Over the past decade, Brad Pitt has quietly become a go-to producer for vital independent cinema. With films like “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Moonlight,” “Okja,” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco“ to his credit, Pitt comes across as both thoughtful and intentional in the films—and filmmakers—he chooses to support. So it didn’t come as a surprise in 2016 to see Pitt’s name as a producer in “The Lost City of Z,” James Gray‘s sprawling and ambitious epic about one family’s lifelong obsession with the Amazon. Coming on the heels of Gray’s critically beloved “The Immigrant,” ‘Lost City’ seemed like exactly the sort of visionary filmmaker that Pitt would place in his orbit.
READ MORE: 2019 Venice Film Festival Preview: 15 Must-See Movies
But working with Pitt as a producer and working with Pitt as an actor are very different things, which is why when the time came to shoot “Ad Astra“ with Pitt as the lead, Gray went looking for a little outside help. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the writer-director admitted that he called David Fincher—who had previously directed Pitt in “Se7en,” “Fight Club,” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button“—to gain a little perspective on what it was like to work with Pitt in front of the camera. Gray did not share Fincher’s specific advice, but the “Ad Astra” director did offer his own take on Pitt’s presence.
“He is an unbelievably subtle actor in a way that I didn’t even anticipate,” Gray shared. “And he’s extremely intelligent, very shrewd, understands human behavior very well. In some sense, I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but Pitt is kind of an underrated actor. On a technical level, underrated. And it’s a pleasure to work with someone like that.” According to Gray, one of the best parts of working with Pitt is allowing the actor to do some of the substantial character work on his own. “The expression is he can fill it up, which means you give him some tidbits and he does the work,” Gray explained. “He thinks about it, you roll the camera, all of a sudden you can see the inner workings, the turmoil. It’s, I think, an incredible performance. It’s not showy at all. I have no idea what the world will think, but it is for my money great work.”
READ MORE: Read our full Venice Film Festival review of James Gray’s “Ad Astra”
Elsewhere in the interview, Gray opened up about the process of shooting his biggest-budget film to date. “You know, I have a lot of flaws and one of them is that I miscalculate degree of difficulty,” he said. While “The Lost City of Z” offered a variety of challenges for his production team, in hindsight, Gray admits that he appreciated having a preexisting physical space to inhabit. “I thought mistakenly that I was going to go into a soundstage and I would be in L.A. and it would be easier. And it was harder. It was harder than the jungle because you have to create the entire world. You can’t just look for a shot, point the camera. Everything has to be imagined.”
As for what audiences can expect with “Ad Astra”? Given the film’s impressive budget—the article notes that “Ad Astra” cost $80 million “before tax breaks,” a marked increase upon the reported $30 million budget of “The Lost City of Z”—Gray knew that he needed to bridge the gap between art and entertainment. “You can’t make an Ingmar Bergman movie,” the director told the Times. “You have to embrace what an audience will need as red meat, as a sugarcoating of the pill. And so you ask yourself, is it worth it to express yourself on this scale, but include red meat and some sugarcoated pill for the audience, or to say ‘No, no, I have no interest in communicating anything but precisely what it is I’m after,’ in which case, good, you’ve got no movie. And I would rather have a movie.”
Follow along with all our coverage from the 2019 Venice Film Festival here.
