“Look at him,” Gray said to his editor, pointing at me on the couch. “He’s all thinking and wondering.
“He’s having a good time?” Morris asked.
“I don’t know if he’s having a good time,” Gray said, talking as if I wasn’t there. “I wouldn’t quite put it that way. He said he’s about to have a baby.”
My wife was expecting a child, our first. “He doesn’t know the misery waiting for him for the next 18 years,” Gray, a father of three teenagers, said to Morris. “I call it like a beautiful misery, you know? Like it’s the greatest thing ever, but I’m not gonna promise you happiness. It’s better than happiness, but it’s not happiness. It’s like… gorgeous misery.”
This is an idea, gorgeous misery, that Gray finds himself drawn to, that he was trying to explore with Armageddon Time, he said. “I wanted to do something that had a direct vitality and a humanity in it and a warmth to it, even if the story was sad. Sad is not the same thing as depressing. And so sad to me is an aspect of our emotional life, which is quite beautiful. It’s who we are. Life is sad in many ways. That’s part of why beauty exists. Beauty is connected to sadness. Beauty doesn’t exist in the infinite. Beauty is connected to death. Beauty is connected to finality.”
While making Armageddon Time, Gray said, he wrote four words on the camera: warmth, humor, loss, love. “But the biggest word was loss,” Gray told me. “The irretrievability. The ephemerality of our lives. That has been a fairly recent, last five years preoccupation. I would blame it on the pandemic, but I had it before that.”
Morris cued another scene, and Gray went back to work. Throughout the film, different versions of the Clash’s cover of “Armagideon Time” play, and Gray and Morris were perfecting the precise timing and mix of the music cue. “I have to get the rights to this damn thing,” Gray said, about the song. (Ultimately, he did.) It was getting dark outside and I had to get home. We made plans to talk a few more times as he finished the movie, and then again after he released it.
“It’s a bit of a difficult period,” Gray said, as he walked me out. “My father has COVID and is sort of on his last legs. We’ve been really preoccupied with that too. That and the movie and everything else. So it’s been a crazy period, but you can come back if you want.”
Five days later, my son was born. In time, Gray texted me, asking how it was going. I sent a photo of my boy: new to the world.
“My father died last week,” Gray wrote back. “Transmigration of souls.”
He congratulated me. I expressed my condolences.
“Yes, sad,” he said. “But that is life, the sad and the beautiful.”
Zach Baron
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