James Gray: ​‘I was armed with an 800lb goril­la – the movie star’

James Gray ought to be a house­hold name by now. He already is in France. One of the Amer­i­can cinema’s most dis­tinc­tive auteurs, with a per­son­al fil­mog­ra­phy hid­ing in plain sight – he’s an auteurist film­mak­er work­ing with A‑list stars, his films play­ing main­stream mul­ti­plex­es. The lead­ing pro­po­nent of mid-bud­get stu­dio fare, Gray’s are the kind of pic­tures that would turn up five-a-week in the 1970s. From his four pic­tures with Joaquin Phoenix – The Yards, We Own the Night, Two Lovers and The Immi­grant – to his clas­si­cal epic The Lost City of Z, Gray turns out the kind of pic­ture that was once the New Hol­ly­wood movement’s bread and butter.

The lack of name-recog­ni­tion may well be set to change this week, as Gray looks to the stars with his biggest pro­duc­tion to date, the Brad Pitt-star­ring exis­ten­tial space odyssey Ad Astra. As the film opened world­wide, we took a call from the film­mak­er to talk the dis­ap­pear­ance of mid-bud­get fare and why com­pro­mise is an essen­tial part of the direct­ing gig.

LWLies: I’m not sure exact­ly how much Ad Astra cost, but it’s cer­tain­ly noth­ing like the $250m stu­dio behe­moths we get these days. It’s oper­at­ing in a cre­ative space that’s large­ly ignored.

Gray: Yeah, you can’t real­ly make movies of this bud­get size any more, because it’s nei­ther fish nor fowl. It’s not $2 mil­lion, but it’s not $300 mil­lion or what­ev­er the hell they spend now. When you’re deal­ing with some­thing that you might call mid-bud­get, it’s in some sense a dinosaur because there’s a lot of risk involved and not much reward. From a finan­cial per­spec­tive, I sup­pose it’s a risk for the stu­dios, but for me it’s where the most beau­ti­ful work was always done. The film­mak­ers were able to pur­sue a lit­tle bit of sub­ver­sion and a lit­tle bit of what moved them, cou­pled with scale. I miss that seg­ment of the business.

You men­tioned risks for the stu­dio, but what are the risks for you as a film­mak­er work­ing at that bud­get and in an idio­syn­crat­ic register?

There’s always the risk of com­pro­mise and I had to make a few. But what you gain, I think out­strips any com­pro­mise that you have to make. You have the abil­i­ty to work on a large can­vas and the abil­i­ty to express your­self in ways that you haven’t before if you haven’t done this kind of movie, and I had not. I wel­come that challenge.

Do you think there are bud­getary lim­its to a per­son­al cin­e­ma like yours, where after a cer­tain point you have to cede too much con­trol and it’s just not worth it?

It’s a very good ques­tion. It real­ly comes down to a very fine line. The prob­lem is that a movie is not a fixed cre­ation. You don’t wake up in the morn­ing and say, ​‘This is what the movie is going to be!’ What hap­pens is that you work on it and it becomes some­thing. You just don’t know what kind of com­pro­mis­es you’ll have to make before you make it. If it were easy to do it, it would become a more mech­a­nised process. The stu­dio sys­tem tried to do it, they tried to make the sys­tem very pre­dictable, but it’s not like you’re mak­ing Pal­mo­live soap, and then next week ​‘New and Improved’ Pal­mo­live soap where you just change the emul­si­fi­er slight­ly. It’s a whole new ket­tle of fish every time you make a film. The lev­el of com­pro­mise is nev­er ful­ly clear to you until you make a movie.

Now, there’s enforced com­pro­mise – when you have to lis­ten to oth­er people’s opin­ions – and most of the time that leads to very poor qual­i­ty of work. Most Amer­i­can stu­dio pic­tures are made for mer­ce­nary rea­sons. It’s a depress­ing notion but it’s a fact. It doesn’t mean that all of them are, and it also doesn’t mean that the crafts­peo­ple don’t care, they almost always do. Every­one is almost always try­ing to do their best work, but the sys­tem is very pow­er­ful, so if you’re work­ing at the lev­el I am and try­ing to do a per­son­al film, you’re real­ly strug­gling to main­tain your voice. I don’t know what the cut-off point would be. I think it has to do with the peo­ple you’re involved with, what their lev­el of com­mit­ment is to what you’re doing and if you’re clear, as the film­mak­er, as to where you want to go. All these things have to be in align­ment, and if they’re not, then you’re in trouble.

Did your expe­ri­ence with Har­vey Wein­stein on The Immi­grant lead you to pur­sue any cre­ative safe­guards? Is that even possible?

I’ve had final cut on my films since The Yards, so I’ve had it since 2000. I had final cut on The Immi­grant too. The prob­lem wasn’t that the movie itself got changed, the prob­lem was sim­ply that he didn’t like the film and tried to get me to change it. Then when I wouldn’t, he aban­doned the film. That was not an issue of the cre­ative process, that was an issue with the release of the film. With Ad Astra, I did not have final cut, because the bud­get was much big­ger. Almost nobody gets final cut any more when your bud­get is over $20 mil­lion. I knew that in some ways the cut would be a col­lab­o­ra­tion. It couldn’t just be me mak­ing demands and that would be it.

Hav­ing said that, 90 per cent of the movie is cer­tain­ly mine, but there are ele­ments of col­lab­o­ra­tion in the film. You know that going in, and if you’re work­ing with an actor with Brad Pitt’s lev­el of impact on the film, you know that you have him there, either to debate and bounce ideas off, or to help enhance your sit­u­a­tion. There is com­pro­mise in the film, but very lit­tle con­sid­er­ing the size of it. That’s good for­tune, mak­ing a movie with peo­ple who are going to the same place you are, so you have a com­mon lan­guage. The Har­vey Wein­stein sit­u­a­tion was very spe­cif­ic, and awful, but a very dif­fer­ent set of cir­cum­stances. The source of the mis­ery was his own desire for what he want­ed out of the movies he was releasing.

So how does it work, with a pro­duc­er-star of Brad Pitt’s sta­tus? If there were a hypo­thet­i­cal dis­agree­ment over some­thing, does the direc­tor get the final say?

You dis­cuss it and try to see the oth­er person’s point of view. You have to remain open and try to decide if it enlarges the scope of the film or gets in the way. That’s a judg­ment for the direc­tor to make and then press his or her case, which is exact­ly what I did. Now, you’re not going to win every dis­pute like that, but if you win prac­ti­cal­ly all of them it’s still your film and still feels like your film. I have to say that this feels very much like a film I would make, I didn’t lose the film.

I did feel that I lost the film on The Yards, because Har­vey insist­ed on things and I had to do them. I lost con­trol of the film. I lost what the sto­ry was. I lost what I want­ed to do. Not because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because I was no longer in con­trol. It is what it is, and my director’s cut does exist on DVD, so it’s all good now. Thank­ful­ly I didn’t face any­thing like that on this because, like I said, I was armed with the 800lb goril­la which was the movie star, who was ded­i­cat­ed to almost exact­ly the same movie that I was.

What’s so great about Ad Astra is that it while it’s a $100m Brad Pitt movie and a $100m sci-fi movie, more than any­thing else it real­ly feels like a $100m James Gray movie. Some of the great­est film­mak­ers of yes­ter­year were able to carve out their own per­son­al cin­e­ma from with­in the stu­dio sys­tem. Do you think that kind of stu­dio auteurism is still pos­si­ble today, for any­one who isn’t Steven Spiel­berg or Christo­pher Nolan?

First of all, I wish I made a $100m movie. It’s some­where around $20m less than that. I don’t real­ly know exact­ly where the bud­get wound up, and that’s not because I’m being cheeky, I just stopped asked those ques­tions when I was in post. We fin­ished on time, and I don’t know where we end­ed up, but we had about $80m to make this.

Hav­ing said that, your point is still the same. I don’t feel great about the chances of main­tain­ing a voice when costs are $100m or over. There’s a big psy­cho­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence between $80m and $100m. When you start spend­ing $150m, $200m, $250m… I believe The Revenant was $175m, and was very much a per­son­al film, very much an auteur’s movie. I think those are going to be the excep­tion to the rule. They’ll be an acci­dent that wasn’t intend­ed, some weird uni­corn out there. Part of the prob­lem is that the lev­el of risk becomes so enor­mous. Not just the cost of the film, but the cost of the movie cou­pled with the marketing.

When you’re spend­ing $200 – 250m on a movie, you know you’re going to have to spend that again to mar­ket it, so you’re gonna have to make $700m to earn out. That’s a lot of peo­ple see­ing your film, and can some­thing per­son­al exist in that realm? I’m a lit­tle cyn­i­cal about that. So I pushed the enve­lope to about as far as I felt we could go with this kind of movie.

By some com­plex twist of fate, Ad Astra went from being a Regency/​Fox pic­ture to being a Dis­ney movie by the time it came out. If this makes all the mon­ey and wins all the awards we hope it does, could you ever be tempt­ed into the for-hire fran­chise game, or is cin­e­ma an inher­ent­ly per­son­al pur­suit for you?

I don’t see how I could ever push the enve­lope fur­ther than I just did. If I’m spend­ing that kind of mon­ey… Look, you have to find plea­sure in the doing. The result you can’t pre­dict. Who knows how a movie will do at the box office, whether it’ll break even? Or even if peo­ple will like it and get what you’re try­ing to do. The lev­el of risk would be so great on a movie like that, that the pres­sure while mak­ing it would make the endeav­our so intense­ly unpleas­ant that there would actu­al­ly be no rea­son to make the film. You can’t pre­dict out­comes, so you have to find your joy in the mak­ing of it. I have to tell you, it sounds like a ter­ri­fy­ing and mis­er­able prospect.

Ad Astra cer­tain­ly feels like a com­pan­ion piece to The Lost City of Z, or per­haps the flip side to it. Where Fawcett’s char­ac­ter in the ear­li­er film roman­ti­cis­es explo­ration, this seems to do the oppo­site. Are these the­mat­ic through-lines, or motifs, that run through your body of work – and there are plen­ty more – some­thing that is active­ly cul­ti­vat­ed, or are they sim­ply by-prod­ucts of the inter­nal cre­ative process?

I don’t think about it on a con­scious lev­el. You’re com­plete­ly right, but if I think about it, it makes me very self-con­scious. For this movie the inspi­ra­tion was real­ly very sim­ple. 2001: A Space Odyssey exists, it’s my favourite movie in the sci­ence fic­tion genre. There are great ones that we’ve talked about and ones we haven’t – Blade Run­ner, that’s a mas­ter­piece – so what do all those movies have in com­mon? Well, a lot of them, not all of them, are obsessed with the exis­tence of alien life, or are talk­ing about dystopi­an or utopi­an futures. So you think, ​‘What can I do that’s different?’

Even though it’s called 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s not real­ly like The Odyssey. It’s not a myth of man, it’s a myth of the gods. You don’t real­ly know any­thing about Keir Dul­lea, you care more about the com­put­er. So I tried very con­scious­ly to do some­thing that was a myth of man sci­ence fic­tion film, which I didn’t think we’d seen a lot of. So let’s do some­thing that’s from Telemachus’ point of view, because you can’t real­ly do The Odyssey from Odysseus’ point of view unless you want to make like a 17 hour movie or some­thing. So we thought about Telemachus, and his father Odysseus going away for 20 years, and how he would feel about that. Then all of a sud­den the sto­ry took shape, and it wound up hav­ing huge sim­i­lar­i­ties to The Lost City of Z and a cou­ple of oth­er films I’ve made. It wasn’t like I was try­ing to ampli­fy themes from pre­vi­ous films, that would mean I was suf­fer­ing from grandios­i­ty or something.

I was watch­ing Casi­no for the first time in years last night, and it got me won­der­ing, when Scors­ese does his fast push into a Pesci close-up, that he must know that he’s doing ​‘The Scors­ese Shot.’ Is there an ele­ment of self-con­scious­ness there, I wonder?

It’s a great ques­tion, and I know exact­ly what you mean. Obvi­ous­ly I can’t answer for Mar­tin Scors­ese, but there are a num­ber of the­mat­ic and styl­is­tic touch­stones in his films. I nev­er think about style. Prob­a­bly to my detri­ment, may I say. I always just think that what­ev­er I wan­na do should suit the film, suit the sto­ry and try to suit the scene. If there are sim­i­lar­i­ties, then great, and if there aren’t, well maybe that’s great too. I try to think about what’s truth­ful in the scene and try not to be self-con­scious about the style. I bet Scors­ese isn’t self-con­scious either. I bet he just does those shots because that’s the way he feels. It’s like ask­ing, ​‘Did Picas­so paint Dora Maar over and over again that way because that was his style?’ Was he self-con­scious? I don’t think so, I just think it was an instinc­tu­al part of his process. It’s what makes him who he is.

Ad Astra is in cin­e­mas now