James’s crime-genre work,” he says. “‘ Tw o
Lovers’ is small and carefully drawn, and
I was amazed at how emotional it was.”
Shifting the storytelling focus in-
ward liberated Gray, who began to set
his films in other times and places. For
his next project, “The Immigrant,” he
wanted to make a film about a woman
coming to New York from Eastern Eu-
rope in the early nineteen-twenties: a
movie that would look frankly at what
it meant to be an American arrival,
through the lens of relationships in the
New World. He drew on the experi-
ences of his grandfather, who had fled
Eastern Europe around that time and
run a saloon on the Lower East Side.
Marion Cotillard plays Ewa, a young
Pole who is separated from her sister at
Ellis Island and who falls into the world
of a small-time theatre impresario and
pimp (Phoenix), who holds her in an
ever-changing relationship.
When the movie was in postproduc-
tion, its funders told Gray that they were
selling it to Harvey Weinstein, who
hadn’t seen it but who liked what he
had heard about it. Gray begged them
not to. He had worked with Weinstein
on “The Yards,” and Weinstein had in-
sisted on changing the ending to make
it more upbeat. Gray’s worries were
borne out. “He just didn’t like the movie,”
Gray says. (Weinstein says the film tested
poorly.) When Gray refused to change
“The Immigrant,” the Weinstein Com-
pany put it in a drawer for a year. When
it was finally released, with little pro-
motion, it did well critically and at fes-
tivals—Cotillard won several honors—
but was largely overlooked.
By then, Gray had fallen into a long,
hard depression. He couldn’t work. He
found it difficult to focus. At his darkest,
he grew suicidal. It wasn’t that he thought
he’d failed in his ambitions; “The Immi-
grant” remains his favorite of his films.
It was the opposite. He had drawn on
skills he’d honed over the course of a ca-
reer to produce his fullest effort at a great,
true, moving film, only to find, when he
let go, that nothing happened. The movie
just floated there, to the indifference of
its guardians and the silence of an un-
reachable world. At the crucial moment,
when he’d summoned a life’s worth of
mastery and his true voice, no one seemed
to be listening at all.“
T
he Lost City of Z,” the story of
a brilliant, fanatical explorer who
invests his life and spirit in an effort to
recover a vanished kingdom and then
disappears, was for Gray a journey intothe light. “I think the idea of being back
on set was the perfect tonic,” Sienna
Miller says. “He was clearly galvanized
by the experience, very happy to get
back to work, very happy that it wasn’t
being produced by Harvey Weinstein.
He felt very in control of it.”
Gray struggled with the material’s
structure—the film has a five-act story,
with a war in the middle—and his first
cut ran more than four hours. But the
finished movie had a lushness and grace
that recalled Technicolor epics, albeit
with a haunted, modern edge. “In ‘Lost
City,’ I thought, This guy has really
evolved into his own thing,” Pitt says.
“He knows everything he could about
his masters, but he’s made it his own
now. I perceived it as being really open. ”
Postproduction work on “Ad Astra”
began in the winter of 2018 and took
almost two years, as constellations, rocket
flames, and planets were added to nearly
two hours of film. Gray spent the week
of the Oscars in 2018 holed up in an ed-
iting office near Runyon Canyon, work-
ing on a sequence in which Pitt’s char-
acter climbs up the inside of a rocket
funnel just before it fires. (It was the
year when Kobe Bryant won a Best An-
imated Short award. “Always remem-
ber: Kobe Bryant has as many Oscars
as Stanley Kubrick!” Gray exclaimed
merrily.) He spent the week of the Os-
cars in 2019 reviewing visual effects, a
process that continued through the next
six months. In late summer, he flew to
New York. He was writing his next
movie about his home turf, he told me,
and wanted to check details. We got in
a black S.U.V., and he gave the driver
directions into Queens.
It was a sweltering day; the car’s dash-
board thermometer rose past a hundred
degrees. Gray’s hair was wet from the
shower, and he looked sinewy and fo-
cussed. In the past year, he had turned
fifty and lost thirty pounds. “The doc-
tor said my arteries were basically crème
fraîche,” he said. He had tried a choles-
terol drug but had experienced side
effects, so instead he had cut carbohy-
drates from his diet six days a week. His
Sunday dinners had become a reprieve.
We crossed the East River and took
the Queens-Midtown Expressway to-
ward Flushing. Gray grew animated as
we neared his childhood home. “This
is Utopia Parkway, and as you can see