James Gray and Ethan gross knew exactly what they wanted when they set out to write the sci-fi film “Ad Astra,” which stars Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones as father-son space explorers who may never find what they’re looking for.
After a recent screening of the film, which opened September 20, the filmmakers did a deep dive into their own personal history as they gave insights into the development of the movie and their thoughts on whether there is other intelligent life in the universe.
Gray, who also directed and produced “Ad Astra,” and Gross met when they were students at USC film school three decades ago, and right off the bat, Gross recalled that Gray was a know-it-all.
Gray started talking about one of their professors who gave off a Jack Palance kind of vibe. “I was an asshole and he hated me because I corrected him in a class on THX sound,” he said, noting that both of them got terrible grades in that class. They reflected on dorm room pasta dinners they used to have back in the day.
Flash forward to current day and their very clear mandate for “Ad Astra.”
“We liked ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but we wanted to go in the opposite direction. We didn’t want any wookies, light shows or aliens. The fact is there’s nothing out there. There are no green men coming to save us. You have to confront who you are,” Gray said about Roy McBride and the the Pitt’s character’s journey into space. “His dad goes away for 20 years. It’s like the Odyssey. It’s mythic. The son goes to search for the father.”
Gross segued into reflections on working for legendary producer Joel Silver who thought that every ten pages in a script should contain a “whammo.” In “Ad Astra,” that moment comes with the lunar rover chase sequence. But nearly everything else is internal to Roy’s head. “He’s a lonely, closed-off guy. The further away he gets from Earth, the closer he gets to his issues,” said Gross. He explained that the voiceover was an outgrowth of the psychological evaluations McBride had to undergo as an astronaut.
Yet when he was forced to be alone, his psychological state was different. “We came up with the psychological portrait of him,” Gross said about McBride, before the discussion shifted to the father, Clifford, played by Tommy Lee Jones.
“He’s searching for something he can’t find. It’s an impossible dream. It’s Ahab in pursuit of the white whale,” Gray said.
The two filmmakers are fully aware that there will likely be a battle for the moon’s natural resources despite any treaties that will be put into effect, and also that it will be used as a launch pad for travel to other planets including Mars.
They said they re-created the Martian surface and the lunar service from photographs and that Gray decided that depicting zero gravity would be a death warrant for the shoot, meaning that many of the scenes had to be shot horizontally, vertically and wide.
As is typical in Q&A’s involving screenwriters, the two discussed the process of writing. Gray admitted that he has writers block every day and he has to work through it. “99% of the time I’ve got nothing. The empty page says, ‘Fuck you. Fill me up, asshole.’”
And then the conversation turned more philosophical. “Film is art. Make a film that is uncomfortable. There is no art without risk,” Gray said.
Then, the inevitable question. What is out there? “There is no life in the reachable universe,” Gross said.
“If we find it, it’s unreachable,” Gray agreed. “We have been sending signals for 50 years so if we can’t communicate with them and they are so far away, who cares? It’s pointless….but valuable.”
Cliff’s worship of the search for intelligent life in the universe is a false god, said Gross, yet he noted that others who go into space also feel that it is a profound experience.
Gray discussed how the majority of experiences of astronauts in space are from the point of view of white guys, many of them from Ohio, and all invoking God.
“We thought it was a reaction to the metaphysically profound shock of being off the earth, a coping mechanism.”
Somewhat of a spoiler alert: I was riveted by a moment near the end of the film between McBride and his father and asked Gray about it privately and received this insight. “He realized the father was mentally ill,” he told me. “He had to transcend the father.”
