When director James Gray's space film Ad Astra came out, it was met with lukewarm reception. Some critics like Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out the film's scientific inaccuracies. In an Instagram conversation with his producer Rodrigo Teixeira, the filmmaker referred to the gravity-related criticism in particular as "fatuous."

Gray said one of the arguments that troubled him about the film was when some people pointed out that Brad Pitt's hair would be floating in zero-G or he wouldn’t be able to sail through the rings of a planet. "To me, it’s a very fatuous level of critique," said Gray. "You don’t read the myth of Icarus and say, ‘Wax on feathers wouldn’t allow you to fly.’ Of course, that’s true, but it’s all about metaphor essentially. I felt that we were trying to get at, and [cinematographer] Hoyte van Hoytema understood, something mythic, almost like a fable. He lit the film in that way. It’s a visually arresting movie. I’ve had people tell me they don’t like the movie but they remember how it looks completely. It’s a lot due to Hoyte’s boldness.”