THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 35
to watch films, and many actors and
craftspeople who have worked on a Gray
film have been to Sunday dinner at least
once during production. The following
Sunday, Tommy Lee Jones, who has a
lead role in “Ad Astra,” would be com-
ing by. “He sent a terrifying e-mail,” Gray
told the table. “It said, ‘I will be hungry.’”
The guests laughed. Gray does an
exacting impersonation of everybody
he meets; each recounted bit of dialogue
comes in the voice of its speaker. He
had to be up at five-thirty the next morn-
ing to make it to the set, but, as a Bar-
baresco was poured, the conversation
drifted, and Gray spoke about his fa-
vorite hobby shop in New York—Polk’s,
near the Empire State Building, which
had been turned into a souvenir store.
That sort of thing was happening ev-
erywhere: San Francisco, London....
“It’s about the creative life style being
packaged with big money,” Houseago
said. “I was convinced L.A. would be too
big and weird to do it, but no. It used to
take years. Now it happens in eighteen
months.” He raised his shoulders. “I lived
in New York in the early nineties. A few
years later, I saw ‘Friends’ and thought,
What the fuck has happened to New
York? People lolling around on couches
with no natural predators? They magi-
cally have lots of money, and their prob-
lems are ridiculous?”
“There’s a level of bullshit that the
culture is now embracing,” Gray said.
“The other day, the doctor is poking
around my pancreas, and he’s, like, ‘You
see “The Avengers 2”?’ I’m, like, ‘No.’
He said, ‘Why not?’ I’m, like, ‘I’m not
nine!’” Gray thought that public report-
ing of movies’ gross profits, a practice
that took off in the eighties, changed the
popular conception of what a success-
ful film looked like. (“My dad will say,
‘That was a very big hit!’ I’ll be, like, ‘I
don’t think you’re a stockholder in Time
Warner!’”) At the same time, differences
in how movies were released gave im-
portant films less opportunity to prove
themselves in other ways.
“ ‘The Godfather’ came out in five
theatres in New York and two theatres
in L.A., and then it widened and wid-
ened and played for about a year,” Gray
said. “Word of mouth was very impor-
tant. By 1990, movies were coming out
in a thousand theatres—now it’s five
thousand—over the first weekend. A
movie that is a big hit will last only five
or six weeks, so they stopped having a
central place in the culture. You can’t
quote lines from huge hit movies now.
Whereas, if I say to you, ‘I’m gonna
make him an offer he can’t refuse .. .’”
He shrugged.
Houseago nodded vigorously. “The
period when an art space had room to
grow and be weird is gone,” he said. “It
used to be that if you were a successful
artist you could make a living; then you
died, and there was a question of what
happened to your market. Now you have
the contemporary art market existing
simultaneously with the secondary mar-
ket. The pressure on the artist is: do not
fuck up your secondary market. You hear
that—‘Don’t go off the reservation.’”
“The idea of needing that validation
immediately is a pretty new, last-twen-
ty-years thing,” Gray posited. “People
now want to make a lot of money or
win prizes. The Oscars in the seventies
were a joke! I don’t think Stanley Kubrick
wanted to win prizes.”
“And he didn’t want a franchise,”
Gross murmured.
“People say that to you: ‘Gotta have
your franchise!’ ” Gray said.G
reat movies wrestle with a contra-
diction latent in most art: they
must be challenging, original, and par-
ticular while also being inviting, legi-
ble, and unifying in experience. Sales
typically reward formula and facility
more than artistic power; history is full
of masterpieces undersold in their owntimes and prize-winning blockbusters
now remembered as dross, if at all. At
the same time, a work that can’t seduce
an audience has missed a key connec-
tion, and is unlikely ever to get its wings.
James Gray’s movies have been no-
table for straddling the boundary be-
tween private vision and Hollywood
scale. “Ad Astra,” a drama of adult prob-
lems which bears the fingerprints of itsmaker in every shot, is also an eighty-
eight-million-dollar movie, starring Brad
Pitt, with twelve past Oscar nominees
in the credits. Gray writes or co-writes
all his own material, and has a reputa-
tion for being a caring custodian of ac-
tors’ talents. “Immediately after I did
‘Twilight,’ James was the first person I
wanted to work with—I sought him
out—because you get in a James Gray
movie and you get a good performance,”
Robert Pattinson, who co-starred with
Charlie Hunnam and Sienna Miller in
“The Lost City of Z,” told me. Many
actors can cite moments when Gray
seemed to understand the psychology
of their craft better than they did them-
selves. Miller describes one point when
she struggled to convey remoteness in
her character’s dialogue; Gray moved
the other actor away, getting the per-
formance he wanted by changing the
focus zone of her eyes. Joaquin Phoe-
nix, who has starred in four of Gray’s
movies, recalls Gray rescuing him from
an overwrought moment by telling him
to eat a cookie while playing the scene.
In the nineties, Gray emerged as part
of the same precocious generation of
American directors as Paul Thomas
Anderson, Wes Anderson, and Sofia
Coppola, all of whom he counts as
friends. Today, he has admirers among
his lifelong heroes. Francis Ford Cop-
pola says, “I hold him in the highest re-
gard.” “James is one of the people I look
to,” Martin Scorsese told me. “He’s an
individual voice and always has been,
from ‘Little Odessa’ through ‘We Own
the Night’ and ‘The Immigrant’ right
up to the present.”
It is striking, then, how selectively
Gray is known among American audi-
ences. People who have travelled with
him on the Continent insist that the
French approach him on the street as
if he were, well, Brad Pitt. And yet, to
casual American moviegoers, “a James
Gray film” doesn’t conjure something
in the way that his peers’ work does, and
it’s an open question why. Some de-
scribe a change in the industry. “We’re
in a moment when individual voices are
being marginalized and demeaned and
dismissed in whole new ways on whole
new levels,” Scorsese says. “The idea of
challenging the audience has been grad-
ually replaced by servicing the audience,
which is much more corporate-friendly,