James Gray emerges from a bathroom in a London hotel room with his face and hands dripping cold water. Surprised to see I’ve already been ushered in by a publicist, he explains that he’s been in Europe for a while, presenting Ad Astra, the film we’re here to discuss, and, following a sleepless night, is fighting to keep himself awake. He’d hoped splashing his face before our interview might help. “So, hello!” he says brightly, settling onto a sofa.
He hits his stride quickly and in no time is lucidly pondering the connection between himself as, “dare I use a dirty word, an artist”, and his films. “History and myth begin in the microcosm of the personal,” offers Gray. “You try to remove the wall between yourself and the work.”
One of his favourite filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, achieved this with his fierce exploration of masculinity, Raging Bull, he suggests, by way of illustration. “It looks like he took his self-destruction of the late 70s and he said, ‘Here’s what it is: I almost killed myself with everything I did.’”
Gray, who grew up in a Jewish family in Queens, New York, similarly infused his doom-laden, 1994 directorial debut, Little Odessa, with the pain he was carrying following his mother’s death from brain cancer. He developed the story for his fourth feature, Two Lovers, after tests before the birth of his first child revealed, to his “shock and embarassment”, that he was “positive for a whole host of genetic disorders [including Tay-Sachs and Gaucher’s disease] that I would have passed along to my children, if my wife had had them too.”
His next film, The Immigrant, was pulled from the experiences of his Jewish-Russian grandparents, while he was drawn to Percy Fawcett, the real-life protagonist of his most recent film, The Lost City of Z, because he empathised with his desire to “be part of the system and the system doesn’t necessarily want you.”
Made for $87 million, Gray’s mesmerising first foray into science fiction, Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt, is bigger and more superficially mainstream than any of these. He’d feared that the technical aspects of the filmmaking, including doing shots for the same scenes on two vertical and horizontal sets, two weeks apart, with Pitt hanging on wires for up to 15 hours a day (“He was a real trouper about it. He never complained to me once,” Gray laughs), and the “snail-like pace” of the process, would create the distance he “abhors”.
“You’d say, ‘What were we doing emotionally here?’... So I’m trying to break that wall down and there are all these other huge roadblocks that are put in your way. I found it a huge challenge.”
Even so, despite its scale, epic narrative (the original idea was to do The Odyssey from the point of view of Telemachus, son of Odysseus) and heavy use of special effects, Ad Astra is as achingly intimate, personal and human as anything in the director’s oeuvre.
At its heart, as in The Lost City of Z, is a son struggling to deal with his father’s legacy. Here, emotionally-repressed astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) goes on a mission to Neptune to bring back his scientist father (Tommy Lee Jones), who has apparently gone rogue while searching for aliens.
McBride’s journey into outer space also becomes an inner journey, as he tackles the wall he has built to protect himself from the hurt of being abandoned by his father when he was young.
The depth of feeling in the film is so strong, I ask Gray whether he was writing more as a father or as a son, momentarily stunning him into silence. “Wow, that’s a great question, dude. Maybe that’s the difference in the work. I used to come at it from a son’s perspective, and now it’s both.”
He has a daughter and two sons, aged 10, 12 and “about to be 14”, and “I want to eat them, that’s how much I love them.
“But I worry all the time about screwing that up. And in a way we always will. We’re going to make big mistakes. And I think what you kind of hope for is that your own child can look at you and say, ‘You know, Dad, you screwed that up’, and that you have the wisdom to say, ‘Yes I did. I’m sorry.’ It weighs very heavily on me this idea of being a father and whether or not I screw up the kids.”
Gray reveals that he’s concerned that he and his teenage son are too close, “because I worry that he’ll rely on me too much. I think it’s okay that he’s his own man. I don’t want him to have my opinion on movies. I don’t want a Xerox of me. If he disagrees with me, I would love it.”
You can feel these tensions in Ad Astra, and Gray confirms that his relationships with his children and his father informed the film. Unlike McBride, though, Gray isn’t estranged from his father, who’s still alive, and Jones isn’t playing his dad. But, “personal’s not the same thing as autobiographical, and what you’re trying to do is conjure a feeling and an emotion that you can relate to,” he says.
“I’m in debt to him in many ways. But, of course, it’s complex. It always is. And he’s an interesting guy. He grew up in a fairly hardscrabble circumstance in the 1930s in Brooklyn with his father as a plumber and an immigrant who spoke no English. And his own history is interesting, and I’m sure, unconsciously and consciously, he’s inculcated me through that filter. So that’s what I’ve tried to explore, really.”
Ultimately, the film is about human connection versus disconnection, making it apt for a time characterised by isolationism and the politics of hatred and division. Gray didn’t alter anything in his screenplay to reflect changes in the zeitgeist, and hadn’t thought about it as a critique of where we are. However, this isn’t to say he wasn’t affected by what’s happening:
“It’s a coincidence,” he says, “but it’s not. What happens is that you feel certain currents coming, sometimes. It’s not that you predict the future.”
Intentional or not, Ad Astra delivers the perfect message for today, in a package that is visually stunning and emotionally compelling, and whose vision of space as a vast void bereft of life makes its human story feel big and universal. If we’re alone, we only have each other, Gray’s saying. Why screw that up?
Ad Astra is released 18 September.
