What Remains

How the filmmaker James Gray went from the outer boroughs to outer space.

- Nathan Heller

A son might rise and become a father; a daughter might become a mother; an admirer of art, an artist. Such transitions are uneasy and unsure. You try to carry your line forward while improving on it, but there seem to be no rules. What if the future frowns on your best efforts? What if, in seeking gains, you’re actually creating a new kind of loss? These are anxieties that fathers, mothers, and artists share.

The filmmaker James Gray taught himself to face the problem of the future through something that he calls classicism: the idea that what remains from the past can provide guidance for making art in the present. He found his models in clear, almost mythical stories and enduring films—most of all, those movies of the nineteen-seventies in which a generation of directors seemed to exercise daring creative control.

But the assurances of the past are limited; a risk is distancing yourself from the world where you live now. A classicist, like a parent, has the expectation of being understood in retrospect. What remains is the challenge to connect before the delicate human moment has passed.

One Sunday evening two Octobers ago, James Gray had guests over for pasta at a large house he was renting in Central Los Angeles. Gray, a tall, pale man with tufted auburn hair and a whitening orange beard, had moved into the place a month earlier, from the apartment in Hancock Park where he had lived for some years with his wife and their three children. He was the writer and director of six movies, and was shooting his seventh, “Ad Astra”—a film set largely at the outer reaches of the solar system. It was a warm, still evening, two weeks before Halloween. In the front yard, an adult-size skeleton and a child-size skeleton, dressed by Gray’s kids, perched against a gnarled tree in the long late light.