36 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
and everyone seems to be playing along.”
Coppola gives a different accounting:
“Maybe it’s the grayness of his name.”
The dark-horse position has not
been lost on Gray. “He feels underesti-
mated—I’ve seen that sometimes,” Si-
enna Miller says. “He deserves to be up
there with the rest.” In moments of
self-assurance, Gray is convinced that
he is doing the best version of work
that he believes in, that he is giving a
pure voice to his particular idea of the
world. In darker moments, he fears that
he is working off bad navigation, drift-
ing over the horizon, lost by his mis-
placed faith. He told me, “If you’ve ded-
icated your whole life to the pursuit of
something, and then everybody tells
you it doesn’t exist, it can’t exist, and,
even if it did exist, there’s no way you
could ever relate to it—I hate to use
the word, but there is something tragic
about that.”
O
n the Monday after Sunday din-
ner, Gray showed up at his film
set looking askew. His hair was swept
in multiple directions. His belt, stuck
through only three loops of his pants,
dangled before him like a backward
tail. He had slept past his five-thirty
alarm and rushed to get to the sound-
stage, in Boyle Heights, on time. “Ad
Astra” is the first film that Gray has
made off location, on a stage in Los
Angeles, and neither he nor his family,
who normally travel with him to shoots,
were wild about his working so close to
home. It was like normal life, they said,
except that he wasn’t around.
“The Lost City of Z,” Gray’s previ-
ous movie, had been an arduous pro-
duction. Half the film was shot in the
Colombian jungle, where temperatures
reached three digits, with high humid-
ity. Charlie Hunnam, who played the
lead, had had to be airlifted out at one
point after waking up with an insect
flapping deep in his ear canal. Crew
members were felled with intestinal ail-
ments, and Gray had fallen into a dazed
anomie. Yet work on “Ad Astra” proved,
in some ways, still more difficult. Gray
wanted to shoot the movie on film, with
a minimum of green screens, to create
a space where actors could do their best
work. It meant that every zero-gravity
shot had to be set up with mind-bend-
ing geometries—sets flipped on their
sides, scenes filmed from below as if
from above—and actors had to perform
on wires while floating their limbs about,
in a whole-body plank exercise.
That day, Gray was shooting foot-
age of a craft filled with drifting dead
bodies. The shot, done from Pitt’s point
of view, was filmed through a space hel-
met. “We’ve been studying NASA foot-
age, but something nice with space is
that there are no real visual references,”
Hoyte van Hoytema, the director of
photography, who has been the d.p. on
such films as “Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy” and “Dunkirk,” told me. “James is
very bold—he’s been pushing me to take
whatever risks I can take.”
Some directors are visibly high-strung
on set; Gray is not one of them. Be-
tween setups, he read the news on his
laptop and held court with a seemingly
endless supply of comic anecdotes. He
gave mini-lectures on widening aspect
ratios (“In closeup, suddenly you have
all this negative space”) and the men-
ace of small screens (“People say to me,
‘I saw your movie on a plane.’ It’s, like,
Why don’t you just tell me, ‘I watched
your movie while taking a shit’?”). The
video-assist operator on set had taken
to playing a “stump Gray” game, dig-
ging up obscure foreign B movies on
IMDb and asking him to name the di-
rector, and Gray came out ahead. “I don’t
think I’ve ever met anyone who has a
knowledge of cinema like his,” Miller
says. The director Damien Chazelle was
an undergraduate in a film course at
Harvard, in 2004, when Gray gave a
guest lecture. “What was amazing was
his whole attitude about film—this in-
vigorating passion that had a real bite
to it,” Chazelle says. “It was what I imag-
ined the young Godard and Truffaut
being like: tearing down certain heroes,
building up others, and crafting their
own language.”
The instant “action” was called, Gray
hunched his face toward the screen and
clapped on a pair of headphones play-
ing music—that day, Gustav Holst’s
“Saturn.” He believed the music helped
him set the action in an arcing, outer-
space pace. “There’s a very particular
rhythm to his movies,” Pattinson says.
“As an actor, you feel as if he’s very in
touch with the movement of the cam-
eras—there’s a kind of rolling aspect to
it.” The headphones were also Gray’scue for entering the dream world on
the screen in front of him, the place
where he retained control.
Gray got the idea for “Ad Astra” sev-
eral years ago, while thinking about the
loneliness inherent in American ambi-
tion, and decided he had to set the film
in outer space, the last true terra incog-
nita and a lonely zone. He and Gross
watched all the space films they could
find, and then started composing the
screenplay the way Gray usually does:
he bought a stack of five-by-seven-inch
index cards, jotted down ideas for scenes,
and looked for common threads. The
threads began to coalesce into an out-
line. When it had reached about fifty
pages, they began to write the script.
The outlining process, for Gray, takes
months; writing the screenplay takes a
few weeks. “Ad Astra,” when finished,
followed a tight three-act structure, and
it clocks in at less than two hours.
The movie opens on Major Roy Mc-
Bride (Pitt), a cool and collected man
whose heart rate never exceeds eighty
beats per minute, even in moments of
crisis. He is doing the work he dreamed
of—“I always wanted to become an as-
tronaut,” he says in the film’s opening
narration—and it bothers him only
slightly that, in middle age, this work
has not entirely given him what he’d
hoped for. He has separated from the
woman he loves (Liv Tyler), and ac-
cepts the separation as a casualty of his
focus. When a series of cosmic-ray
bursts from the far reaches of the solar
system, known as “the Surge,” starts
passing over Earth, flummoxing all our
circuitry, he agrees to lead an explor-
atory mission.
In a briefing, Roy is told that his fa-
ther, H. Clifford McBride ( Jones), a
hero of the space program who disap-
peared during Roy’s youth while run-
ning a research project near Neptune,
may be alive. He may, in fact, have gone
rogue, abandoning Roy and his mother,
and he may be responsible for the Surge.
Roy sets off toward Neptune. “The idea
of portraying a man who couldn’t con-
nect, who had to go to the outer reaches
of space to unlock himself, spoke to me,”
Pitt said. “I think it will speak to any-
one who has tried to protect themselves
in life and ended up walled off.”
Neptune is a long leap for Gray by
any measure. He grew up in a Russian