THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 41
it is utopian,” he said as we made a right
onto a wide boulevard. “You have to try
and imagine this with fewer trees, be-
cause it was considerably grimmer with-
out them.” On 175th Street, we pulled
up at a little two-story brick house.
“Here it is, the palace,” he said, fac-
ing the front yard. His voice caught. He
blinked repeatedly, and took off down
the sidewalk so I couldn’t see his face.
“My mother died here, and that’s un-
fortunately a very clear memory of
mine,” he said, a couple of minutes later.
“On the day of her death, my brother
and I went out and got pizza, and we
were fine with it,” he said. “Three weeks
later, I saw her shoes in the garbage can,
and that fucked me up.”
Before his mother became ill, Gray
revealed, she had suffered from depres-
sion. “She used to tell a story: she would
say, ‘I never could understand why your
father took so long to come home from
work, but one day I was at the super-
market, and I saw him come out of the
subway. He wandered into this store
and he wandered into that store; he
looked at this book and that magazine.
Your father, the absent-minded profes-
sor!’” Gray interpreted the anecdote
differently. “I thought, Schmuck—he
doesn’t want to come home.”
S
omewhere between the first and the
third acts of “Ad Astra,” there is a
quiet tonal shift. What was cynical and
ironized, at the start, becomes earnest,
direct, vulnerable, even hopeful. “There’s
a part of the design that’s a move to-
ward the greatest possible sincerity,” Gray
told me. “The idea was to strip away the
myth of the heroic, of machismo, to say
once and for all that it’s a crock of shit.”
Pitt: “James and I were looking into the
definition of being male, as we knew it,
and asking, Does true strength come
from vulnerability? Does true confidence
come from embracing the self—the foi-
bles, the missteps, the regrets?”
Back on the freeway, as we passed
Flushing Meadows, Gray suddenly leaned
forward and told the driver to take the
exit. He wanted to visit the site of the
1964 World’s Fair. “I was always attracted
to the melancholy of this place, the way
that it was all dilapidated and wasn’t kept
up, almost like modern ruins,” he told
me as we stepped into the swelter. Above
us, the disk-shaped observation towers
of the New York State Pavilion loomed
like flying saucers. The fair’s dedication
had been to “Man’s achievement on a
shrinking globe in an expanding uni-
verse.” In 1964 and 1965, more than fifty
million people had gone to see it.
We sat on a bench in a patch of shade,
and Gray told me that he’d recently re-
alized he’d lost his wild ambition to be
included in the pantheon of
legendary directors. He used
to memorize the worst para-
graphs of his reviews—the
criticism stoked some inner
furnace that drove him to
become a Great Man. Now
he didn’t look at the stuff.
He had found a new creative
lodestar in the time he spent
with his wife and kids. As
the brass rings had fallen
away, however, he hadn’t lost his drive
to make beautiful movies, to touch an
audience, because—why? Gray had puz-
zled over that, until he decided that the
answer was, quite simply, that he cared.
Caring for other people was the essen-
tial human privilege, he now believed.
Caring was what both artists and audi-
ences put into an exquisite work. The
tragic thing, he decided, wasn’t caring
about something no one else seemed to
appreciate; the tragic thing was when
you stopped caring, got too cynical, grew
afraid to let yourself be seen to care and
be cared for. “The key is to get more
personal, not less,” Gray told me.
Gray talked about the movie he
was writing, which currently exists as a
twenty-page outline. “I did the Amazon,
and I did Neptune, so it’s time to go
home,” he said. The film is set in Queens
and Manhattan in the nineteen-eighties.
“It’s about my change from public school
to prep school,” he said. “It’s about class
and race and a kid’s coming of age and
realization of what that means—the striv-
ing, the humiliation, the ego and pride
about our position in life, the disgusting
hubris.” The Trumps will appear in it.
So will the music Gray encountered as
a teen-ager slipping into Danceteria,
CBGB, the Ritz, and Studio 54. He has
found himself studying the ominous in-
souciance of Fellini’s “Amarcord.” “That
movie ends with them in a field, which
is lovely, and yet you know Italy will meet
with total catastrophe in a few years,” he
says. “In some ways, it’s an accusation—
basically, If you’d gotten your fucking
head out of your ass, maybe we wouldn’t
have had Il Duce.”
Gray told me that he had a sudden
wish to see the Panorama of the City of
New York, a scale model showing every
street, every house, an inch for every hun-
dred feet, commissioned for the fair by
the godlike Robert Moses. “My brother
and I were obsessed with
this,” he said. “My grand-
mother would take us, and
we’d hang out here all the
time.” Now he took his own
kids. Boats the size of bee-
tles waited by the loading
docks of the harbor. Zips of
transparent wire carried tiny
model airplanes toward the
sky. “It used to go from day-
time to night,” Gray said.
“The city would light up.”
When he came here as a child, he
would make a point of finding his house.
As we followed the walkway back in
the direction of Flushing, he said that
he’d recently been struggling to find a
new balance—a more immediate and
vulnerable expression of his passion for
old forms. “All the classical format re-
ally means, to me, is: take your own ego
out of the equation,” he said. “It’s all
about you, but the style is not about
you. Something is lost in that media-
tion, but that’s the battle that you face.”
We found his childhood home—
smaller even than in life, and near a con-
crete playground represented as a park.
Gray stood above the model looking
pleased. The streets unfurled before us,
a sharp, ordered grid. The model was
impressive, refined, a thing to behold.
He’d begun to turn away when, sud-
denly, there was a shifting in the build-
ings’ shadows, a sense of movement in
the static model below us. The light
started to change. It glowed rich gold
and deepened toward orange. Gray looked
on, captivated, standing at the rail.
“I thought they didn’t do this any-
more,” he whispered, and remained still
for a long while. “Look at that.”
The light over the model of the city
turned a vivid blush. We watched it si-
lently, keeping our eyes on the place
where Gray’s home had been, feeling
subject to a tiny miracle, as pinpoints
of light rose among the buildings and
the room went dark.
