dinners for friends since college, when
he studied film at the University of
Southern California: a period when his
mother was dying of brain cancer in
Flushing, Queens, and his creative life
was gaining speed. Gray’s first film,
“Little Odessa”—the story of a young
man (Tim Roth) becoming entangled
with the Russian Mob while his mother
(Vanessa Redgrave) dies, his father
(Maximilian Schell) turns him out, and
his kid brother (Edward Furlong) strug-
gles to cope—appeared in 1994, when
Gray was only twenty-five, and estab-
lished him as a precocious talent who
brought sensitive family-drama realism
to gritty crime-drama machismo. His
next two films, “The Yards” (2000) and
“We Own the Night” (2007), also ex-
plored these themes, but his subject mat-
ter broadened with the release of “Two
Lovers” (2008) and “The Immigrant”
(2013), which begins with a young wom-
an’s passage through Ellis Island. In
“The Lost City of Z” (2016), based on
a book by the New Yorker writer David
Grann, about the British explorer Percy
Fawcett, he moved away from New York
for the first time, filming in the U.K.
and Colombia.
“Ad Astra,” which appears later this
month, is Gray’s first outer-space film
and his largest production to date. He
saw it as a narrative about an epic jour-
ney, with a flawed hero. “We tried to
make a classic, stripped-down story,” he
says. “If you’re stealing from something
so old, maybe people think you’re new.”
In the kitchen, Gray made a few late
additions to an oxtail Bolognese that
he’d begun cooking at 8 a.m. He wore,
as usual, a black T-shirt, tan cargo shorts,
and sneakers, and his shoulders rolled
with the forward-drooping aspect of a
marionette being pulled up by one string.
“Should we drop the pasta?” he asked
his wife.
“Are we ready to eat?” she said.
“Wait ten minutes and then drop the
pasta!” Georgia, their loquacious fifth
grader, cried.
The guests that night included Gray’s
friend since film school Ethan Gross,
with whom he wrote “Ad Astra.” Gross,
a shy, slender man with a reedy voice
and a creeping wit, is recessive in theways that Gray is dominant. “James has
that alpha personality, and I like to leach
off the energy,” he says. “I didn’t like
him at first in school, because he was a
know-it-all, and loud.” Today, they seem
nearly inseparable. Gray holds court
with a nebbishy, self-mocking churn of
anecdote and lamentation, and his
humor, in the outer-borough Ashke-
nazi style, can leave one unsure where
the shtick ends and the real self-loath-
ing starts. Adjusting his thick-rimmed
glasses, he made a series of groans over
the broccoli.
“James, how are you feeling about the
Bolognese, dude?” Thomas Houseago,
the sculptor and painter, asked, approach-
ing the stove. He was from Leeds, and
his voice was both brassy and airy, like a
clearing whoosh through a French horn.
“It’s top quality—it has medicinal
properties,” Gray said.
A loose queue formed at the stove,
as Gray spooned sauce. Place cards in
the dining room were marked with
guests’ initials. “Now, if there were a
Yankees game tonight, we wouldn’t be
able to do this, because the world stops
for the Yanks,” Gray said. Once, he was
escorted from his seat at an Angels-Yan-
kees playoff game for excessively rau-
cous cheering in the family section.
“Ever been tempted to start liking
the Dodgers?” Houseago asked as they
carried their plates to the table.
“I really tried, but there’s something
nauseating about it,” Gray said. His chil-
dren like to make fun of his pronuncia-
tion (he says “nwauw-se-ating” and “be-
coss”), and he and his wife, a warm, wry,
dark-blond Californian who can seem
like his affective opposite, have a running
dispute about how to say names such as
Craig and Carrie. Gray looked several
seats down at Gross. “How’s tonight’s
red sauce?” he asked. “A ‘Godfather’?”
“They rate everything according to
Francis Ford Coppola movies,” Ali Gray
explained. A superb meal on Gross’s scale
is a “Godfather.” A meal better than su-
perb is a “Godfather II.” One that’s re-
warding but an acquired taste (such as
Gray’s lemon fettuccine with jalapeños)
is an “Apocalypse Now.” Once, there was
a “Jack” meal, but they don’t talk about it.
“A Godfather I or II,” Gross pro-
nounced, although he was eating a veg-
etarian version of the sauce. He and Gray
get together several times a week, often“ You’re hogging the covers again!”