Hello. My name is James Gray.
I am the co-writer and director of the film Ad Astra,
which presumably, you've seen already.
And if you haven't, and you're listening to me,
well, that's a grave injustice.
But I'm assuming you've seen it already, so...
And you're willing to listen to me ramble.
And so, here I am, rambling.
It's a strange thing seeing the Fox logo at the head of this film.
This film was made by a company called New Regency,
headed up by a man named Arnon Milchan,
but was supposed to be released by 20th Century Fox.
And by the time the film was completed,
20th Century Fox had been purchased by Disney.
It's a strange thing. I never thought this film would be released by Disney.
You'll notice that the opening of this film, which has this crawl,
is fairly quiet, and you're hearing a sort of strange sound.
Sounds almost like a baby's ultrasound.
Actually, it's the looped voice of Tommy Lee Jones
saying, "I love you, my son" over and over.
And these loops that you hear were created by the people
working in the sound department at Skywalker.
In particular, three people.
One man named Tom Johnson and another man named Gary Rydstrom,
and another man named Douglas Murray.
We all decided that the real meaning of the film
was that the true terra incognita was the human soul.
And we wanted to get as elemental as possible.
And we thought that these tape loops, which sounded somewhat like...
Like I said, a baby's ultrasound, would conjure the child within.
Some of this... It's all not meant to be literal, of course.
It's all meant to be working on an unconscious level.
And how much of that works, you never know.
This opening shot was
very much the idea of Hoyte Van Hoytema, the cinematographer.
And his thought was to go through the sun
to reflect all of the visible spectrum of light,
all the colors of the spectrum.
So, you see that it goes through all of those colors
as the shot progresses and pans, of course, revealing the Earth.
It's a strange thing because it's counterintuitive.
If you're making a science-fiction film, well, it's all about space, right?
It's all about space travel.
It's all about the allure
and the magic, and the romance of space travel.
But in fact, it was very much my intent to make the opposite of that.
I had seen many great films
made in the tradition of science fiction.
2001, obviously, is the touchstone for practically all people
working within the genre.
But there are other great ones, of course.
There's Fritz Lang's Metropolis,
which doesn't take place in space, but is certainly science fiction.
There's Blade Runner,
which, of course, also takes place in a kind of future Los Angeles,
although I hesitate to point out the date that begins Blade Runner.
But the whole idea there...
And of course, there's the work of Steven Spielberg,
who makes something like E.T.
or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or A.I.
But almost in all cases, certainly in the case of2001,
and certainly in the case of the work of Spielberg,
the films are preoccupied with the notion of alien life.
In 2001, Kubrick doesn't depict aliens at all.
He has a black slab monolith,
which is essentially a probe that the aliens send out.
But you don't see the aliens. They remain an abstraction.
So, he beats the trap of having good aliens or bad aliens.
You can project anything you want onto those aliens.
Are they good? Are they bad?
So, he offers up an idea of false gods.
But you have to confront the fact
that you can project anything you want onto them,
and the sense of meaning in the film is endlessly ambiguous.
Now, Spielberg is another matter.
With something like E.T., for example,
he beats the trap too, but he beats it in another way.
The film takes on
a metaphorical meaning,
that the film is no longer about a guy searching for aliens.
The film is really about a young boy and his loneliness,
and that E. T. is really almost like his imaginary friend.
So, the film plays like a fable
and is brilliantly successful on that level.
So, armed with this knowledge
that I had about what science-fiction films had come before,
it was my intent, and along with my co-writer Ethan Gross,
whom I had known since film school
and is a very close friend of mine, and we share very similar tastes...
It was our intent
to make a film which addressed a central comment
made by Arthur C. Clarke,
the co-writer of2001, and a brilliant mind.
He said, "Either we're alone in the universe or we are not.
"And both ideas are equally terrifying."
So, we'd seen a lot of films, as we've just discussed, about aliens,
but never a film where we're alone.
Where, "What if there is nothing out there?
"What if we are all that matters?"
Well, this raises profound psychological...
Profound questions for our identity,
who we are and how we relate to the Earth.
And we felt that we'd never seen a film that covered that territory.
So, if you look at the news today,
there are any one of a host of articles that say,
"Oh, there's this exoplanet, it's a Goldilocks Planet.
"There could be life on this planet. There could be life here.
"There could be life there."
And really, it's not very interesting, is it?
Because if the life is an organism
that is basically a single-cell organism,
you can't have a conversation with a euglenoid or a paramecium, right?
You can't have a conversation with an advanced form of life,
that's so advanced that we can't connect with it.
So, really, even if tomorrow, we were to discover
some alien life-form that was more intelligent than we were,
but that we couldn't really communicate with, it wouldn't matter.
One, we almost assuredly couldn't reach it with any kind of human life span.
And two, we wouldn't be able to communicate with it,
so what good does it do us?
We're alone in the universe, and that idea, that central idea
was what governed all of the creative decisions in Ad Astra.
This sequence about him falling back to the Earth
was meant to present this character, Roy McBride,
a person who adheres to the traditional notions of masculinity...
"His pulse rate never goes above 80," the generals tell us, for example.
What does this mean, to be a man?
What is this idea of masculinity that we used to have
and hopefully, we can rid ourselves of.
It's a very damaging thing to keep our emotions inside,
to look outward, to look for false gods.
That this is inherently connected to this idea that I have just expressed
that Arthur C. Clarke put forth,
about how it might be really terrifying if we were alone, too.
That we have to confront not only our interior identity,
but our connection to the Earth. Because there is no viable plan
that we have
to set up a colony anywhere else, on any exoplanet,
that will provide the same resources
and the same succor that the Earth provides for us.
We felt this was all connected,
and I'd wanted to begin the film with a bang.
In this case, literally.
And that the father's reach would somehow hit Roy back on Earth.
That there would be this big construction,
this big tower, which would speak to our ambitions
as a species to look outward. But what does it mean to look outward?
And that Roy must fall back to Earth in order to survive.
We felt that this was the perfect objective correlative
to the meaning of the story at large.
It was wonderful shooting this.
I didn't do any skydiving myself. I'm way too wimpy.
But there was a terrific guy, his name is Travis.
He was Brad's stunt double,
but also did all the skydiving, and he's absolutely fearless.
And he wore a GoPro camera
and he shot all that footage for us as he fell,
and I have unending admiration for his guts.
ROY: That's what she used to say to me.
GRAY: One of the other things that you learn when you cover...
When you do research on astronauts, you find that
astronauts have a very good sense of the Earth if they're in low orbit,
if they're 200 miles above the surface of the Earth.
That when they see the entire Earth,
their psychological state is not in question.
They're still grounded and rooted to who we are as a species.
But what people have found is that the Apollo astronauts,
those people who have been to the moon and looked up and seen the Earth
as just one celestial body
in a sea of other celestial bodies in a vast darkness,
that all of a sudden, the psychological questions become quite different
and a loneliness creeps in.
So, we had decided
that we were going to depict this man, Roy McBride,
as a very lonely figure.
But in a way, he would be a perfect astronaut for the system.
Because they would need people who were loners,
people who were not necessarily questioning their inner lives,
in order to be successful out in deep space.
I had come across an article about astronauts
that they were trying to recruit for a Mars mission,
where people will be in close quarters
next to each other for a year and a half.
Now, most of us... I certainly know
that as much as I adore my children, if I'm with them for a whole day,
by the end of the day, I'm tearing my hair out
if we are in close quarters.
I know this being in a car with them for a whole day.
But you can imagine, if it's a year and a half,
you would need a very special kind of person.
You would need someone, frankly, with what we call
"schizoid personality disorder tendencies."
Almost a form of what people call "on the spectrum,"
a kind of Asperger's syndrome.
People who are very, very comfortable with being alone,
very comfortable without any kind of human contact, touch.
Just very comfortable functioning within their own systems,
their own series of chores,
of experiments, of field of study.
So, we thought, "Well, this is interesting.
"We can explore a loner.
"We can explore someone with schizoid personality tendencies,
"and have that person have to confront his emotional life,
"and have that person go as far as any human has ever gone."
If you look at the interviews with Neil Armstrong, for example,
who, without question, is one of the more remarkable
human beings in the history of the human race,
that the lunar landing, Apollo 11 landing
is possibly... No, I'm not gonna say "possibly,"
I'm gonna say definitely the single greatest achievement
in the history of man, so far.
But if you listen to him talk, in that first press conference he gives
after he's finally released from quarantine after landing on the moon,
he talks like an engineer.
(IMITATING NEIL ARMSTRONG) "The system had
"6.6 pounds per cubic inch of oxygen."
(IN NORMAL VOICE) He's not connecting
with the more metaphysical aspects of what it means
or what it meant to be the first human being
to step on another celestial body.
Well, I think that was intentional on NASA's part,
that Neil Armstrong was both the perfect person for that journey,
the perfect astronaut, and yet,
he was not at all able to discuss the lunar landing
in any way that connected us to a larger meaning.
Well, we felt this contradiction
was perfect for a character that would have to go to Neptune.
When I first met with Brad Pitt, he and his company, Plan B,
had produced the previous film that I had made,
which was called The Lost City of Z, or if you wanna be detailed about it,
and accurate, in English, you'd say, "Lost City of Zed."
At any rate, Brad met with me.
He'd seen Lost City of Z, and liked it very much,
and he asked me what I wanted to do.
And I said, "Well, I have this script."
I had written this before Lost City of Z.
And in a weird way, they started to complement, or certainly,
they seemed almost like a pair of movies now,
in their exploration of the idea of exploration.
One goes to the Amazon, one goes to space.
But they are both father-son stories.
And Brad was attracted to everything that I've just explained to you.
All of this idea about a schizoid personality,
a person unable, at first,
to confront his relationship with his father,
and what that would mean.
And the traditional notions of masculinity.
Staying within yourself, restraining your emotions,
"Pulse rate never goes above 80," don't reveal yourself,
be a man.
Well, this is very damaging. And what does this mean?
What does this mean for his identity and what does this mean for the story?
And how is it that we can move past this place?
How can we move past this place in the world today,
where men have to be men? It's a very damaging thing
when you can't confront your emotions, discuss them openly.
Women are just encouraged a little bit more to do that.
I see it with my daughter and my sons.
That my daughter is encouraged to express herself emotionally,
my sons are not.
I think that's a devastating thing
and a terrible thing that we teach our young boys.
So, this was all part of the background.
This idea of the father and the son,
that the father had essentially inculcated in the son
a necessity to keep the emotions reined in.
To be the expert, to be the perfect astronaut.
And of course, the father,
in doing so, finds it tolerable and acceptable,
in the greater scheme of things, to abandon the son.
CLIFFORD: Roy, this is a message from your father.
GRAY: We had discussed casting, Brad and I,
about who would play his father.
And it was not an easy question for us to answer.
In one respect,
you needed an actor with some sense of a mythic dimension.
Which is to say, you needed to know who the person was.
The person had to be famous.
The person had to have some kind of persona,
the person had to have a plausible relationship,
or biological relationship with Brad, obviously.
Had to be a certain age.
And then the field began to get a little smaller,
because those actors are not a dime a dozen.
And I'd always loved Tommy Lee Jones.
I remember seeing him first...
Although he had done a lot of films before then,
the first time I became aware of him was Coal Miner's Daughter.
And his work as Doolittle,
Loretta Lynn's husband, is just astonishing.
Both he and Sissy Spacek are brilliant in the film,
and it's a beautiful movie. I love it very much.
But Tommy Lee's work is so beautiful and so sensitive and so aware.
And of course,
then I went back and looked at other things that Tommy Lee had done.
Certainly smaller parts in the early to mid-'70s.
And then Executioner's Song.
And really, had always loved his very biting, no-nonsense persona.
Now, in person, when you meet Tommy Lee,
he is a riveting and brilliant man.
He is not especially talkative,
and one could mistake that for coldness.
But Tommy Lee is not really a cold person.
Tommy Lee is ferociously bright, does not suffer fools gladly,
and incredibly aware and sensitive,
and really wants to do good work,
which is all that you can ask for from an actor,
and I got along with him fantastically well.
The casting process, as I say,
really got very, very simple because there were only a handful of actors
that then had a mythic quality about them.
And I immediately, from the very small group,
thought Tommy Lee would be perfect.
Because of that no-nonsense quality,
and you could see that he would be the type of person
who would abandon his son for vainglorious reasons.
To go off and explore in space and to make great discoveries.
Donald Sutherland, on the other hand, another actor I'd always loved...
I'd loved him ever since I remember,
as a kid, seeing the movie Ordinary People,
in which his work is remarkable,
and then, of course, got exposed to him elsewhere,
in MASH, and a beautiful film called Klute,
which, if you haven't seen, you should. It's a fantastic movie from 1971.
But Donald has been in so many movies.
Now, I don't think
Donald would've been right as Brad's father because...
I don't think that there's that hard, cruel edge.
I think Donald has danger. But he's also got great tenderness.
So, that's why I thought Donald would be perfect
as this man Pruitt, who would be as they say "in loco parentis,"
that he would be the father figure.
Now, you would think, as the film progresses,
"Oh, this father figure is gonna be in it for the rest of the movie.
"He's gonna stay with Brad. He's gonna show him the way."
Well, that's what the film hopefully sets up.
And hopefully, the film then subverts that,
and what happens is you realize, "Yes, he's a father figure,
"but he's a failed father figure," much as Tommy Lee Jones was.
And that this idea of looking toward the patriarch
for some kind of answer...
Metaphorically, it's not gonna work.
That we have to look inside of ourselves.
ROY: I made a promise to always be truthful.
GRAY: So, those people were cast, these men were cast,
really with an eye towards not just their larger personae,
but also with what they convey when they're on-screen.
And Tommy Lee, on-screen, has a very unsentimental presence.
Whereas Donald... Not sentimental, not sentimental at all,
but certainly projects a greater vulnerability.
So, that's why the film was cast the way it was.
Now, there can be huge success sometimes with
film directors who are bold and far more brilliant than I,
and who can cast against type. And then that can become its own magic.
So, for example, there's a beautiful film by Bob Rafelson
called The King of Marvin Gardens,
in which Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern play brothers.
And you would think Jack Nicholson would play the outgoing guy,
(IMITATING JACK NICHOLSON) the guy who's got a lot of things goin' on,
and really is talkative and the girls love him,
(IN NORMAL VOICE) and that Bruce Dern would be the introvert.
Well, they decided to flip roles at the last second,
and the result is quite extraordinary.
But here, I didn't wanna play games like that,
because Tommy Lee Jones is not in the movie very much.
He's only in the movie at the end, obviously,
and Donald is only in the movie at the beginning.
So, you don't have much time to establish archetypes...
Some would say "cliché," but I would say archetypes.
You don't have a lot of time.
So, what you can do, is you can cast according to type,
and then find the specificity of behavior,
the detail that gives it some kind of a larger resonance.
You'll see here, this lunar shuttle,
with the, of course, ridiculous wallpaper.
It was our intent to show
that space travel would be, in the near future,
more developed to go to the moon.
That that would be the domain even of some kind of space tourism.
So that there would be commercial systems that would bring us to the moon.
You'll see the product placement here, Virgin Atlantic, which
they were happy and proud to participate in.
That was great. You'll also see Lockheed Martin in a bunch of places.
This was our intent, to give a grounding
to all of the settings and all of the spacecraft.
And here, he asks for a blanket and pillow pack.
She charges him over $100 for it.
It was our way of saying that, "The past is the present is the future."
That human beings
may be more technologically advanced in the years to come,
in the 50 years, 100 years to come... But that human behavior doesn't change.
So, we like to remind ourselves and you
that, well, you'll be able to go to the moon,
but you've got to still pay for your pillow.
It's one of my favorite things in the movie 2001.
They come upon a black monolith,
which could be the greatest discovery in the history of science,
and they pose for a photograph,
and the guy taking the picture
is gesturing for them to get inside the frame of his picture.
Human behavior doesn't really change.
When you wanna make a science-fiction film,
you ask yourself, "Okay,
"what does it mean to look into the future?"
Well, looking into the future, most of our answers are wrong.
Most predictions we make are wrong.
Now, we're stunned by people like Leonardo da Vinci, right?
Who, we say, "He invented the first airplane."
Well, he didn't. Because none of that stuff that he drew would work.
He didn't know about Bernoulli's lift.
It doesn't diminish Leonardo da Vinci's brilliance,
but very little of what we predict comes true.
So, knowing that already,
knowing that we face a situation
where any prediction we make about what the moon will look like
50 or 100 years from now will be wrong,
what we tried to do was simply look at the present.
Or look at 50 years ago or 100 years ago,
and see what has changed.
So, how clothing has changed in the last 50 to 100 years.
Well, for men, not very much.
Men wore suits in 1950 or 1960.
Men will probably wear some form of suits in 2050, 2060.
Sharpies that you write with,
black Sharpie magic markers, they existed in 1964.
They've existed in some fashion since 1870, I think.
So, people will probably be working with Sharpies.
Fast-food restaurants existed 50 years ago, that's for sure.
They'll probably exist 50 years from now.
In fact, they'll probably be even more popular on the moon
because there'll be things like artificial meat,
which will be growable on the moon.
So, we tried to use the past as our reference for the future.
We also thought, frankly, it would be funny
to have fast-food restaurants or chains like Applebee's on the moon.
And we tried to say, with the moon,
"Okay, how do we look at what the moon will be?
"Well, let's look at parts of the Earth
"that haven't been, or that weren't, even up until the last 30 or 40 years,
"exposed thoroughly.
"Well, there's been a huge call for natural resources,
"so, obviously, on the moon, there's a lot of something called helium-3.
"We don't know what the commercial applications will be forhelium-3 yet,
"but we're sure that there will be.
"There'll probably be some kind of lunar treaties among nations.
"The number of treaties that are adhered to are almost zero."
I believe that the number of treaties that
European-Americans signed with the indigenous peoples of the Americas,
and then were later adhered to, I actually think is zero.
So, knowing this,
knowing that there might be some kind of international lunar treaties,
knowing that there would be natural resources,
knowing who we are as human beings,
well, that means that there's equal parts
Hudson News, and Nathan's, and Vegas Vic,
as you see here...
And pirates, people clamoring for natural resources,
because there would be lots of no-man's land on the moon.
There would be no nation-states that could plausibly claim certain areas.
And yet, there'd be highly valuable natural resources.
Valuables potentially on the rovers.
And how could you govern no-man's land on the moon?
Hence, this sequence.
I can't lie,
a lot of the motivations in the film were simply to do things
that were not technically possible before.
If you had said to Stanley Kubrick,
"What does the moon look like?
"And can you put a lunar rover chase on it?"
Well, he was so brilliant, he probably would've found a way.
But if you watch 2001,
his depiction of the lunar surface isn't quite right.
Now, we excuse him, of course,
because he didn't have the information available
when he started making the film in 1964, '65, '66.
He did the best he could with what he had available.
But we know, of course, now, what the moon looks like.
We have a lot of great 16mm film shot of the moon
by the Apollo astronauts.
And we used it.
A lot of the surfaces that you see here are actual lunar surfaces.
So, in some sense,
it might be the first sequence ever shot on the moon
that was shot on location.
I have a lot of
love and respect for the people at Atomic Fiction,
the company that helped us put this together.
The film was...
This sequence was put together really, by a combination of them.
The close-ups that you see here of Brad, of Sean Blakemore,
the actor who is driving,
the lieutenant who gets shot and Donald Sutherland,
we shot this on a stage.
And the wider shots on the rover,
the practical rovers were shot in the desert in Death Valley,
which was insane because temperatures got up to 130 degrees,
and the stuntmen would have to have their suits heavily air-conditioned,
and sometimes, they wouldn't work.
And in some cases, the rovers are entirely CG.
Computer-generated.
So, like for example, that one, where it just got hit.
So, it's a combination of practical,
shooting in the desert, replacing the sky,
and CGI.
The footage shot in the desert was shot with a 3D rig.
That is to say, we shot with two cameras that were...
One was a digital camera,
an ALEXA infrared digital camera.
The other was a film camera,
providing the grain structure and the higher-resolution image.
Now, I've not made an entire feature film digitally before.
And I won't until I can't,
because I find that film and film stock is still vastly superior
as a method and a means of recording an image.
There's something called "temporal resolution."
I don't wanna bore you too much with this,
but when you see an image on film, it's made up of grain,
and every frame you see,
the structure of grain changes from frame-to-frame.
In a digital image,
the scan from frame-to-frame is always the same.
In order to do a film-type experience,
where the structure of the grain, or the structure of the grid, I'll say,
would change every frame,
you would probably need hard drives
that would fill the Empire State Building for one movie.
So, it's not plausible.
And film is still the best
and most beautiful means to record the image.
But I am not a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination.
Some of my good friends in the film world...
Christopher Nolan, who shoots exclusively on film,
and I love him dearly,
he is adamant about finishing on film,
cutting the negative and the like. But there are other friends of mine,
for example, Paul Thomas Anderson shoots on film only.
But Paul has embraced certain aspects of digital as I have.
And the way that I feel about it is
that as the initial and original device to record the image,
that film is still the best.
But I do believe in the magic of the digital intermediate,
where the film is scanned and then you can adjust what it looks like.
Chris Nolan still goes the old route,
where you take out a machine called the Hazeltine printer,
and you adjust it.
It's photochemically finished. It's photochemical
from beginning to end, never electronic.
And it works brilliantly for him,
but I enjoy the greater control of the digital process
after the initial recording of the image.
Here you see the failure of the father figure,
that he can't proceed any further.
And so, we know Roy is gonna be left alone.
I was really blown away by Donald.
He's done such great work in so many movies,
and he's worked with...
My favorite director of all time is Federico Fellini.
He worked with Fellini on a movie called Fellini's Casanova.
And of course, I spent a lot of our down time
asking him what it was like to work with Fellini.
And he likes...
He's very old-school. He likes the director
to sit next to the camera, not to look in the monitor.
Which I like, too, unless I physically can't fit in the space.
And Donald is very aware of all aspects of the production.
He's very aware of what lenses you put on the camera.
And he'll say to you,
(IMITATING SUTHERLAND) "Is that a 32 you have on the camera?"
Or, "Is that a 50?" (IN NORMAL VOICE) And he'll look and really pay attention
and he'll modulate his performance depending on what lens you're using.
He is, in all senses, an old pro.
Brad is a beautiful actor.
And in some ways, we underrate him
because he has a movie-star persona and movie-star charisma.
But he is a fine, fine, fine actor, and every bit as good
as any actor I've worked with, and extremely subtle.
If you give him a direction...
There are times when I would give Brad a direction,
and he would apply the direction and I would say to myself,
"He hasn't really done it. Has he played it?"
And then, when I would see dailies, I would realize,
"Of course he did. Of course he did."
He made a very beautiful, subtle adjustment.
And Brad is very beautiful to work with because he is aware of
how important it is to be open and vulnerable.
At least he was with me, and in this film.
We had resolved to break down the barrier
between actor and character, character and movie.
That is, to be as open and as vulnerable as is possible.
The most direct expression of the character's interior state of being.
And that became
very much our modus operandi as we made the film.
I've said before and I've said since...
I've kind of gotten in a little bit of hot water about this.
I've said I wanted to make the most realistic movie
about space travel that anyone's made.
And that was a very dumb thing of me to say
because I misspoke, really. I didn't mean "realistic" meaning
that this is all happening.
What I should have said is,
"I'm interested in the most plausible version of science fiction."
So, that is to say, "They're going to Mars,
"they're going to Neptune.
"There's no realistic way
"that we can go to Neptune in 79 days, as is said in the film.
"But is it plausible, in the next 50 to 100 years?"
Maybe. Ion propulsion, plasma propulsion,
some kind of nuclear-fusion propulsion. These are being worked on.
They don't exist yet, but they're plausible.
So, we decided to stick with the plausible.
The production design was done by a man named Kevin Thompson.
And my ego,
since I was a little boy, has taken quite a battering.
But one thing I have a big ego about and I feel very, very proud of
is the fact that I gave Kevin Thompson his first job as a production designer,
on my first film, a movie called Little Odessa.
And that Kevin has revealed himself to be
one of the best production designers working in the movie business.
I'm very proud of that.
See, I take the credit for Kevin's wonderfulness.
And his work in this movie, I think, is brilliant.
This is an extension of what I was just talking about,
this idea of the plausible. So, what did we do?
Kevin looked exhaustively
at all of the pictures of the ISS, all the pictures of Skylab.
We went to Lockheed Martin,
we went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California,
had lengthy discussions with astronauts
all about space travel and the necessities of space travel.
Now, you'll see the progression in the design.
In the trip to the moon, it's commercial.
There's wallpaper, they're giving out drinks,
the pillow and blanket packs.
And now, here, to go to Mars, Mars is deep space.
So, all of a sudden, the materials are military-grade.
They don't break down. The quality of the switches is different.
The quality of the nuts and bolts of the space is different.
This is meant for long-haulers, for real space travel.
For the difficult, grinding work it takes
to have a spacecraft exit the Earth or lunar orbit.
Now, the science of the film is,
we tried to ground it, like I say, in not only the plausible,
but also does dictate the narrative.
So, some might feel, "I don't understand this.
"They have to go to the moon to go to Mars?"
Well, this is actually what they think is the case.
Because on the moon, one has to remember,
there's only one-sixth the amount of gravitational pull that the Earth has.
So, why take off from the moon to go to Mars?
Well, if it's only one-sixth as strong gravitationally,
that means that a rocket can be smaller or have less thrust
in order to leave the lunar gravitational pull
than the Earth's gravitational pull.
So, in the future,
we will probably have the Orion spacecraft,
which is going to take us to Mars, they're hoping by 2033,
that will take off from the moon.
And we're going to build the Orion in dry dock,
in a craft that orbits the moon.
Sounds like science fiction, doesn't it?
ROY: He promised me that one day I could join him in his pursuits,
that he'd come back for me.
And I believed him.
First man to Jupiter.
GRAY: The intent here was to show that this is a group of astronauts
who were entirely unaware
of The Surge or the cosmic-ray bursts that were coming from the Lima Project.
That they might have been aware of The Surge itself,
but they weren't sure what the cause was.
And so, they were in some sense really oblivious,
certainly were oblivious to Roy's purpose.
And that Brad's character would be in a state of real turmoil
because he wasn't able to express the purpose of his mission to anybody,
and that becomes a very draining psychological state.
When you are forced into an interior position
where you cannot express yourself,
it forces upon you an ever greater sense of
solitary confinement, of loneliness.
And so, here, he can't interact with the crew.
One of the films I owe an obvious debt to here
is Apocalypse Now, Francis Coppola's movie from 1979.
Now, that's a masterpiece. It's a very important film for me.
I saw it first when I was a little boy. I was only 10 years old,
and it was unlike anything I'd seen before.
And clearly, I owe a lot to that film.
The use of voice-over.
The idea that a person travels to the end of the solar system,
in this case, and in that movie, up the river to confront a father figure.
But here, I tried to make it literal.
Kurtz in that movie is from Heart of Darkness,
the book by Joseph Conrad, is not his actual father.
And here, it's his actual father,
that he is going to have to confront something directly emotional.
Now, I don't believe that Francis Coppola
needed to do that because he had the context,
the historical context of the Vietnamese war
with which to tell his story.
But stripped of any kind of historical context like the war,
I wanted to confront more directly the emotional inner life of Roy
and what it meant to be abandoned by his father.
That's what made the story personal to me.
I had read a quote.
Not to get too pretentious or sententious on you,
I'm sorry about that, so let me apologize in advance...
But I'd read a quote on a wall in an art exhibit, which said,
"History and myth always begin in the microcosm of the personal."
So, the more specific we can get,
the more specific and personal we can become,
hopefully, the more general, the more broad,
the more mythic that we can become.
And the idea was to tell a story
that almost adhered to the simplicity of a Greek myth,
that was almost like a Campbellian myth, where the hero...
And we sometimes confuse that now with superheroes,
where they're all-powerful and they're infallible,
and that they're forces for good.
But a hero in mythic terms, a flawed individual,
a person who seeks some kind of transcendence,
well, this was our idea.
And in the hero's myth, he would have a series of trials.
Well, you see it here. The first one, the gateway, right?
He has to get through the moon.
The trip on the moon, where he has to face the pirates
in order to go progress towards Mars.
And here's another trial
where he is going to face
something that's very unexpected.
And that, of course,
is the research monkey or research baboon on the Vesta spacecraft.
The sequence was meant to express,
in real terms,
the absolute bizarre unpredictability
of the journey and of space travel in general,
and of what it means
for Earth-bound creatures to be in space.
Behavior becomes completely different.
Our physical being becomes completely different because of zero gravity.
And the situations, the issues, the ideas that we face,
the crises that we face become of a very different order.
In space, that endlessness, that void, that infinite,
forces us to abandon
all practical considerations, all practical concerns.
You don't... I'll give you an example.
Everybody in the movie wears one of these spacesuits now, right?
This is how they survive. They have to wear these outfits.
This spacesuit is, in a way, their own private spacecraft
and it is completely practical.
The color of it is practical, the shape of it is practical,
that pack, what people call a jet pack, it's really called an "MMU,"
that's practical.
It's a very practical existence.
And so, you are left really
faced only with your own internal struggle.
There is nothing to distract you.
"Oh, look, there's a scratch in the hood of my car.
"Look, the hem of my garment is torn,
"I have to get this altered, I've gained weight.
"Look, I ate this pasta dinner last night at a very good restaurant.
"That has too much carbs." No.
Your space food is chosen for you.
Your clothing is chosen for you.
The only thing you have is that void.
And that void is not bad, it's not good, it is indifferent.
And it is cruel in its indifference.
And so, this forces this aloneness, this separation from the Earth.
This lack of practical distraction forces the inner dialogue,
it forces the inner monologue.
This is another reason why we felt that the voice-over became necessary.
Now, the voice-over itself was not an easy thing to arrive at.
I wrote a version,
Brad gave notes on the voice-over,
and then some other writers contributed.
A poetess named Tracy K. Smith, who is actually credited
at the end of the film, gave a couple turns of phrase.
As did Charlie Kaufman, the wonderful screenwriter.
And we tried to... We got help from all quarters.
I also consulted Kazuo Ishiguro for a time,
the famous novelist, the wonderful novelist.
All of whom gave us great ideas,
but ultimately, what you hear in the film
is very much a collaboration between Brad and me.
And we felt it essential in order to get inside of his head,
and to understand him, and his internal dialogue...
His internal monologue, I should say.
The visual effects in this film
were really what you might call a bespoke thing.
Many people have said to me or asked me,
(IN NEW YORK ACCENT) "Who did the effects in your movie?"
(IN NORMAL VOICE) And the answer is, a lot of people.
I mentioned Atomic Fiction earlier.
They were the company that worked on the lunar rover sequence...
MPC is another firm.
They worked on a lot of the spacecraft stuff
and on a lot of the Mars stuff.
There was Industrial Light & Magic, ILM.
Perhaps the most famous company for visual effects.
They did a lot of conceptual work
in pre-production for us.
And the baboon here, who just blew up,
he was done by a company called Weta, which is located in New Zealand.
Weta is famous for doing primates. They did the Planet of the Apes films.
And they are a really remarkable group of people.
And it's interesting,
the technology that goes into making the computer-generated apes
has changed and gotten better
even since they made the Planet of the Apes movies.
Even just by about 5%, but still, just a little bit better.
And the way you shoot it is very, very distracting.
We had a stuntwoman wrestling,
and she wears what looks like
gray pajamas with these white dots all over her.
And you kind of have to look at it and say,
"What the heck is that? That's supposed to be a baboon,
"but it's some young woman
"who's hanging on wires and is wrestling.
"Is that gonna look good?"
And then, of course, a year later,
you're seeing a baboon wrestling with Brad Pitt.
It's funny how these things work.
To that point, I should talk to you about the sets themselves
because it was a strange undertaking.
The cockpit was designed
with an eye towards making every single switch mean something.
A man named Robert Yowell,
who had helped in the development of the cockpit of the space shuttle,
talked to us and aided us in the design of the cockpit.
Well, that's it. I mean, we...
We go to work, we do our jobs,
and then it's over.
GRAY: So you'll see around Brad here,
every switch, every screen has some practical function.
Brad was obsessed with this.
He would always call up Robert Yowell,
or he would call up an astronaut that we consulted a lot,
a fantastic guy named Garrett Reisman who's flown...
Not only flew the shuttle, but also was on the ISS,
the International Space Station.
He'd always say, "What does this switch mean?
"What does this mean?" and "What does this screen mean?
"If I could fly it this way, how would I pull back on the stick?"
'Cause he wanted to be very accurate that way,
which I thought was just terrific.
And sometimes,
I would sit there and marvel at Brad's commitment
to the detail and accuracy
of what it would mean to fly a spacecraft.
And we built
both the previous spacecraft you saw, called the Vesta,
the one with the baboon in it, and this one, twice.
We built it horizontally and vertically
because of the zero-gravity work.
Now, there is a way to address zero gravity
that relies more on computer graphics or computer-generated imagery.
That would be, for example, Gravity,
the Alfonso Cuarón movie with Sandra Bullock.
Where Alfonso did something really remarkable,
which is essentially treated zero gravity
almost like one would treat a cartoon.
I don't mean a cartoon lacking complexity in narrative.
What I mean is, a cartoon, meaning that he would use her face,
Sandra Bullock's face,
superimposed on an entirely CG body.
So that he would almost treat it like he was an animator.
And the level of technical expertise involved in that film is jaw-dropping.
It is a truly remarkable technical achievement.
We tried to go a little more old-school.
Hoyte and I looked at 2001,
but also, Hoyte had worked on Chris Nolan's film Interstellar
and had some previous experience with it.
And we have the actors acting on
what they call "apple boxes," which is wood crates
that would move a little bit,
so that they would never have a solid footing.
And then for the wider shots, we hung actors on wires with harnesses,
with the camera at the base of the set, looking upward.
So, they'd be hanging on these wires,
and then the wires would either be obscured by their bodies,
or they would be painted out later on.
As you can imagine, this was its own form of
a painstaking and grueling activity.
And it was very, very hard on Brad,
very hard on the other actors. And may I say, all the actors
treated it like real troupers.
Because they would have to wear these very uncomfortable harnesses,
and the core strength required is considerable,
and they would go home at night really beaten up.
And it would mean that we would get
six or seven camera setups in the course of a day,
when traditionally, you get maybe 14 or 15.
It became quite painstaking.
And so, the wide shots in the film were done with a vertical set
with the actor hanging on wires.
That is not a comfortable state.
Actors... I love actors. I think they are
wonderful, crazy, beautiful, wounded souls.
And they are the key to any movie experience.
And you have to support them
and give them the space to be as comfortable as they can be.
And one of the things actors rely on,
it's in fact a critical thing that an actor relies on,
is environment, and is stimuli,
in order to know what to react to,
the other actor in the scene...
You know, one remembers famously
Marlon Brando walking with Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront...
A beautiful film, 1954. Directed by Elia Kazan.
...where she drops her glove walking in the park.
And right behind her, he picks up the glove and starts playing with it.
It's a beautiful human moment.
Well, those moments are very hard to achieve in a movie like this.
Because you see the way Brad is dressed,
or the way the wonderful actor Loren Dean is dressed here.
And it's almost like you have a fishbowl over your head
and you're dressed in this giant Michelin Man spacesuit.
And it becomes very difficult when you're hanging upside-down,
or when you're acting against a green screen,
to project that stimuli that you need in order to invest in the character.
So, for example, Brad looks out the window here,
and you see a Martian surface at dusk.
Brad saw a big orange screen.
We had done a lot of research about the Martian surface
and about exploration on Mars.
And we found that...
Though the movie The Martian,
with Matt Damon, the Ridley Scott film, which is a wonderful movie,
extremely entertaining movie.
Though we were big admirers of that film,
that we had to do something different.
And we had to try to be as true to what Mars would be like as we could
with all the most recent technology and photography of the Martian surface.
So, you'll see here again,
we used real photographs from the Martian rovers
as a basis for the Martian surfaces and the exteriors.
So, again, this might be the first movie
to be shot on location in Mars.
All right, you guys are good to move to the next concourse.
GRAY: The idea of going underground also has its foundation in...
Hopefully, in plausible science. Of course, we don't actually know.
We don't actually know how effectively to land on Mars.
Mars has an atmosphere. The air is quite thin.
There is sound on Mars.
The sound on Mars is all apparently much more low-end.
We again, of course, don't know this for certain.
Although, one of the Mars rovers did send back
the sound of Martian wind, about a year ago.
And it sounded very boomy, very bassy.
But we do know that Mars has underground lakes.
Many are frozen. Some may not be.
We also know that Mars has what's called "lava tunnels."
So, the most plausible idea for a Martian base
would be these tunnels,
because they're already dug underground for us.
They already exist.
So, we depicted... We felt that Mars would play best
as a kind of underground version
of what an Antarctica base is for us right now.
So, the United States has the largest Antarctica base in the world.
It's called McMurdo Station.
And we looked a lot at McMurdo Station photographs.
Again, a total adherence to the practical,
just like the spacecraft.
That the surfaces, that the furniture, that the space
would be only what they needed or could bring in
or could make there with 3D-printing, and not much more.
That the future is not going to be designed by Giorgio Armani.
The future is not going to be designed by
Richard Meier, or Peter Zumthor, or Frank Gehry.
The future is going to be designed in space
mostly by necessity.
Mostly by what we need to survive.
Because space and other planets are hostile to us.
So, we decided to avoid all manner of style.
In a way, to get rid of the idea of style.
"I'm attempting to communicate with you.
"SPACECOM wants you to know that they are aware of the disturbances...
"and that it cannot be your responsibility.
"They would like all information about attempts...
GRAY: These scenes in the Mars communication room,
which was shot in what's called an "anechoic chamber,"
in, I believe, Santa Clarita, California...
Although I forget the exact location, even though
I was there myself for a couple of nights.
It was very hot this night when we were shooting.
It was extremely hot in this anechoic chamber.
And it was such a strange environment.
And we didn't really have to do much production design here.
I think we put some lights in the floor,
which you see, he's walking on that strange grate from the shot above.
And we opened up the roof to see space,
so that Brad could look up to space.
As if to say, to look up to his father and his connection to his father.
It was a strange space, and Brad's work in this sequence
was just extraordinary. I think he did...
We did the scene from many different angles.
So, he had to do it many times.
And I believe I shot 17 takes with two cameras
on the message to his father,
and I think what you see in the film is take 12,
although my memory might deceive me here.
And each time, he gave me something slightly different.
Some more emotional. Some less emotional.
And in my own view,
this take struck precisely the right chord.
The music of the film was its own strange
series of events, we shall say.
I had heard of Max Richter actually through
his revisiting of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
And I was very, very struck
by the challenge that the film's music would present.
Because if you're to go all symphony,
which is to say instruments that we know of from
the West, from really, since about 1800,
starting with pianoforte, the piano.
You're talking about... That's the language.
The basic language of movies.
It started really, with silents.
But in the studio system, with people like Max Steiner,
who scored King Kong and Gone with the Wind,
that became the language.
The Central European Orchestra.
And then somewhere around the mid-1960s,
with what's called the "musique concrète movement..."
There were a series of composers.
Krzysztof Penderecki from Eastern Europe,
and Morton Feldman from the United States, for example,
really started to experiment with
and veer away from the idea of, melody, for example,
and really took great pains to experiment also with
other forms of instrumentation.
And Stanley Kubrick, whom we have spoken of quite a bit,
explored the music of a man named Ligeti.
And you'll hear his music not just in 2001,
but also used in Eyes Wide Shut.
And obviously, I couldn't do that
because that has already been done by Mr. Kubrick in an unmistakable way.
So, then, you turn, "Maybe, do we look towards the orchestral?"
Well, Mr. Kubrick has certainly done that with the Blue Danube.
And standard orchestral pieces, well, I really was interested in organ.
And that, I thought, gave us a kind of grand, mythic idea.
But then Chris Nolan made Interstellar,
and Hans Zimmer's score uses organ, so I couldn't do that.
Then you say, "Okay. What about electronic?"
Well, again, Stanley Kubrick has used that with the work of Wendy Carlos.
And of course, Vangelis' fantastic score from Blade Runner,
Ridley Scott has used the electronic score.
So, then the electronic music is taken from you.
So, what is left? Well, electronic is gone.
Western instruments are gone from you.
And atonal voices are gone from you. "Well, what about combining all three?
"And what about using instruments that are maybe Eastern?"
So, the idea through...
What I pursued through Max when we met,
I showed him the film, he responded very positively to it,
and he recorded very strange sessions.
There was some orchestral score.
There was also an electronic component. There was also human voices.
So, he did a kind of amalgamation.
He used an instrument called a Canna Sonora,
which I had never seen before. A man came and put white gloves on his hands
and he started to rub these very long metal bands
that would make this sound, like a kind of a wailing sound.
So, we tried to go outside the box of standard instrumentation.
And it worked wonderfully well in some places,
and in some other places,
there were things that I was attracted to.
For example, the...
Brad had introduced me to an electronic composer named Nils Frahm,
whose music is used in the film in a couple of places as well.
That, we felt, expanded the scope of the film,
to use his music in certain places.
And then there was a man named Lorne Balfe who came aboard at the end,
who wrote a couple of pieces
that adhered to more the genre aspect of the film,
which it was felt needed to be accentuated a little bit more.
So, the score became a little bit of this and little bit of that.
And, ultimately, I was pretty happy with it,
even though it had a strange nature, that it was all over the place.
But that seemed to me to mirror his journey,
that it got stranger and weirder as he progressed deeper into space.
This room, I wanted an almost clichéd idea of the Earth,
and what the Earth would mean. So, you see these waves.
It's almost like a screensaver on Apple TV.
And it was a bit, if I am to be honest with you,
it was a bit of an afterthought.
The idea was arrived at after the set was built
and is all, obviously, visual-effected.
Now, I don't know how much we would have done this practically anyway,
but I'm sure Hoyte, quite rightly,
probably takes great issue with this because he didn't light it
with these backgrounds in mind. It was lit as a practical set.
But I felt it was important to remind us of what the Earth physically was,
and to give the space this other level of meaning,
particularly for her character, for Ruth Negga.
Now, Ruth is a brilliant actress.
And also, I wanted someone who could plausibly have grown up on Mars.
And Ruth has in her...
And every actor brings with him or herself a persona,
or what they project on-screen.
So, what people say about Brad is "all-American guy," you know.
He has his crew-cut and he feels like one of those
American astronauts from the 1960s.
And Ruth has an ethereal quality.
An almost distant quality,
and someone who perhaps didn't have exposure
to a lot of human beings on the Earth, an emotional remove.
And we felt that this would be perfect to convey, really,
a tangible version of what we might call a "Martian."
A human being, of course, born on Mars,
but someone who, of course, would be a Martian.
Now, a human being born on Mars would probably miss the Earth terribly.
That person would be acclimatized to a gravitational pull
that is one-third the gravitational pull of the Earth.
That person would be totally unacquainted with going outside
and breathing the air and sitting under a tree and reading a book.
That person would be totally unacquainted with seeing birds
or having a spider walk across her foot.
So, there would be a certain remove to that person. This is what we felt.
And Brad really has no connection with any other people in the film,
and we felt that there was one fleeting chance he would have,
and it would be her.
In mythic terms, Joseph Campbell would say,
"It was a hero's meeting with the goddess."
Now, I wasn't quite so literal about it,
and even thinking of her as "the goddess" I felt
was a bit wrongheaded because I didn't want to project some sexist...
Or hint at some romantic idea between the two. I found that to be a mistake.
But I did want him to have a connection with another human being.
Another human being who shows him some measure of compassion.
Another human being with whom he has a bond, or at least the hint of a bond.
And I had also remembered reading about Nausicaa from the Odyssey.
Homer's Odyssey.
And these all went into informing her character.
I'm disclosing a tragedy.
Here, on the edge of our solar system, some of our people
have been unable to handle the psychological distress...
GRAY: It was a sense, almost to give a kind of organic quality to the space.
The movement of light, that it was meant to mimic almost
the internal workings of Roy. It was his pulse, his heart rate.
That it was some kind of an organic space.
We tried to look at real-life examples for Tommy Lee Jones' character.
So, what does that mean?
Well, obviously, nobody has been to Neptune
and hung out in a space station on Neptune.
So, what do we do?
Well, there have been many explorers, and we have to remember that
when Europeans traveled to the Americas,
there was no certainty that they would find land, obviously.
And it was like going to another universe for them.
What it must have felt like for Magellan, for example,
to try to travel around the world.
So we try to look at those examples, but also,
frankly, to try and do a deep dive into megalomaniacal behavior.
And I had really tried to drill down on this kind of megalomania.
I had been reading about Jim Jones.
Now, it's become a kind of a joke that we say it now,
you know, he or she "drank the Kool-Aid."
Meaning, of course, that somebody drank a poison
that made them do crazy things.
But it comes from Jonestown, a remote colony
in South America,
which was developed by the Reverend Jim Jones, who was an American,
and quite active in the American civil rights movement,
and anti-poverty, and was a person of very laudable efforts.
And, in fact, was lauded by Walter Mondale,
the Vice President under Jimmy Carter, as a really great American.
But went down to South America,
and really lost all sense of reality and lost his mind,
and is the person responsible
for the second greatest loss of American life
in a non-combat situation...
Over 900 people, I believe,
in a mass suicide that he inspired by having them all, yes, drink Kool-Aid.
HELEN: This is a map of an underground lake
beneath the launchpad.
You'll be able to access the ship from there.
We're approaching.
They're gonna come for you, you know.
I know.
GRAY: His message about his divine mission,
and how megalomania and ego and narcissism overtook him,
and how, in our movie, the void,
which, in the case of Jim Jones, was the jungle...
But in our movie, the giant expanse, the void,
devastated his psychological health,
and how he really became totally distanced from reality.
And it was part of why he became totally tolerant
with having abandoned his own child.
We also looked at fictional sources.
I was very into Moby Dick. It's still my favorite novel...
Maybe The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky is my favorite novel.
But I really love Moby Dick, which I came to later in life.
I was a very crappy student in high school,
and we were made to read Moby Dick in
I believe it was senior year of high school.
Being a bad student and a pretty crummy guy,
I cheated my way through.
I read what was called the Monarch Notes or CliffsNotes,
I can't remember which now.
And I didn't do very well on the test, but that was what it was all about.
"Ha, ha, ha. I've cheated the system,
"I didn't have to read that stupid, long, boring book about a whale."
Well, when I was in my early thirties, I said to myself,
"I have to read Moby Dick, it's one of the most important
"novels ever written, and I guess it'll be a chore, but, okay."
And I cracked it open, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever.
And I became obsessed with Herman Melville's writings.
Bartleby, the Scrivener and Billy Budd.
And one of the things you come across in Moby Dick, in particular,
is the absolutely brilliant conception of character,
and the real knowing quality that Melville had towards Captain Ahab.
Now, Captain Ahab in that book has been...
Had his leg bitten off by the whale.
Now, actually, if you read the book closely, it's also his manhood,
his penis is lost. Bitten off by the whale.
Although, that's not spoken of too often, but...
He's been essentially neutered by the whale.
And getting, capturing and killing that whale then becomes his obsession.
And the book becomes a brilliant meditation on obsession,
and the destructive power of obsession.
And the destructive power of narcissism and of
what you think is the greater good or the goal that you need to pursue,
even if it's completely self-destructive.
And so, I started to see
Tommy Lee Jones' character as almost a kind of
outer-solar-system Ahab in pursuit of the white whale.
And in this case, the white whale would be intelligent life.
That elusive thing that he'll never get to,
and it'll never satisfy him.
But through his narcissism and his megalomania,
and the void, that terrible distance he has to travel,
madness sets in.
Now, in whaling times, of course, that was the great expanse of the ocean.
Orin the times of the explorers, that would be the endless jungle,
which drove people mad.
But here, we have space.
And I don't think that NASA... Although certainly, they've tried.
But NASA has not really been able
to understand exactly the implications on the human mind
of deep-space travel.
That was the preoccupation we had in the film.
The genesis of the movie was a strange one.
I had read about the splitting of the atom,
the first time the atom was split, under the grandstand
at Stagg Field in Chicago.
And before conducting the experiment,
and certainly, before conducting the first nuclear explosion
in New Mexico,
Fermi had warned his scientists that there was a 90% chance
that the entire southwest of the United States
would not be destroyed, which, of course, is terrifying.
It means there was a 10% chance
that the southwest US would be destroyed.
And there was a greater question,
they thought 99% chance that all known matter,
all known matter would not be destroyed.
And yet, they did the experiment anyway.
So, I started to put that together
with a megalomaniacal, Jim Jones kind of figure.
And in deep space, having lost it,
what would it mean if that person were conducting experiments,
or something had happened in deep space
that meant our survival was at stake.
Now, as these stories evolve,
what happens is that you change the story...
Not just to change it, but because different things reveal themselves.
And at the same time that I had read this about the splitting of the atom,
around the same time,
I had read what I'd mentioned earlier, which was this whole idea that
the people they're going to need for space travel are,
by necessity, emotionally repressed individuals,
in order to avoid this kind of danger.
So, I, of course, made The Surge
the result of the mutiny attempts by the crew of the Lima Project,
because I didn't want to totally demonize
Tommy Lee's character. I didn't want to make him, as Tommy Lee called him,
(IMITATING JONES) "I don't think we should make me
"Ming the Merciless."
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Which is, of course, the name
of the villain in Flash Gordon.
A comic-book villain. But he wanted to be very dimensional,
which I agreed with completely.
So, to us, it was a more beautiful thing
that people with the best of intentions sometimes go awry.
And that's what's beautiful, also, about Moby Dick.
That, although Ahab is leading the crew to death...
And his first mate is Starbuck,
who, and this is one of the great dramas that is actually
not spoken about too much, is that Starbuck
comes close to mutinying against Ahab,
and ultimately thinks the better of it, or maybe the worst of it, and doesn't.
And thereby ensuring that the entire crew is led to their deaths.
All of whom... Everyone dies except, of course, Ishmael.
And the idea here was that...
Even there, Ahab is aware of his shortcomings.
Ahab is aware of the madness.
Ahab is aware of the devastation he might cause.
And he can't help himself.
So, when some of us like to read Ayn Rand,
when we read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged,
and she has her theories about how we act out of self-interest,
I've always been quite opposed to that theory.
I think people act out of what they think is their self-interest,
which is quite different from actual self-interest.
And sometimes, what they think is their self-interest
is extremely destructive because it's connected to our desires
and it's connected to our most narcissistic impulses.
And so, Tommy Lee Jones' character was created with all of this in mind,
and what that would mean to Brad's character.
Now, Brad has a series of not just narration,
but, of course, these psychological evaluations,
which chart his mental health through the course of the film.
And we felt that that was an honest and very direct way
to have access into the person.
Now, most movies... What's great about most movies
is the close-up. Why?
Because the best seat you have in the theater
is 20 feet away from the actor.
You cannot get close to the actor,
you cannot get particularly intimate with the actor.
So, the actors on stage, in plays, often say what they mean.
They have to. In the cinema, actors can lie.
And the camera, we can see the lying. We can tell the actor's lying.
So, there's much more intimacy in the cinema.
And so, we felt it was subversive
to have the actor say and be as vulnerable, as open...
Brad and I felt to be as vulnerable and as open as possible
would be its own form of subversiveness because he wasn't lying.
He was only truthful to a computer.
Couldn't be truthful to his father, his father left him a long time ago.
Couldn't be truthful to anybody else on his crew,
he couldn't open up to them.
Couldn't be truthful to his ex-wife.
That's a ruined relationship. He ruined it.
He could be truthful to a computer. There, he was safe.
There, he could be vulnerable.
The film's edit proved to be fairly challenging
because when you are talking about a film where a character is alone,
and really from the very beginning,
and doesn't have any characters with whom he or she can relate,
it presents an enormous narrative challenge.
And to that end,
the film's edit was straightforward in terms of the chronology.
That is to say, A to B to C to D.
We never toyed with flashbacks
of any lengthy duration.
We never toyed with putting the end in the middle
or the beginning at the end or anything like that.
Any changes in the chronology turned out to be fairly minor.
What was not easy was the aspect of focus.
How much we focused on Brad,
how much close-up time we gave him.
How much we knew in the voice-over.
How much the voice-over would contrast with what he says in the psych eval.
How much the psych eval would convey, how little it would convey.
Which takes we would use, because a lot of the times,
the work that Brad and I did was heavily improvisational
in the psychological evaluations, particularly the one
that he gives on the Cepheus after the monkey attack.
So, to edit is to choose.
And it is a form of rewriting.
So, you get into the editing room...
And I have a very strange approach to it.
I'm very precious with the film when I'm shooting.
"Oh, this is so beautiful, this is so important for the movie."
And then, once you get into the editing room,
you want to use as little of what you shot as you can get away with.
So, my approach has always been,
and maybe this is the wrong one, I don't know,
it's a process, and it works for some people
and doesn't work for others. You neverknow.
My process has always been,
"What is the shortest possible version of the movie you can make
"which conveys all of its complexities?"
Now, the previous film I had made was two hours and 20 minutes,
really, two hours and 10 minutes without credits.
And the movies have evolved
in the length that they're in for a reason.
In other words, we go to the movies
and we expect a film to be an hour and a half to two hours long...
Or three hours long. So, for example, you have...
A standard movie which, let's say,
is an hour 45 minutes, plus now 10 minutes of credits.
So, it's almost two hours, or two hours minus 10 minutes for credits.
That is a basic three-act structure.
The movies evolved, and our patience evolved
into that being the standard length for a movie.
But then there are films that are three hours
and you say, "Well, what about that?"
Yes, there are beautiful films made in three-hour format,
and many of the greatest films of all time are three hours.
But then you have to pursue what's called "the five-act structure."
This is a difference in screenwriting.
And, not to get too technical about it,
but, for example, if you think of The Godfather,
which is a brilliant piece of screenwriting
by Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo,
in which they decided to combine two hour-and-a-half-long films,
one about Marlon Brando and one about Al Pacino,
into a three-hour-long movie. So, there's two characters.
Now, we know that Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo did this on purpose
because when they made Godfather Part II,
it is literally two films, one about De Niro and one about Pacino.
So, that's a three-hour-long format.
In the two-hour-long format, you wanna edit together a film
that is an hour and a half to two hours long,
and really not longer than that.
And I had judged my previous film, The Lost City of Z...
I had judged it as a little bit of a structural problem,
because its two-hour-and-10-minute running time...
I'm very proud of that film.
But its two-hour-and-10-minute running time
was a conscious form of experimentation on my part
with the three-act structure.
And in some senses, it's four acts.
Because it's three acts, three trips to the jungle,
and a fourth act was his trip through World War I.
In this film, I tried to adhere much more rigorously to that structure.
And yet, we had a heavily improvisational scheme
when we were doing the psychological evaluations.
And it was a very experimental structure,
in that the character had nobody to whom to relate.
So, he was only able to relate to a computer
and directly to us.
And that's what presented the enormous editorial challenge.
You saw, just now, the trip to Neptune, which took many different forms.
The ultimate form of the trip that you see here
was really the brainchild of the editor Hank Corwin,
with a lot of collaboration between him and me,
and, of course, Brad's input as well.
And you see a man, essentially, in solitary confinement.
Now, there's been a lot of discussion lately about solitary confinement
as being a form of cruel and unusual punishment,
perhaps even worse than the death penalty.
That people who go through solitary confinement,
it is the most punishing form of torture for the mind,
and you start hearing internal voices,
you start flashing back on parts of your life.
That it becomes absolute agony for anyone,
apparently, who has had to go through it in prison.
So, we felt that that was the closest analogy,
a trip to Neptune where he'd be in some form by himself,
for week upon week upon week on end.
And the punishment that his mind would have to take
on his trip to Neptune.
The editors, with whom I had worked before,
and who really helped me through the first initial passes on the film,
John Axelrad and Lee Haugen, really superb editors,
and they were on The Lost City of Z, the previous film that I made.
And I'd edited several films with John, as well.
And the process was quite fluid because, like I say,
the challenges of making an interior film like this were quite vast.
And they were instrumental in helping me marshal the story,
but I did enlist the help of other editors as well,
in order to corral the very kind of
Heart of Darkness nature of the story.
It's interesting. I never understood when I see
Apocalypse Now or a movie like that...
And this is not to compare this film in terms of quality to that one.
That's a monumental work of art.
But I always wondered why there were all these
multiple people that edit a movie.
Well, you realize why when you make the films,
because you cannot have pride of ownership about a good idea.
And it's a collaborative effort, making a film.
You don't do it on your own, you don't sit on your own...
And in the case of someone like David Lean, he edited his own films,
but by all accounts, summoned a huge number of opinions on the film.
And when he says "edited," he really means
he was the one doing the physical editing.
And, in fact, filmmaking is a hugely collaborative process.
The director's job is not to...
He or she is not meant to just be an autocrat and a dictator.
He or she's job is to maximize the talents of the people
at his or her disposal.
So, you use the production designer's ideas,
and you take the best of those ideas
and the best of editors' ideas,
and the best of the cinematographer's ideas and actors' ideas,
and you try to make the best film. Because in the end,
it makes you look better, not just as a matter of ego,
but the work is better.
The central problem
or conundrum of the movie director
is, how do you make a film where you embrace
all the things that expand the scope of your original idea,
while at the same time, making sure you don't include ideas
that get in the way of or destroy the idea
that you originally had in mind.
That is the great challenge of movie directing.
Being the filter.
Because if you make 998 decisions out of 1,000 correct,
but you make two decisions that are wrong,
those two decisions might destroy your film.
You have written a bad scene or directed a bad scene
or cast one person incorrectly out of...
It's why making a great film,
not that I should know this in particular...
But you really can imagine that making a great film, a truly monumental film,
is among the rarest of artistic endeavors.
It's probably up there with creating a great popular music album
where you don't want to skip a single song.
There are only a handful of records where you would do that.
And in the case of the cinema, there have been many, many masterpieces,
but you think of how many movies have actually been made,
and it's quite daunting, really.
The challenge of directing
goes beyond summoning all the great ideas, as well.
Because every film will get away from you.
Every film is a wild horse.
So, your job is essentially to make sure that horse looks beautiful
as it gallops away. If you try to restrain it,
if you try to pull it back in, if you try to control it,
it'll destroy you.
Now, in the 1930s and 1940s in the Hollywood studio system,
where they shot everything on a back lot,
they also did a lot of reshooting, because the actors were under contract
and you could get Cary Grant offstage six
and Katharine Hepburn offstage four and reshoot two scenes very easily.
It was a more controlled atmosphere to make a story work.
Today, because of the style of acting, which is method-acting,
because we shoot on location or because we shoot in volume
or green box or actors are hanging upside-down or whatever,
the process is much more likely to get away from you.
And if you were to look at the films, for example, of Alfred Hitchcock,
who is one of the greatest,
if not the greatest director in the history of the cinema,
once he lost the ability to storyboard everything
and to shoot it exactly as storyboarded,
the work began to suffer and feel stiff.
So, he could make Vertigo and he could make Rear Window in that context,
but when the method actors took over and the new Hollywood came in
in the late 1960s, early 1970s,
he gave you Topaz and Frenzy and Family Plot,
which I would contend are not as interesting
as the work from the '50s.
But they were also because he couldn't contend
with the difficulties of being on location.
It has become a different art form.
Now, I have spoken before about the idea of myth.
It's very important that...
I acknowledge here the huge debt
that I do owe to the Conrad story, Heart of Darkness,
but also, again, to Greek myth and to Joseph Campbell.
This idea that Brad's character enters the belly of the whale
and that there is going to be an atonement with the father.
You see here, this antimatter catalyst, this reactor meltdown,
the science here is a little bit tenuous, I have to say.
We tried to base it as much on what people think might be,
in the future, a plausible thing.
But we didn't want to get bogged down in the technology too much.
And the movie is not really about that.
If you're watching the movie to know how
an antimatter catalyst nuclear reactor would work
in deep space, this is not the movie for you.
But I would contend that that's not really the function of art, period.
"Art," if I may use that dirty word.
Because it's about knowing who we are,
learning who we are, the depiction of human behavior.
The accurate rendition of human behavior.
Showing what is wrong with the world
and understanding that, so that we have a greater connection amongst each other.
Now, this sounds a little bit like self-help,
or some kind of psychological bullshit,
you know, some kind of psychotherapy. But it really is true.
The purpose of the... "What we owe the artist,"
as George Eliot once said, great novelist, she said,
"What we owe the artist is the extension of our sympathies."
Which I think is a very powerful... I've quoted it many times.
A very powerful idea, because what it expresses
is that in the end,
a creative work is about discovering
and exploring, and dissecting the nature of our identities
and our relationships to each other.
Now, even in something like 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which we have spoken of many times,
that is not a myth of man, that is a myth of the gods.
And, as such, the story doesn't bear any resemblance
to the story in this film.
But even there, we relate to HAL, the computer.
We feel bad when he's shut off.
When Keir Dullea shuts off that computer, that's a form of murder.
So, we look at these things and we understand them
only in the context...
Even in that movie, for example, we understand these things
only in the context that we understand our humanity
and our connection, or lack of connection, to each other.
So, here, Brad has to confront his father.
And Tommy Lee here, you'll notice, he says,
(IMITATING JONES) "I spent 30 years breathing this air, eating this food,
"and I never once thought about home."
(IN NORMAL VOICE) We wanted this scene to be...
It's the penultimate scene, really, between father and son.
And we wanted it to be about a lack of connection,
and yet, Roy has the capacity, still, to love.
And deep inside the father,
there is an awareness of that abandonment.
I felt both Tommy Lee and Brad's work to be very, very beautiful on this day.
I was very nervous.
You make a movie where somebody travels to Neptune
to see his father,
you know it's all gonna be about this scene.
But I thought they played it, both, just beautifully.
I have infinite work to do.
GRAY: We also wanted the staging of the scene itself,
where the son must first look up to the father,
and then rises to the level of the father,
to be somehow emblematic of the relationship between the two.
This is, in a very tangible way,
the desire, or the lack...
The desire not to be touched and the lack of need for contact
to be the clearest expatiation of schizoid behavior,
that the father had really fallen far into a state of madness.
This scene, which was early on
conceived of, I have to say, in the screenplay,
nonetheless, we never shot it in principal.
It was additional photography
and was photographed by the brilliant cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.
When production was about to begin,
we had a limited time with Tommy Lee Jones,
and also, it was felt that perhaps the scene that you just saw
would be enough.
That a conversation between father and son
where the father tries to beseech the son to go further into space
would push us away further from Tommy Lee,
and really be such a state of madness
that it would be unpalatable.
Now, this scene, in a slightly different form,
had existed, as I say,
in some of the earlier drafts of the script,
but we knew we'd have to come back, because we never shot
Brad getting let out of the capsule.
That was pushed off to some kind of second unit.
So, we always knew we had to go back and shoot more,
and we picked this scene up later.
And I'm glad we did, because...
I think Tommy Lee is extraordinary in the scene.
A combination of mad, but also vulnerable.
And Brad is having to confront, of course,
his father's vulnerability and his insanity,
and Brad is terrific here, too,
and how it affects him is really something to behold.
You and I, together, Roy.
GRAY: It was a difficult thing to shoot
because of the position of the actors and how the camera would have to be,
and the presentation of zero gravity and the maintenance of that.
And Brad was in a very uncomfortable harness.
I only got, I think, four takes of Brad in his close-up,
and I never could get the camera quite exactly where I wanted it to be
given the set and given the harness and all that.
So, what I finally...
I think this is pretty good, and actually, you get to see Brad,
but I would've wanted it to be a bit more frontal
and a bit more directly close up on him.
And it just was not to be, given the set
and how difficult a set it was.
And I didn't want to torture Brad
and have him do five, six, seven, 12, 15 takes
knowing how uncomfortable that harness was.
So, after take four, I'd gotten some very beautiful work,
and I just felt bad about him being in that harness
and said, "Let's move on."
As it is, I think he's terrific.
The depiction of madness is difficult.
Why?
The depiction of madness is difficult because...
It is so essential that we understand and love the characters.
Now, that does not mean that everybody is depicted
in your movie as a nice guy, or a good woman, or whatever.
It means... It's not whether they're liked or hated,
or to be liked or to be hated,
but are they interesting enough to involve us?
And as the creative force behind the film,
as the co-writer and director of this film,
am I saying I'm better than Tommy Lee Jones is?
Am I saying I'm better than Brad is when the crew is killed under his watch?
I'm not.
If I am, I should be ashamed. We're all flawed.
Nobody is perfect.
That's the reason that we explore drama.
That's the reason we make these films, the reason we write these plays,
the reason we make these television shows.
It's to express that side of ourselves we're not comfortable with,
that makes us vulnerable, that makes us complex,
that makes us human.
We can't distance ourselves from that.
We have to confront it. It's our truth.
This space walk
was a very difficult and very strange thing to shoot.
You can imagine,
there is no version of "Let's go to the rings around Neptune and go shoot."
So, what do you do? Well, this is all on a stage,
the actors are all on these very painful harnesses.
And this, with the actor
spinning away on a harness and pulling Brad,
Brad actually did do that.
And it's unpleasant, and frightening, and difficult.
You're in a very large sound stage
with a complicated pulley system,
and I really...
Of all the things I've ever done in my career...
Now, this shot, for example, is purely digital.
You couldn't possibly do this in reality.
But most of these are done practically with backgrounds replaced.
But of all the things I've done in my career,
this ranks up there with just about the most difficult to shoot,
and that includes any trip to the jungle.
The lighting was also, I think, beautifully done
by the cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema.
I spoke about Hoyte in the beginning of our commentary
and now, it's time to give him his due.
I think the work that he's done in the film
is really beautiful and every bit as magical as I'd hoped
when I first met with him.
He and I both adhered to the idea of a practical light source, always.
Which is to say, very little adornment, photographically.
That there would always be...
The light would always be coming from a place
where you could either see it or understand it.
Now, here is the one area where we did take a risk.
Because this blue light, it makes no sense at all.
At Neptune, you're talking about a celestial body
that is over two billion miles away from the sun.
The sun appears as a large, bright star on Neptune,
and there is only the most minimal amount
of ambient light from the sun.
So, in other words, this action would happen in complete darkness.
But how can you make a scene in total dark?
You have to take some liberties.
So, the reference that I gave everybody,
which meant nothing to anybody, really, except me, it turns out,
was the display
at the Museum of Natural History in New York City
of the squid attacking the whale.
It's funny, there's a movie called The Squid and the Whale,
beautiful film made by Noah Baumbach from several years back
with Jeff Daniels, which is about the diorama itself.
But I remember seeing it as a kid, and you would see just the barest image
of the squid and the whale in this very haunting, dark diorama.
And that's what I tried to express to people.
There would be the hint of this blue,
that would be our light source, to try and justify it a little.
Now, I suppose what I could have done,
is I could have said, "Okay, Hoyte, let's light this
"so that it's only the light coming off the Lima Project," the spacecraft.
The station.
But that in and of itself would have been very difficult to do,
and it would have lent itself to a level of artificiality, almost,
because it would've looked like
a searchlight was lighting part of the actor's face.
And we did test a version of that during the hair-and-makeup test period,
where you would be lit from the spacecraft,
and it looked flat-out terrible.
So, our option was really either that,
or to take license with a little bit of this blue ambient light,
and we chose the latter.
I think, looking at it now,
I'm glad we did, because I think it looks lovely.
Now, here he sees the sun,
which is about what it would look like, maybe a little larger,
but about what it would look like from Neptune.
We exaggerated it a little bit with the flare.
That probably wouldn't exist.
Like I said, it would just look like a large and bright star.
But for dramatic purposes, we felt that it was important
that the audience understood that Brad was reminded
of the life that was back on Earth,
and his desire, in fact, to return to Earth.
Many people have criticized the film Gravity
for its leaps of faith it's asking the audience to take
in terms of believability.
And I always felt that those criticisms were terribly unfair.
That you have to make decisions
that are dramatically plausible,
and you cannot possibly adhere to total authenticity.
And if you did, it might be extremely boring,
maybe even boring...
You may think this film is boring, as it is.
But it would be impossible
to make a two-hour-long film dramatic at all
adhering entirely to the realities of the moment.
There's just too much in the way of telling a focused story
that requires this kind of...
It requires this kind of experimentation
with what kinds of risks you take with the science.
Having said that,
I can explain to you that going through the rings of Neptune here,
here are the liberties that we did take.
The actual rings are shockingly thin.
The duration is pretty accurate.
They're about 50 feet thick, the rings. They're quite thin.
But if you came at them diagonally, this would be about the duration,
given the angle that Brad's character flings himself through.
The rings themselves are much more finer-particle dust.
You see some larger particles, but again, I had to take this liberty
because you can't really depict a guy going through dust.
It wouldn't look like anything, especially as dark as it is out there.
Now, there are, by the way, having said that,
there are some particles in the rings
that are as large as the ones that you see here.
There are just not as many as we've depicted.
At least, as far as we know.
Obviously, there's photographs of Neptune taken by Voyager,
which has now exited our solar system,
but this is about the best information that we have.
I'm sure I wound up getting some of it wrong,
but certainly not intentionally.
So, I've spoken before of Joseph Campbell
and Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that he wrote
about the myth of the hero.
It's a beautiful book.
If you guys haven't read it, you should definitely take a look at it.
George Lucas relied on it very heavily for the Star Wars films,
and Francis Coppola relied on it when he did Apocalypse Now,
and Stanley Kubrick did when he did 2001.
So many directors have relied on this kind of template
for telling the story of a hero.
Now, one of the things that Campbell discusses over and over
is what he calls "the boon."
"Bringing back the boon."
The hero returns with something of great value.
And I felt that the hero needed to return with the boon.
And in this case, the boon was a negative boon.
The boon was the knowledge that we may well be all alone
as intelligent life in the universe.
That is a frightening proposition.
But it's also ennobling,
because the idea could be that we're very special.
Now, it could also mean that our time on this Earth is limited.
That the great filter,
the mass extermination of the species is ahead of us.
But it could also mean
that we've advanced past that point of the great filter,
we've advanced past the point of the dinosaurs,
and that, somehow, our species will survive.
So, we had endeavored, Ethan and I, my co-writer and I,
to make a film which was about being alone in the universe,
which we felt had never been done before.
And we thought this was...
The perfect means by which to tell the story
of a man's emotional awakening.
You know, they've talked chapter and verse, astronauts have,
about what it means to be in space.
And you can see the wonderful videos, probably on YouTube,
of Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut,
talking on the ISS.
But there is a difference between being on the ISS or being in the shuttle
and seeing the Earth below you in such a large and tangible way.
And there's a big difference between that
and the Apollo 11, and 12, and 17, and 15...
Those astronauts... The astronauts, the men that walked on the moon,
and how they saw the Earth as this tiny celestial body in the sky,
just one of an endless number of stars and planets,
and how that forced a reassessment, an existential crisis, really...
What it means to be a member of the human race.
Now, you'll notice,
of the 12 astronauts that landed on the moon,
almost all of them entered a period of real crisis.
Neil Armstrong went to his farm in Lebanon, Ohio,
and you didn't hear much from him from then on.
Buzz Aldrin has been very open about
his battles with alcohol and other substance abuse.
Edgar Mitchell talked of aliens,
and Charlie Duke became a born-again Christian minister.
There was a real need
by the men who saw the Earth in such a state
to try and attach some kind of greater meaning.
A real existential crisis they had to undergo.
So, you can imagine what it would be like,
going as far as Neptune, and what it would do to our psyche.
(RUMBLING)
Here, Roy uses a nuclear explosion as part of his propellant.
Is this authentic? Is this real?
Well, obviously, it's not real. Is it realistic?
I don't know. Is it plausible? Yes.
People have discussed using this kind of nuclear propulsion
in order to achieve greater and greater speeds.
Because what you have to remember is, there is no air resistance in space.
So, once the speed is set, you can continue at that speed forever,
without having something act upon it.
Of course, Brad's rocket would have some kind of retro rocket force
that would stop his craft.
As you see earlier in the film,
when they approach the Vesta for the monkey attack,
you'll notice that we did depict the Cepheus turning around,
going backwards, and firing its engine in reverse.
Now, in reality, it would have to do that
way before it got to the Vesta.
But we still wanted to be plausible
about the fact that the craft had to turn around.
And his return to Earth was always meant to be
a sign of real great relief, and also of an awakening.
A transformation and a transcendence in Roy.
That Roy had, at the beginning of the movie,
said he always wanted to be an astronaut.
Wasn't even sure why, maybe it was in his blood.
It was something that he had pursued,
obviously, we find out, because of the father.
Some unconscious need to find the father.
But now that he's home, back on Earth...
We hoped, as the filmmakers,
really, that some kind of nightmarish quality to the film
would be over, and that he could reconnect with the Earth,
both in literal and figurative terms.
I remember we went back and forth about this landing.
We had an effects shot of the craft landing,
and I never thought it was good enough.
And finally, we kept it in Roy's point of view
that the craft kind of landed inside, and...
You see here that he has a pretty big beard.
I've been very unspecific about how long it took him
to go here or there. In the film,
it's 79 days to Neptune.
How long it would take him to get back is an open question,
given what the science would be.
I was a big fan of Brad's performance of this.
I remember on the set,
I was playing a piece of music by Edvard Grieg
from the Peer Gynt suites.
Now, we know of the Peer Gynt suites
because they have a very famous piece of music
that's been used in a lot of cartoons about waking up in the morning.
You know, this is used a lot,
but there's other parts of the Peer Gynt suites
which are very dark, and very operatic, very epic.
And Brad used it... I remember playing it on the set.
He used it so brilliantly to have both tears in his eyes,
but also that smile that said both things,
that he was so happy to be home and yet, bore the cost of that mission.
And I'd wanted these troops to be out of focus
because I didn't think the specifics of their identity mattered.
I felt that all that mattered was the knowledge
that he had returned to the Earth and reconnected with humanity.
When you make a film of a certain size...
This was not a huge-budget movie.
You know, movies today,
at the time of this recording, in the studio system
cost 200, 300 million dollars, 180 million dollars,
but not a small-budget movie either, which would be 20 or 30.
Somewhere in the middle, and they really don't make these very much anymore.
But when you make a movie of this size, it does demand...
There is a level of collaboration and compromise that are in play.
And my own choice for the ending
was always to complete the film as he was led out of the capsule.
And this was sort of a post-script which was added on.
The idea of his transcendence,
it was agreed upon that it should be even clearer.
Does he reconcile with her, with his ex-wife?
Well, we don't know, it doesn't really say for sure,
but we added this
to imply a stronger sense of transcendence
for the audience, really, because without it,
it was believed that the audience would not understand
his full transformation.
So, here it is, and you can decide for yourself, I suppose.
In any event, you can see Brad's expression.
Brad's performance is beautiful.
Submit.