James Gray to team up with Robert De Niro, Anne Hath­away, Oscar Isaac

Though pro­duc­tion has been halt­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic – for now – the wheels of Hol­ly­wood have not com­plete­ly stopped turn­ing. Meet­ings can still be con­duct­ed vir­tu­al­ly, con­tracts can be emailed, and deals can be struck so that once the viral dust has set­tled, every­one can hit the ground run­ning on new projects.

One such film will come from James Gray, accord­ing to an intrigu­ing news bul­letin from Dead­line. Gray has com­menced pre-pro­duc­tion on his next fea­ture Armaged­don Time, though the head­line instead trum­pets the impres­sive trio of leads he’s already cor­ralled. Hav­ing grant­ed Brad Pitt one of the great­est roles of his career with last year’s Ad Astra, he’ll soon shine his favor on Robert De Niro, Oscar Isaac, and Anne Hath­away.

Though the title may con­jure an image of Sam Wor­thing­ton deliv­er­ing a grav­el­ly one-lin­er before the big show­down in space, Armaged­don Time will be an earth­bound tale, described in the Dead­line item as ​“a dra­ma based on [Gray’s] child­hood mem­o­ries, a big-heart­ed com­ing-of-age sto­ry that explores friend­ship and loy­al­ty against the back­drop of an Amer­i­ca poised to elect Ronald Rea­gan as president.”

Dead­line go on to spec­i­fy that Gray wants to start shoot­ing in New York the instant he can be sure it’s safe, and that this will be a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from his recent work.

His last cou­ple of films, Ad Astra and 2016’s The Lost City of Z, plunged audi­ences into vivid­ly real­ized far­away places for an adven­ture hew­ing clos­er to genre than the art­house dra­mas on which he made his name. Gray’s next film sounds like a return to his ori­gins, and the quotes he pro­vid­ed to Dead­line def­i­nite­ly sup­port that much.

Gray men­tions a desire to make a movie that’s ​“the oppo­site of the vast, lone­ly, and dark void” of Ad Astra, a sto­ry ​“very much about peo­ple, human inter­ac­tions and emo­tions” with ​“warmth and ten­der­ness.” The name-drop of Rea­gan sig­ni­fies epochal ambi­tions, which he all but confirms:

“In a grander sense, if I may sound a lit­tle sen­ten­tious and pre­ten­tious, his­to­ry and myth always begin in the micro­cosm of the per­son­al and though you are using some­thing so small and spe­cif­ic in your life, the result can become uni­ver­sal if it access­es real emotion.

“I’ve tried to move to the oppo­site of a cold dark space. I want to be polit­i­cal and his­toric about it, but fill it with love and warmth. What hap­pened with me, very sim­ply, I got in big trou­ble when I was around 11, though the boys are 12 in the movie, and the sto­ry is about my move­ment from the pub­lic edu­ca­tion that I got into pri­vate school and a world of privilege.”

Gray explains that that pri­vate school hap­pens to be the same one that host­ed a young Don­ald Trump, and that the insti­tu­tion grew into an emblem of white Chris­t­ian hege­mo­ny for a young Gray. As an avowed fan of mid-20^th-cen­tu­ry peri­od pieces wrestling with the grand nar­ra­tives of America’s evolv­ing cul­ture, I’m eager to know more.

All that’s left to do is devise secure shoot­ing meth­ods under quar­an­tine lock­down, fill out the rest of the cast and oth­er cre­ative per­son­nel, shoot the thing, edit it, land a fes­ti­val date, find a buy­er, set a release date, and wait. It could be a while.