Ad Astra: Brad Pitt, James Gray talk about making Apocalypse Now in space – ‘there were so many walls we just kept hitting’
- Pitt put his trust in director but says filming wasn’t easy. ‘We were trying to do a film about a man’s inability to connect with others yet he was often alone’
- Gray was fascinated by the people who go into space. ‘Your heart rate never goes above 80, but there’s a deeply … screwed up person underneath that surface.’
If there’s one thing that director James Gray regrets about his new movie, Ad Astra, it’s when he first described it to the press. “I said it’s a mash-up of Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey , which it sort of is but isn’t.”
Then again, if you’re going to fuse a pair of films, you might as well choose two of the greatest ever made: Francis Coppola’s Vietnam war saga and Stanley Kubrick’s masterful science fiction opus.
Gray wasn’t just making a glib comment, though. “I had been very much into the mythic hero. And when I say hero, I don’t mean superhero. I wanted [to write] a heroic figure in mythic terms, a flawed person, a person with real limitations.” This is a reference to theories explored by author Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness was the chief inspiration for Apocalypse Now.
“You realise that both Stanley Kubrick and Francis Coppola clearly took hugely from Campbell,” Gray says.
In the case of Ad Astra, Brad Pitt plays Roy McBride, an astronaut in the near future who fulfils the remit the 50-year-old Gray talks about – the flawed hero. On the surface, he is full of poise and power. When we first see him, he is skipping around the International Space Antenna high above Earth, until a cosmic burst of energy causes him to tumble to the ground – a catastrophe he survives barely breaking sweat.