James Gray has broken decisively with his 2019 sci-fi film Ad Astra, telling French outlet Brut at the Cannes Film Festival that 20th Century Fox seized control of the picture during post-production, hired a separate director to shoot additional scenes without him, and released a cut he had no hand in approving.
“That film was taken away from me. That’s not my cut of the movie,” Gray said bluntly. The remarks, made while Gray was promoting his new film Paper Tiger in Cannes, are his most direct public disavowal of Ad Astra yet — though he first flagged the issue at the Lumiere Film Festival in 2022, revealing that the theatrical version was not his cut and suggesting he had been effectively removed from the editing room after filming wrapped.
Gray had no final say in how the film was edited or what additional scenes were shot. Another filmmaker was brought in to direct the reshoots entirely without him. The chaos stemmed partly from a seismic corporate shift: New Regency produced the film through Fox, and the Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox upended the studio relationships mid-process, leaving Gray caught between competing power structures with no leverage to protect his vision.
When audience members later asked Gray about Brad Pitt’s prominent voice-over narration, he was left in the awkward position of distancing himself from a choice he never made. “When people start coming up to you and saying, ‘Why’d you do all that stupid voice-over?’ and you didn’t do it, that’s a very frustrating experience,” he said in a 2022 Vulture interview.
His preferred cut, Gray now says, would have been leaner, not more expansive — an unusual position for a director invoking creative rights. “It would be 12 minutes shorter. I’m the only director who makes a shorter director’s cut,” he told Brut, adding that he hopes to release his own version someday, though he concedes that decision rests entirely with the studio.
The candor tracks with the lesson Gray says he drew from the experience. Paper Tiger cost $15 million against Ad Astra’s $80 million budget, a deliberate choice that kept studio pressure at bay. “I like to work on that scale because I don’t think it’s productive for people to just change your movie around and you get the blame anyway,” he said.
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Paper Tiger, competing for the Palme d’Or, stars Adam Driver and Miles Teller as brothers in 1980s Queens whose American Dream ambitions draw them into a Russian mob entanglement, with Scarlett Johansson as Teller’s wife. The Hollywood Reporter called it Gray’s “ninth and arguably best film,” though some critics found the performances uneven and the screenplay underpowered. Neon has acquired the film for U.S. theatrical release, with a date still to be announced.
Ad Astra, which grossed $135 million worldwide against a reported budget of $80 to $100 million, remains available to stream via Prime Video and Apple TV — a film now carrying the unusual distinction of being openly disowned by the person whose name it bears.
