material is so delicate,” Pitt explained.
It was approaching 9 P.M. when a
takeout order of dumplings from Din Tai
Fung arrived for the crew. Gray exclaimed,
“Oh, my God, yeah, baby,” but kept work-
ing without a bite. A bit of tricky shoot-
ing was about to begin. He had to film
a few moments of footage in which Roy
emerges from an air-lock door and leaps
into open space—the lead-in to the climax
of the film. Pitt had been strung up on
wires, and was perched atop a partial set
of the spacecraft’s exterior, against a black
background; stars would be painted in
when the wires were painted out. Pitt
called down from his perch, “Steal me
some dumplings!”
“We’ll make you a plate,” Gray
offered. “What do you want—pork,
chicken, shrimp?”
“Pork!” Pitt called. He peered over
the edge of the structure, to the concrete
of the stage floor. “How about a nice pad
right here?” he said, swirling his hands
around the empty space. Crew members
rushed to drag a mat beneath him.
“All right, let’s go,” Gray called. “Pic-
ture! Take Brad to one.”
Pitt slowly unhooked his space-walk
tether wire and rose. “Three, two, one,
launch!” Doug Torres, the first assistant
director, called. Pitt gave a little leap
and a wire hoisted him into the air by
an elaborate pulley system. “And cut!”
“That was pretty damn good!” Gray
said. “If you can do one more, we’ll make
it really tight on you.”
A Scorpio camera crane was pulled
into position to film the part of the se-
quence, preceding the leap, when Pitt’s
character exits through the hatch. Van
Hoytema had been shooting with cus-
tom wide lenses, to allow extremely close
focus and to encourage optical flares,
and he and Gray found that, by notch-
ing up the film rate, from twenty-four
frames a second to thirty-six, they could
imbue some shots with the underwater
quality of space-walk movement. Now
they wondered about working in the
opposite direction: if they recorded just
six frames a second and Pitt moved at
a quarter of his normal speed, the foot-
age would look normal, except with a
slight moon-landing jerk.
Gray got behind his monitor. “I don’t
know how he’s going to be able to do
this,” he murmured with a grin to van
Hoytema.
“I turn to the left?” Pitt called from
inside the hatch.
“It’s an awkward turn, but it ties to
what comes after,” Gray called. “The
audience is so visually literate that if
you make a fuckup it’s all over IMDb.”
“Picture’s up!” Torres called. “Roll
film. Three, two, one, action!”
Slowly, slowly, Pitt opened the door
of the craft. The whole soundstage was
quiet. As he climbed out of the hatch
and turned left, a tight, high giggle is-
sued from behind the director’s moni-
tor. Gray put a palm over his mouth and
shook. Even at this slow pace, he could
see what the finished shot would be.
When Torres called “Cut,” he exploded.
He doubled forward in disbelieving
laughter. He began to clap his hands.
“It’s so good!” he cried. “It’s so good!”A
question that often arises among
people who spend time with Gray
is why he’s never made a comedy. In
person, he is funny in the way of a co-
median, for whom the act of making
humor seems to aid a digestive func-
tion in the soul. Wes Anderson tried
to get Gray to play the comic role of
Vladimir Wolodarsky, in “The Life
Aquatic” (the part ultimately went to
Noah Taylor), and Luca Guadagnino
recently contacted him about acting in
a project under way. But, besides an
early, abortive attempt, playing Larenz
Tate’s “white friend” in Theodore
Witcher’s film “Love Jones” (“I got so
nervous when the camera was on that
I was stiff and terrible, and he obviously
had to cut me,” Gray says), he has been
wary of letting his funny self onto the
screen. “If you’re not charming or hand-
some or smart, joking is how you get
popular,” he says. “It’s a survival instinct.”
“Little Odessa” is often assumed to
be Gray’s most personal feature, but it
was his most calculated in approach. A
producer named Paul Webster, who had
liked his U.S.C. thesis film, offered to
make a movie with him—a remarkable
break. Gray didn’t take to any of the
scripts he saw, so Webster suggested
that he write his own. Gray recalls, “He
said, ‘O.K., James. Tell them the story
of your relationship with your family,
but add a genre hook.’ That was the cal-
culation, and the Russian Mafia hadn’t
been done to death yet.” The Grays had
no direct experience with the Mob, butit was never far away in Russian Queens
and Brooklyn, and he knew just how to
bring the texture of the place to life. “I
come from South London, so it was a
million miles away from what I knew.
But that world was so clearly indicated,”
Tim Roth says. Gray explains, “I was
trying to use the form of the New Hol-
lywood. In a sense, it was a young per-
son trying on a style.”
Gray describes himself as a benefi-
ciary of a now vanished market for voicey
indie movies that could linger on in
video. Yet, unlike many such films, “Lit-
tle Odessa” became known for its clas-
sicist restraint and grace. “The camera
was locked down—it didn’t move a lot—
whereas every other director at that
time was trying to be like ‘Goodfellas’
Scorsese and move the camera every-
where,” Gross says. The movie went to
the Venice Film Festival, one of the
most prestigious in the world.
The experience was disorienting for
Gray. On his first day at the festival, he
went to the opening of “Il Postino” and
sat next to its esteemed co-director Mi-
chael Radford. Fresh off a red-eye from
California, Gray fell asleep the moment
the lights went down and snored in
Radford’s ear all through the screening.
He had worn a T-shirt and jeans—he’d
been told that Venice was casual—and
found himself at a black-tie affair.
Abashed, he wore a tuxedo to the
première of “Little Odessa,” only to dis-
cover that he was the only one dressed
up. Maximilian Schell sat beside him
and spent the screening making small
unhappy noises and moaning, crypti-
cally, “I will never again play Handel!”
The theatre seemed, at best, half full.
“I was so depressed I flew back to
L.A. and went to bed,” Gray recalled.
The studio called and asked where he
was. It turned out that the screening of
his film that he’d attended was not the
public one. The public screening had
been full; his movie had received an up-
roarious ovation. It had won the Silver
Lion—David Lynch had been the head
of the jury—and he needed to return
to Venice at once to accept.
In Gray’s own telling, even many up-
beat stories end with his humiliation.
For a period in the nineties, he lived in
an apartment building next to the one
where Sofia Coppola lived. He had never
met her, but part of her apartment faced38 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019