32 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
PROFILES
WHAT REMAINS
How the filmmaker James Gray went from
the outer boroughs to outer space.
BY NATHAN HELLER
A
son might rise and become a
father; a daughter might be-
come a mother; an admirer of
art, an artist. Such transitions are uneasy
and unsure. You try to carry your line
forward while improving on it, but there
seem to be no rules. What if the future
frowns on your best efforts? What if, in
seeking gains, you’re actually creating a
new kind of loss? These are anxieties
that fathers, mothers, and artists share.
The filmmaker James Gray taught
himself to face the problem of the future
through something that he calls classi-
cism: the idea that what remains from
the past can provide guidance for making
art in the present. He found his mod-
els in clear, almost mythical stories and
enduring films—most of all, those mov-
ies of the nineteen-seventies in which
a generation of directors seemed to ex-
ercise daring creative control.
But the assurances of the past are
limited; a risk is distancing yourself
from the world where you live now. A
classicist, like a parent, has the expec-
tation of being understood in retrospect.
What remains is the challenge to con-
nect before the delicate human moment
has passed.
O
ne Sunday evening two Octobers
ago, James Gray had guests over
for pasta at a large house he was rent-
ing in Central Los Angeles. Gray, a tall,
pale man with tufted auburn hair and
a whitening orange beard, had moved
into the place a month earlier, from the
apartment in Hancock Park where he
had lived for some years with his wife
and their three children. He was the
writer and director of six movies, and
was shooting his seventh, “Ad Astra”—a
film set largely at the outer reaches of
the solar system. It was a warm, still
evening, two weeks before Halloween.
In the front yard, an adult-size skele-
ton and a child-size skeleton, dressed
by Gray’s kids, perched against a gnarled
tree in the long late light.
“Should we eat now, Ali?” Gray called
to his wife, Alexandra Dickson Gray, a
documentarian. He stood at the counter
in the middle of the kitchen, fishing
peeled tomatoes out of a can with his
fingers. Cheese and olives had been set
out for their guests; John Coltrane was
playing softly from the other room.
Gray had been hosting weekly Sunday Gray, photographed here in Brighton Beach, has lately been making films that are at
