An opening title card explains that “Ad Astra” will take place in the near future. That means there’s a populated colony on the moon some distance away, but close enough to our time that there’s a subway sandwich franchise and a DHL shipping outpost in that colony.
Directed by James Gray, “Ad Astra” convincingly creates a world that is both familiar and fantastic. In the film, Brad Pitt plays Roy McBride, an astronaut who has a top secret mission to find out what lies behind the destructive electromagnetic impulses that come from near Neptune and threaten the very existence of life on Earth. The answer might be McBride’s father (Tommy Lee Jones), a decorated astronaut who was long considered missing.
As McBride travels billions of miles through the galaxy, McBride has to grapple with pirates on the surface of the moon, break into a rocket at launch from Mars, fend off other unexpected dangers, and deal deeply and sincerely with his innermost feelings and definitions ,
The idiosyncratic mix of elemental and exterior – a man sent billions of miles into space to solve problems with his father – was a major inspiration. In the discussion about the impulse behind the film co-authored with Ethan Gross, Gray recalled a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel The Sirens of Titans, 1959, which states, “Humanity has always flung its outriders outward , always outward. … It threw them like stones. … The externalize finally lost its imaginary charms. Only the awkwardness remained to be explored. “
“And I thought that was very nice,” Gray explained. That really sums up why we wanted to do that because the contrast was very effective, dramatic and beautifully illustrated. The further you physically move away and the less you know about yourself, the greater the mystery around you.
“We tried to illustrate the inwardness by going as far as possible,” he said. “We thought the contrast would be dramatic.”
Anchored in Pitts subtle performance, “Ad Astra” moves between big standard situations and quiet moments, McBride often reflects on his alienated relationship with a woman on Earth, played by Liv Tyler.
“It was very much our intention … to have a scene of inwardness, followed by something almost, not quite, but almost a sort of thrill,” said Gray. “Then you would have a chase on the moon, followed by introspection, and then you would face a baboon, followed by a self-observation, the landing on Mars, followed by a self-observation. This was an integral part of the design of following the Shakespearean original of wide and subtle or demolishing it. “
Among the numerous employees that Gray assembled was also the cameraman Hoyte van Hoytema, who also shot Christopher Nolan’s space adventure “Interstellar”. Costume designer Albert Wolsky is a two-time Oscar winner for Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and Barry Levinson’s “Bugsy.” The score is by “Black Mirror” composer Max Richter, with additional music by Lorne Balfe, music composer for “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”.
Production designer Kevin Thompson worked with Gray on the first two feature films of the filmmaker, the stark New York thrillers “Little Odessa” and “The Yards.” Thompson’s later work included Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Birdman”, Judd Apatow’s “Trainwreck” and Bong Joon-ho’s “Okja”, but he had never worked on a project like “Ad Astra”.
“It was totally different for both of us,” Thompson said of his renewed collaboration with Gray. “We entered it together and explored what the approach would be – what were our references and what things we liked? I think we wanted it to feel quite naturalistic and real and not too futuristic, as in the space age. “
The couple has done extensive research by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and found that the basics of space travel have not changed much over the years, even though the technology has evolved. The International Space Station, Skylab and the Apollo missions were still a valuable reference point.
Gray described the aesthetics he sought by saying, “We endeavored to establish them in at least one kind of tangible reality that we could understand as the near future that seemed plausible. Not realistic, but plausible. There is a difference, I think. “
Thompson had to build some of the spacecraft sets, both horizontally and vertically, to photograph the actors in a way that represented the weightlessness of the space. He then created some rooms to incorporate soft details for combat scenes.
For the Moonrover vehicles, part of an exciting chase on the surface of the Moon, Thompson began using the same kind of thin, lightweight material that was used for actual lunar vehicles, but had to modify and amplify them according to the demands of the second – Dan Bradley, the director of the unit, also changes the elements of the set for the practical aspects of production.
An old power plant at Eagle Rock became an integral part of the underground Mars colony, while a former Los Angeles Times print shop became an element of the launch pad from the lunar surface. In an effort to capture a bit of film magic, Thompson did not want to explain how the overwhelming images of nature were seen on the walls of a lounge in the Mars colony, “he said politely – allowing the moody, changing Colors behind Pitt and Ruth Negga in a central scene deliberately evoked the work of artist James Turrell.
The film’s appeal to real spaces in his portrayal of the near future was part of the plan all the time.
“That’s exactly what James’s vision was from the beginning, he was deeply committed to the truth,” said producer Dede Gardner, a partner of Pitt and Jeremy Kleiner in the production company Plan B. “He had footage of a lunar journey, the He showed everyone and was very similar to what he was playing back then, and that has always been his goal, that we see it from the perspective of the ground and that it is not a fantasy, but in fact only the kind of Expression of the citadel of this moment, which is probably not too far from now. “
“And I think that has an impact on this movie,” Kleiner said. “You never lost the feeling that people who are on the moon do not suddenly live in a ‘Jetsons’ world, they are still checked in at a table that you get at Ikea or something, even with the visual effects It took a long time for them to be right and really improved, to make sure they did not feel too futuristic and synthetic and move away from our reality. “
For the visual effects supervisor, Allen Maris, with credits on films such as Stephen Norrington’s The Blade, David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick, and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the question often asked what could not be done, but what Getting the production could not do away with it.
“That was James’ motto throughout production:” What is the minimum of digital work we can do to tell the story? “Said Maris. It’s a very minimalist approach to the CG. Some of these shots do not offer much spectacle. They come out aesthetically just because we add new things in different appearances.
“It’s a kind of composition, it uses all of these elements together, but it’s not a big CG camera that moves or flies through buildings – something that was not included in his vocabulary in this film,” Maris said sadly always trying to be as real as possible.
For Gray, whose recent films were detailed historical narratives “The Immigrant” and “The Lost City of Z”, the practicalities of filming the effects posed a particular challenge. While trying not to lose the emotional momentum of Pitts journey , the star was often laboriously hung on wires or had to act on the set all alone.
“For me, the most difficult part was dealing with it throughout the movie,” Gray said about the balance between effects and emotions. “Actors usually need other actors and the space they are in to answer, the actors have to listen to other actors, actors have to play with the scenery, acting needs that – they are very sensual beings, and I was incapable enough Brad rob these traditional tools and I found that a big challenge. “
With his largest budget film yet, Gray wanted to focus not only on size and scope, but also on emotions. The result is a film that is an anomaly in contemporary Hollywood, a journey through space and into the self, an exciting adventure story with an amazing and deceptive depth.
“Ultimately, this is the ambition to be a bit subversive and bring some kind of emotionalize, tenderness, intimacy, darkness, and light into what is usually a very cold genre,” said Gray. “We tried to turn it upside down. We tried to say, “OK, this is the cold, but look how vulnerable and broken he really is.” And we have tried to do both the awkwardness and the outward appearance of the character and the situation. “