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It’s easy to step into a Telluride hotel suite with a list of questions for James Gray about Armageddon Time, the bittersweet coming-of-age drama that’s here to debut in front of an American audience on a beautiful September day at high altitude. It’s less straightforward to go through this list with a writer and director whose fondness for film and film temporarily turns into questions about the autobiographical highlights of Armageddon and the Reagan era setting, or where the film lands in a career that spans from its 1994 festival debut. Little Odessa to large-scale Hollywood productions such as We Own the Night and The Lost City of Z.
He’s pleased to communicate about his star-studded cast of Armageddon, which includes Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong of Succession as replacements for his defeated parents, and Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins as a courtly grandfather, or the demanding situations of recreating the work. Class queens of their young people around 1980, even their teenage clashes with a circle of well-known real estate relatives pass for a difficult patriarch named Fred Trump. But Gray, 53, is equally keen to expand the strike policy at Cannes, the casting roulette of the pandemic era (De Niro!Blanchett!Hopkins!), and what Mozart and Mark Rothko can teach us about cinema.
LOIC VENANCE/AFP Getty Images Anne Hathaway, director James Gray and Jeremy Strong at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Where did the concept of Armageddon Time start for you?
JAMES GRAY: In a way, it’s your total life, is it rare?But what happened was that I was in Paris for an engagement to do an opera, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. My wife and children hadn’t come to meet me yet, so I lived in this beautiful apartment in a residential domain in Paris. I was very lonely and had many dreams. I had made two films in a row that were incredibly physically difficult for me. He had been to the Amazon. [for Lost City of Z in 2016] – I mean, obviously it’s not a position that requires you to shoot a movie there – and after that, I had a very complicated party at Ad Astra, where you put the actors on the wires. and act in a green box.
Why not go back to your inner life, to the personal, and not create more distance between you and work?And I just think of a film by Federico Fellini called Amarcord. A bit of fantasy, not his life, actually, and yet it is. And I hate getting too political, yet I’ve noticed a similar line between Mussolini and Trump.
You realize all this in Amarcord about Mussolini, which is very powerful, because what it does is tell you that, as ridiculous as the characters in this movie may be, the background you draw is that in a few years, the country will be fundamentally destroyed, that war is coming. And it provides a kind of darkness to what is also fun and beautiful. So I remembered my own confrontations with the [Trump] family, and I remembered that component of my life, when I lost a very smart friend of mine. He was a twisted child in many ways. And then I started making plans through myself in Paris, of all things. I am sorry. I gave you an answer that was too long. [Laughs]
Well, covered a lot.
The answer, actually, as an artistic user, is to be as public as possible. Because there is only one of you and the more non-public you make, the more express it becomes. And the more express it becomes, the more original it becomes.
During the lockdown I watched about 150 videos with my children, who were about 15, 13 and 11 years old at the time. I showed them, you know, the must-sees of world cinema, The Seven Samurai and The Bicycle Thief, 400 Blows, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Raging Bull, American In Paris, Singin’ in the Rain. The 400 shots hit me because it’s Truffaut who is as fair as you can imagine with us, and I think it’s beautiful.
It feels like a genuine moment right now for those same movies through established managers: Bard, Licorice Pizza, Joanna Hogg’s Souvenir Triptych, The Hand of God.
Paul Thomas Anderson says it’s because we’re all getting older. [Laughs] He said it as a joke, but I think at least it’s part of it. We live under the mistaken impression that art forms last forever, and that is not so. I mean, opera, for example: there was an era of about 120, 140 years when opera was the folk art form. Four hundred thousand more people marched through the streets for Verdi’s funeral. Puccini actually died before he could take down Turandot. And within about 4 or five years after that, they were writing fascist operas with massive budgets, and the art form just died.
The explanation for why I mention it is because, you know, cinema probably won’t exist forever. And I think when you see studios investing in just one type of film, you feel like the art form is going through anything. Very complicated and very unpleasant. I’m not badmouthing comedy videos or anything, it’s wonderful to have them in the mix. But if you only have one kind of movie that studios are going to make, a kind of sclerosis sets in. in. And then you have an audience that has been instilled just to enjoy those kinds of videos. And then you start getting a smaller and smaller box for the art form.
And when the medium is struggling, there’s a kind of mass artistic rebellion, a concept of saying, “No, Doctor Strange in the multiverse is rarely the only thing that can be counted. “I don’t shit on that. What I am saying is that there will have to be more. Part of the explanation for why I love it more than the Prado or the Louvre, as much as I love those museums, is that I can look at Aristotle with a bust of Homer through Rembrandt, and they have wonderful Vermeers, but I can also look at Mark Rothko. It is this range, which is what makes us human. That’s what makes us, dare I use the word, beautiful.
Much has been said about the disappearance of mid-range cinema, almost as if the average elegance of this country had disappeared. But we are also facing the loss of a safe monoculture, where we have all experienced entertainment more or less together.
When The Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show, not a single hubcap was stolen in New York City. It’s true! Everyone at home looking at them. [Laughs]
But you’ve raised something very that I think is essential, and that’s the central crisis of our time. You talked about the decline or demise of the middle class, the middle movie, all that. This stems from the number one unanswered question that no policymaker has answered, and for which I have no answer: no one has figured out how to monetize integrity.
Like a schoolteacher, right? It is a very virtuous task, but it does not work. So what do you do when a company doesn’t prioritize integrity at all?You have Donald Trump, an absolutely transactional character. American capitalism has done a wonderful job of getting rid of the concept that doing anything that doesn’t generate a trillion dollars matters.
While when we talk about what videos used to be like, the golden age of cinema, or what it has, we also infrequently acknowledge how many videos are now considered classics – it’s a glorious life, a general failure. $10
It’s a wonderful life, a disaster! It almost destroyed [Frank] Capra’s career. That’s the case, actually.
Focusing features
Going back to Armageddon, how complicated was it for you to physically recreate the queens of your childhood?New York, of course, didn’t stop for 40 years.
The fact is that we went back to my street. The stall where the kid in the movie lives is 90 feet south of my house. The public school they walk in front of at the beginning is my public school. Queens is more or less intact.
Culturally, it’s very different: it used to be Archie Bunker Central. We were the only Jewish family circle in the neighborhood. In fact, we shared our house, which is a townhouse, with a guy who looked, talked, acted exactly like Carroll O’Connor and even had a mast placed a little across his side so they knew who the real Americans were. [ Laughs] I love Queens much more now than when I grew up there.
I need to communicate about casting for a minute, because it looked like a number of musical chairs: Oscar Isaac was one of the first recruits who had to give up, Robert De Niro’s call was in the mix. You even had Cate Blanchett on board at one point to play Donald’s sister, Mary Anne Trump, which is just one scene, but she delivers that very lively speech at the school your replacement, Paul (played through captivating red-haired newcomer Banks Repeta) is going to.
Well, after writing the script, I left and introduced it, and then the pandemic hit. And everyone’s schedule was absolutely ruined. I think Bob De Niro and Cate Blanchett are credited [in the last movie]. Bob helped me a lot in the script, he was very involved. He actually helped me make the movie. But then he went on to make the Marty Scorsese movie, which he shot for a long time.
“Good, Bob!”
[Laughter] yes, I mean, what am I going to say?” Don’t do that”?And with Oscar, the same thing happened. The task I was running was postponed due to COVID. But you know, it’s weird with videos: they’re done the way they deserve.
In De Niro’s case, he’s going to do a much more working-class edition of my father’s father. My mother’s father just like Tony Hopkins: very polite, very Tony, very well spoken. My father’s most murderous father, a plumber. So I had to rewrite the character.
But it went exactly as planned because my mother more or less had a nervous breakdown when my grandfather died and never recovered emotionally. So I’m not glad Bob couldn’t do it. I love him and have been looking for paints with him for a long time. But when Tony came on board, much of the story was unlocked. And it has become completely faithful to what history was.
I confess, I didn’t know Jeremy’s [Strong] work. It came after Oscar, and then I had to watch Succession, because I’m not a TV fan. I thought, wow, this guy is amazing. And Andy [Anne Hathaway] from the beginning. Cate is going to do this Mary Anne Trump thing for a day, and then she went up to do the movie M. [Todd] Field [TÁR], so she didn’t have to come. But she so big. She said, “Honey, I’ll do a green screen over the weekend in Berlin. “
Anne Joyce / Spotlight
What was it like to receive that seven-minute standing ovation in Cannes?Did you have your Sally Field moment, “They Love Me”?
Well, Cannes, I have a love-hate date. I’ve had a lot of videos they have there: The Immigrant, Two Lovers, We Own The Night, The Yards. And I like to say they love videos there like a dog loves meat.
It’s a confession: everyone was telling me, “Oh, you were crying. Were you moved by the ovation?” No, me crying because my father had died a month before COVID.
Did you get to see a cut of the film before you died?
No, that’s a disgrace. That’s a regret. I mean, he was old and we were on very smart terms. But I was crying because we had talked about maybe bringing him to Cannes, and he didn’t make it.
But honestly, I felt like I had run away, like, okay, okay. They didn’t boo. I was on the jury, and they have those seats there when you get up, they slam the door. I was watching a movie directed by a wonderful director, whose call I probably wouldn’t say, and maybe in the first 30 minutes, part of the audience. I was out. So you stay listening, thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack. And you live in terror that this is what happens to you. So you asked me how I felt, my feeling is one of relief.
I spoke to you a few years ago when I was writing a Brad Pitt profile for Ad Astra, and asked if you would be interested in following some of your fellow movie stars in TV series. He said he would, in fact, kiss her, as he loves the odds of telling longer stories. And I see you have credits for an episode of an upcoming Norman Mailer series on IMdB. Do you also hear the siren song on TV?
I do, sure things. Scenes of a wedding originally made for television. The Decalogue, through [Krzysztof] Kieślowski. It’s in the realm of snobbery to say you wouldn’t because if you paint safely, then it’s beautiful. I mean, Sergey Bondarchuk did War and Peace for Russian TV and it lasted 8 hours. If I were to say to the director of Focus, who is a wonderful guy, “Peter, I have an 8-hour movie. Can you distribute it?” There’s no way I can. You can’t.
As you know, about 45% of Americans now have home theaters, which is a staggering number. I’m really lucky, I have a 110-inch screen with a projector and the popcorn machine, everything. What other people don’t comment on that I think is the problem: “I pressed pause, I gave up and I got angry. Then I checked my phone. I sought to heat the shrimp jambalaya I had eaten yesterday. You know what? I will see the part of the moment tomorrow.
When you were a captive audience, that meant that the filmmaker, the writers, the director, you name it, we had to be experts in saying, “Here is a series of expanding tensions that expand a period of 110 minutes, 120 minutes that advance the rest. You have to see what happens. So, I think as a muscle, it becomes a little comfortable if you don’t use it.
You talked about It’s a Wonderful Life, but if you were doing a studio photo in 1943 or whatever, and you took the movie and you previewed it, say, Pasadena, and the preview audience was, by the way, quite different in 1943, they still made their big mistakes, look at Orson Welles. But if they had a challenge with this or that, suddenly Darryl Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer or anyone else would say, “The story doesn’t work in this section. “It was a Monday. On Tuesday, you asked Ben Hecht to rewrite the scene. On Wednesday, you took Cary Grant out of level seven and Ingrid Bergman out of level nine. You brought them back to redo the filming, didn’t you?You can cut it on a Thursday and on Friday you can screen a new edition of the movie logo.
Therefore, the stories worked brilliantly. They continued to surpass them. Revivals are the unsung hero of those old movies. Nowadays, you can’t go back to filming unless you’re on an exorbitant budget. know, now we are filming in Australia, Belarus, Bucarest. Es to bring everyone in combination again.
And, of course, the stars of that era were locked into their studio contracts. They literally couldn’t say no.
They couldn’t say no. Cary Grant didn’t need to do The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey’s movie, which is a lovely movie. He came forward to reimburse his contact’s studio. He said, “Please don’t force me to do this!It’s comedy, me. ” I’m a serious actor. ” He did it. The rest is history.
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