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. As McBride discovers, his father (Tommy Lee Jones) – a pioneer scientist who left Earth years earlier and was thought dead – might be responsible for the cosmic blast. And so begins a journey that sees McBride head to Mars, via the Moon, to make contact with the parent he has not seen for years. Immediately, the Apocalypse Now connections crystallise, with McBride’s search resembling that of Martin Sheen’s character seeking out Marlon Brando’s rogue soldier in the Cambodian jungle. Pitt acknowledges the connection. “He’s looking for his dad and the mystery of who his dad really is.” I wanted [to write] a heroic figure in mythic terms, a flawed person, a person with real limitations. James Gray Then he smiles. “I see our experience [as] similar when I see the making of Apocalypse Now. I see more parallels there. Just trying to crack this damn thing, figure it out. Ah, there were so many walls we just kept hitting. The thing wasn’t working. But we would get ourselves in a corner.” Filming began back in August 2017. “It was by far the most challenging film I’ve done,” says Gray – a big statement when you consider his last movie, 2016’s The Lost City of Z , took him to the Amazon jungle. Initially, he had expected Ad Astra to be straightforward. “I didn’t think it would be a party or anything but I thought, ‘I’ll get my hands around it, I’ll be able to do it.’” Then he got to set, and found Pitt dangling in a large black box. “Your first shot of the day is the camera is looking up 40 feet [12 metres] in the tunnel, that is supposed to be horizontal, and you see that Brad is being lowered down on this system where he is on wires and you’re going, ‘What did I get myself into?’” It was the steepest of learning curves. For Pitt, in virtually every frame and often alone, it was enormously difficult. “We didn’t realise until we got in the middle of it … we were trying to do a film about a man’s inability to connect with others,” he says. “Yet he was often alone, and to illustrate that you need someone else there to show that he couldn’t connect. So it became very challenging in solo scenes to try to illustrate that.” The “delicate” nature of the story added to its trickiness, he continues. “It’s amazing to me as we were putting this thing together, what was landing, what wasn’t. “We could put in a piece of voice-over, a music cue, and it would completely tip the thing over. And we’d have to pull that out, put the car back up, and re-approach it, and we had to do that consistently throughout the film to try to say what we were trying to say without tipping our hand or for it to land blank.” Fortunately, they were like-minded. “James and I talked about doing something forever,” says the 55-year-old Pitt, who has known Gray since 1995, soon after the filmmaker’s acclaimed debut, Little Odessa, came out. His company, Plan B, produced The Lost City of Z , the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett. “He’s like a bulldog,” says Gray. “To have him in your corner is fabulous. You know he’ll fight for what it is you’re trying to go for.” Returning the compliment, Pitt estimates that Gray “really excelled” on The Lost City of Z . “I could see big growth, a big personal story in him.” Then Gray came to him with Ad Astra . “He said: ‘I have this thing.’ It was pretty nascent in its formation … I just trusted going to dive in on it. You really don’t know how the thing is going to land, especially with something like this one.” Gray was fascinated by looking at the type of person who could go into space. “You’re talking about people who are going to go to Mars, in an area that is scarcely the size of this room,” he says, gesturing across the gloomy hotel suite our interview is taking place in. “They’re going to have to live in a space this size together, and they’re going to have to be people who are emotionally completely shut down. They’ll be the first people to walk on Mars and they’re going to have to talk about it … so what does that mean? I was trying to hit these things dead on.” The result is a film that deals squarely with masculinity. “The power of maleness, of masculine behaviour, toxic masculinity, is really ever-present, certainly in American life and probably around the world,” says Gray, who wanted to deliver an implicit critique of maleness in the post-MeToo universe. “Your heart rate never goes above 80, you’re such a man! Isn’t that great? But in fact there’s a damaged, deeply screwed up person underneath that surface.” As personal as Ad Astra is for both Gray and Pitt, it’s also a test case for the future of the film business. Bankrolled by 20th Century Fox, now owned by Disney, is it likely that an expensive, cerebral film such as this will be released by the studios in years to come? “The question is, will we still want to have the big communal experience?” Pitt says. “Or will it all be reduced to streaming? I think we still will.” Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook