvert the notion of heroism and American heroism. Brad is so perfectly American, so Midwestern, grew up in Oklahoma, then Missouri. Take that idea and break it apart. It was very intentional on our part.
Right, you’re also stripping the myth from the man in a way, humanizing a so-called hero.
Let’s be honest here, Neil Armstrong made the single greatest achievement that any human being has ever done. The greatest achievement in the history of man. But he was pretty ill-equipped actually, to discuss the spiritual or metaphysical implications of his journey. Now it’s unfair of us to put that kind of pressure on him because he’s an astronaut, not a hero.
[mild spoilers in this next graph]
So, we thought that we would take that kind of person and do a deep dive on him if we could. It’s subversive because, in a sense, it becomes the anti-action movie. The guy is a flawed hero; he’s responsible for the deaths of that crew. His position is in doubt, but we also felt that that idea was very much in keeping with the [Joseph] Campbell-ian idea. The flawed hero that’s mythic. What’s not mythic, is the superhero when nothing bad can ever happen to him. There are no stakes. That’s why Superman is such a difficult hero for the comics.
Someone asked me when I saw the film: what’s it like? I said, boil down space travel: the awe of it, the terrifying horror and unknown qualities of space. Merge that beauty and terror, and that’s “Ad Astra”—and a course that fear also doubles for fear of the father and all the things he hasn’t addressed in his life.
Majesty and horror are flip sides to each other. One of the things that’s incredible about that kind of journey—undoubtedly true about the Apollo mission—was it was equal parts terror and gloriousness. The vision it took, the aspiration of it—that is an astonishment. And space is indifferent to our fate. It’s endless, we can’t understand the endlessness, and we’re not supposed to be there. It’s scary because in some ways it’s the closest idea we have to death. It’s endless, dark, and yet it’s also magnificent, and it’s the site of our greatest achievement. So, isn’t that good? That’s dramatic. You have the bitter, and the sweet, which I like to say is always the best for drama.
You also manage to put in a considerable homage to your boy Francis in the core narrative, by subverting the down-the-river journey of “Apocalypse Now,” only transporting the idea to space and turning it hopeful. You generally do tragedies.
I wanted it to be hopeful. I didn’t want it to be a downer. It’s the wrong thing to take from it. Without spoiling it, he transcends, and of course, that means so many things. And as you mention it, “Hearts Of Darkness” was very much on our minds. But it’s his actual father, not a surrogate father or a mythic father figure. And that sets up a whole new series of questions emotionally. Facing your father in this do-or-die situation is very different. So, you know, again, the subversion of expectations.
It’s perhaps self-indulgent, but my interview with James Gray was extremely long, so I’ll run another half this weekend. “Ad Astra” is in theaters nationwide now.
