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Commander Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) in the psychological control
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AD ASTRA stars Brad Pitt as an elite astronaut
who travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his
missing father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival
of our planet. His journey will uncover secrets that challenge
the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos.
Directed by James Gray from a screenplay by Gray and his
long-time associate Ethan Gross, AD ASTRA also stars Academy
Award winner Tommy Lee Jones, Academy Award nominee Ruth Negga;
Liv Tyler and Donald Sutherland.
ROY’S ODYSSEY
Per
aspera ad astra: Latin for “Through hardship to the stars.” In
the future, astronaut Maj. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is leading a
team building the world’s largest antenna, designed to locate
advanced alien life, when a sudden power surge almost costs him
his life.
This incident is the latest in a long line of recent
catastrophes taking place on Earth, including fires and plane
crashes, caused by electrical surges that have been happening
due to radioactive bursts. U.S. intelligence believes that these
bursts are a result of cosmic rays emanating from explosions
that happened near Neptune from The Lima Project, a long-ago
mission whose ship disappeared in deep space 16 years after
launching.
Director´James Gray explains, “The idea of the Lima Project was
that they would be far from the Sun so its magnetic field would
not upset any instrumentation and they would be able to look
with great accuracy at the reachable Universe and check for all
kinds of planets. The drive was to see if they could find signs
of intelligent life.”
The commander of the Project was Roy’s father, H. Clifford
McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legendary astronaut who’s been
missing for 16 years. Even though Roy hasn’t seen him since he
was 16 years old, Roy has always idolized him, while inheriting
his incredible tolerance for risk and his belief that the
answers to all of life’s physical and metaphysical riddles lie
in deep space. But Clifford had been a distant parent and
husband and his neglect helped make Roy solitary and remote,
closed off from relationships, repressing all emotions positive
and negative.
Gray says, “United States government officials come to Roy and
tell him that his father, whom he thought was long deceased, is
alive and out at the edge of the solar system. Roy has got to
communicate with him. They have to find him because he might be
doing something horrifying, committing potential acts of
terrorism in the rings of Neptune. They want to use Roy to lure
him out of silence.”
“You can imagine what that must be like for Roy. For 16 years
you’ve thought your father was dead and all of a sudden, he
might be alive and out there doing something destructive.”
To arrive at The Lima Project, Roy must first travel from Earth
to the Moon via commercial shuttle and then transfer to a remote
base to meet the Cepheus, the spacecraft that will take him
first to Mars. There, he will attempt to contact his father via
a secure direct laser link, and, if successful, then on to The
Lima.
Accompanying Roy on his journey is Col. Pruitt (Donald
Sutherland), a retired SpaceCom astronaut and one of his
father’s oldest friends. Pruitt tells Roy, who he’d previously
met when Roy was just a kid, that his last conversation with
Clifford, many years earlier, had not been pleasant; Clifford
became angry when Pruitt told him he was leaving SpaceCom.
Their flight to The Moon is uneventful. The Moon has become a
series of highly developed outposts colonized by people from
various countries from Earth, who, as on Earth, quarrel over
resources. However, the areas in between these outposts are as
lawless as the Wild West. On their way to the Cepheus, they’re
attacked by lunar pirates and renegades.
“Unfortunately,” says Gray, “if you look at the history of human
endeavor, our species can’t seem to get past ideological
squabbles. So we have a Moon that’s filled with pirates because
of the valuable natural resources there along with potential
hostages they can hold for ransom. This is a future that has
both problems and promise.”
Their military escort is killed and Pruitt is seriously hurt in
the attack. Unable to continue on, Pruitt passes on to Roy a
highly-classified video from SpaceCom revealing top secret
intelligence about The Lima Project.
After being away in space for so long without any discoveries,
the scientists had become disillusioned. Half the crew wanted to
return to Earth, but Clifford, would have none of it. As each
faction tried to wrestle control of the ship, some kind of
meltdown occurred with the anti-matter that powered The Project,
releasing electromagnetic pulses which caused the explosions and
threatened the entire stability of the solar system with already
drastic effects on The Moon and Mars.
Having lost his mind, Clifford executed the dissenters for
mutiny, and since then has been hiding out in space. From the
videotape, Roy realizes that the real goal of his mission is to
quietly coax his father out of the darkness, so that the
government can assassinate him and destroy The Lima Project
without the public knowing.
Aboard the Cepheus with a crew of four, Roy is annoyed when the
Captain, Lawrence Tanner (Donnie Kershawarz), insists on
responding to an SOS signal from a nearby Norwegian biomedical
and animal research ship, The Vesta. Roy reluctantly agrees to
accompany Tanner onboard The Vesta, where they encounter no
signs of human life but an enraged research baboon in
zero-gravity that attacks and kills Tanner. Roy manages to
eradicate the beast and make it back to the Cepheus.
Approaching Mars, Roy has to take over the controls when they
experience a loss of power during landing and Tanner’s second,
Lt. Donald Stanford, (Loren Dean) freezes up. Upon arrival, Roy
is met by Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), the Superintendent of the
American Section on Mars, before he’s quickly escorted to the
secure laser link to contact The Lima Project. Roy’s first
attempt at reaching his father, reading a statement prepared by
officials, is unsuccessful, but after delivering an unscripted
informal message, he’s informed that he will not be continuing
on the mission because he’s too close to the subject and poses
too much of a psychological risk. They will send the Cepheus
crew instead.
Frustrated and angry, Roy turns to Helen, who confesses that,
like him, she too was orphaned by The Lima Project, that her
parents were among the scientists murdered by Clifford when they
wanted to return to Earth. She tells him that the Cepheus is
being loaded with nuclear munitions in order to assassinate
Clifford and destroy The Lima. Knowing that it’s Roy’s destiny
to complete his journey, Helen leads him to an underground lake
where he can gain entry to the Cepheus. Making it aboard just in
time, Roy must face off with the crew who have been ordered to
terminate him. Following a zero-gravity fight to the death, Roy
continues on to Neptune alone--a trip of 79 days, 4 hours and 8
minutes.
Anxious to confront his father, Roy is no longer the emotionally
repressed, unsociable man he was when he began his mission. He’s
had enough of his solitary existence in space. He’s ready to try
exploring human connections on Earth. Says Gray, “There’s a new
passage in his life that’s taking hold.”
The inspiration for Clifford came from not only Conrad but
Melville
Gray says, “I’m a big fan of Moby Dick, and I always felt
that McBride was sort of an Ahab figure. That he had become
obsessed with his ‘white whale’ of trying to find all the cute
little aliens that were going to bail us out and provide us with
answers.”
Gross explains, “Roy’s father, Clifford, wanted to be the first
person to discover meaningful life outside of our planet and
years and years have gone by and most of the people in the Lima
project had become disillusioned thinking that there’s no signs
of life.
“But Clifford is a vain man, and he’s determined, he’s not going
to give up. He’s going to stay there even after the last member
of his team is dead and is going to keep looking for life
outside of Earth.
“He clearly doesn’t care about anything on Earth. He doesn’t
care about the lives of his own fellow scientists aboard the
Lima project nor anything else.”
Roy’s meeting Helen Lantos, who’s spent her entire life on Mars
in an underground dwelling, represents a turning point for him.
Gross explains, “She is sort of a flip side of him. She
represents somebody who has also been orphaned by people on the
Lima project. She was orphaned on Mars and left there at a young
age when her parents enlisted to go on Clifford McBride’s
expedition. And she had a lot of hurt and anger about that, but
unlike Roy, she didn’t really bury it. She’s been dealing with
it and living with it throughout every day of her life and Roy
sees that in her.”
Gray says, “She’s concerned for the other people there. Nobody
tells her anything. Roy is the only person that’s ever been
honest with her. She, in turn, is actually honest with him. I
mean, he doesn't have many of those people in his life.
“But there is this bond between them, and although it’s not
romantic, that’s what leads him to acts of desperation, and it’s
what leads her to help him board The Cepheus to Neptune, even
though it will undoubtedly cost her her job and perhaps worse.”
To provide insight and information to Roy about Clifford’s real
nature and intentions, Gray and Gross created the character of
Col. Pruitt, an old friend of Clifford’s who’s assigned to
accompany him on his mission. Pruitt knows what has happened to
Roy’s father and what SpaceCom really intends to do, and
represents the kind of human connection Roy has learned to live
without.
Says Gray about Pruitt, “He can’t go on the journey with Roy.
You want him to go, you want him to be a kind of protector for
Roy in some way, but he’s weak, he can’t do it. “
AD ASTRA had a long gestation period, not unusual for a James
Gray project. Sometime between the director’s productions Two
Lovers (2008) and The Immigrant (2012), Gray and co-writer Ethan
Gross began talking about writing a film set in outer space.
They worked on the script off-an-on over the years, then Rodrigo
Teixeira’s RT Features stepped into develop the script.
In 2016, once Brad Pitt agreed to both star and produce, things
moved quickly. His production company Plan B’s deal with New
Regency provided financing and distribution through Twentieth
Century Fox, with Bona Film Group co-financing with distribution
rights in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. The film
began production in August 2017.
