A son might rise and become a father; a daughter might become a mother; an admirer of art, an artist. Such transitions are uneasy and unsure. You try to carry your line forward while improving on it, but there seem to be no rules. What if the future frowns on your best efforts? What if, in seeking gains, you’re actually creating a new kind of loss? These are anxieties that fathers, mothers, and artists share.

The filmmaker James Gray taught himself to face the problem of the future through something that he calls classicism: the idea that what remains from the past can provide guidance for making art in the present. He found his models in clear, almost mythical stories and enduring films—most of all, those movies of the nineteen-seventies in which a generation of directors seemed to exercise daring creative control.

But the assurances of the past are limited; a risk is distancing yourself from the world where you live now. A classicist, like a parent, has the expectation of being understood in retrospect. What remains is the challenge to connect before the delicate human moment has passed.

One Sunday evening two Octobers ago, James Gray had guests over for pasta at a large house he was renting in Central Los Angeles. Gray, a tall, pale man with tufted auburn hair and a whitening orange beard, had moved into the place a month earlier, from the apartment in Hancock Park where he had lived for some years with his wife and their three children. He was the writer and director of six movies, and was shooting his seventh, “Ad Astra”—a film set largely at the outer reaches of the solar system. It was a warm, still evening, two weeks before Halloween. In the front yard, an adult-size skeleton and a child-size skeleton, dressed by Gray’s kids, perched against a gnarled tree in the long late light.

“Should we eat now, Ali?” Gray called to his wife, Alexandra Dickson Gray, a documentarian. He stood at the counter in the middle of the kitchen, fishing peeled tomatoes out of a can with his fingers. Cheese and olives had been set out for their guests; John Coltrane was playing softly from the other room.

Gray had been hosting weekly Sunday dinners for friends since college, when he studied film at the University of Southern California: a period when his mother was dying of brain cancer in Flushing, Queens, and his creative life was gaining speed. Gray’s first film, “Little Odessa”—the story of a young man (Tim Roth) becoming entangled with the Russian Mob while his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) dies, his father (Maximilian Schell) turns him out, and his kid brother (Edward Furlong) struggles to cope—appeared in 1994, when Gray was only twenty-five, and established him as a precocious talent who brought sensitive family-drama realism to gritty crime-drama machismo. His next two films, “The Yards” (2000) and “We Own the Night” (2007), also explored these themes, but his subject matter broadened with the release of “Two Lovers” (2008) and “The Immigrant” (2013), which begins with a young woman’s passage through Ellis Island. In “The Lost City of Z” (2016), based on a book by the New Yorker writer David Grann, about the British explorer Percy Fawcett, he moved away from New York for the first time, filming in the U.K. and Colombia.

“Ad Astra,” which appears later this month, is Gray’s first outer-space film and his largest production to date. He saw it as a narrative about an epic journey, with a flawed hero. “We tried to make a classic, stripped-down story,” he says. “If you’re stealing from something so old, maybe people think you’re new.”

In the kitchen, Gray made a few late additions to an oxtail Bolognese that he’d begun cooking at 8 a.m. He wore, as usual, a black T-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and sneakers, and his shoulders rolled with the forward-drooping aspect of a marionette being pulled up by one string. “Should we drop the pasta?” he asked his wife.

“Are we ready to eat?” she said.

“Wait ten minutes and then drop the pasta!” Georgia, their loquacious fifth grader, cried.

The guests that night included Gray’s friend since film school Ethan Gross, with whom he wrote “Ad Astra.” Gross, a shy, slender man with a reedy voice and a creeping wit, is recessive in the ways that Gray is dominant. “James has that alpha personality, and I like to leach off the energy,” he says. “I didn’t like him at first in school, because he was a know-it-all, and loud.” Today, they seem nearly inseparable. Gray holds court with a nebbishy, self-mocking churn of anecdote and lamentation, and his humor, in the outer-borough Ashkenazi style, can leave one unsure where the shtick ends and the real self-loathing starts. Adjusting his thick-rimmed glasses, he made a series of groans over the broccoli.

“James, how are you feeling about the Bolognese, dude?” Thomas Houseago, the sculptor and painter, asked, approaching the stove. He was from Leeds, and his voice was both brassy and airy, like a clearing whoosh through a French horn.

“It’s top quality—it has medicinal properties,” Gray said.

A loose queue formed at the stove, as Gray spooned sauce. Place cards in the dining room were marked with guests’ initials. “Now, if there were a Yankees game tonight, we wouldn’t be able to do this, because the world stops for the Yanks,” Gray said. Once, he was escorted from his seat at an Angels-Yankees playoff game for excessively raucous cheering in the family section.

“Ever been tempted to start liking the Dodgers?” Houseago asked as they carried their plates to the table.

“I really tried, but there’s something nauseating about it,” Gray said. His children like to make fun of his pronunciation (he says “nwauw-se-ating” and “be-coss”), and he and his wife, a warm, wry, dark-blond Californian who can seem like his affective opposite, have a running dispute about how to say names such as Craig and Carrie. Gray looked several seats down at Gross. “How’s tonight’s red sauce?” he asked. “A ‘Godfather’?”

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“They rate everything according to Francis Ford Coppola movies,” Ali Gray explained. A superb meal on Gross’s scale is a “Godfather.” A meal better than superb is a “Godfather II.” One that’s rewarding but an acquired taste (such as Gray’s lemon fettuccine with jalapeños) is an “Apocalypse Now.” Once, there was a “Jack” meal, but they don’t talk about it.

“A Godfather I or II,” Gross pronounced, although he was eating a vegetarian version of the sauce. He and Gray get together several times a week, often to watch films, and many actors and craftspeople who have worked on a Gray film have been to Sunday dinner at least once during production. The following Sunday, Tommy Lee Jones, who has a lead role in “Ad Astra,” would be coming by. “He sent a terrifying e-mail,” Gray told the table. “It said, ‘I will be hungry.’ ”

The guests laughed. Gray does an exacting impersonation of everybody he meets; each recounted bit of dialogue comes in the voice of its speaker. He had to be up at five-thirty the next morning to make it to the set, but, as a Barbaresco was poured, the conversation drifted, and Gray spoke about his favorite hobby shop in New York—Polk’s, near the Empire State Building, which had been turned into a souvenir store. That sort of thing was happening everywhere: San Francisco, London. . . .