James Gray travels back to Queen’s roots again for his latest film, “Paper Tiger”. It’s a place, an atmosphere, a state of mind he’s explored across decades and genres, dating back to his first feature in 1994, “Little Odessa.” Like “Paper Tiger,” “Little Odessa” also depicted the shadows of the Russian mafia looming over a family unit — to devastating ends. But even 30-plus years later, with his new film – starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson – Gray wanted to go just as dangerous.
Adam Driver, for one, is dangerous, according to Gray, who played the Oscar nominee as a former police officer who ties up with the red mafia in the 1980s. Gray recently joined IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast with Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio for a wide-ranging, hilarious live chat at the Virginia Film Festival. A man who showed his reputation for ideas – from Luca Guadagnino forcing Gray out of Cannes this year to sit down for the documentary of the Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, to waves of disappointment passing through Maximilian Schell at an early screening in Venice of “Little Odessa”.
“Almost all great performances require some level of risk,” Gray said. “I can only think of a guy who has none, maybe Jeff Bridges as The Dude in ‘The Big Lebowski’, who has no danger at all.” (Though John Goodman’s PTSD-stricken Vietnam vet in the Coens’ 1998 hard-hitting slacker comedy qualifies as dangerous.)
“Adam is a great, intense presence [‘Paper Tiger’]”, said Gray, who wrote “Paper Tiger” with Driver in mind.
Gray also spoke of the “regular nightmares” for any filmmaker: “You screen your movie, and everyone walks out halfway through. That’s never happened to me, thank God.”
But the personal experience of watching this happen to someone else became a real sensation: “When I was on the jury at Cannes [in 2009] … there was a film made by a great director. I won’t say his name, but he is a great director of great reputation. And you have to sit in this jury box, which is kind of in the back of a theater, and the seats … when a person gets up, it’s activated by the spring, so it makes this very high check. I’m on the jury, and I’m watching this movie, and I start hearing tack, tack, tack, tack, tack, tack, tack. And people start walking out in droves. And the movie ended, and it was about half full, and people were stealing. And that became my nightmare. And by the way, I’m not the only director for whom that is a nightmare. I’ve talked to a lot of my director friends, and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. No, I’ve had that dream.'”
James Gray served on the Cannes jury in 2009 under president Isabelle Huppert – who he reiterated, as Huppert has previously done with IndieWire, has no quarrel despite rumors of cheating – with films like Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void” and Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist” in the competition. (But again, he’s not naming names here.)
“I know there are directors who go, ‘I like it. I like it when they boo,’ but that’s bullshit,” Gray said. We also asked for his opinion on the audience going on in films – which some directors, like Lucrecia Martel, have been like falling asleep in the sun, a return of comfort – which will certainly happen with some frequency at Cannes as any attendee knows.
“Who do you like when you fall asleep at a movie? No, I’m sorry. The movie has to keep you awake, and as Hitchcock once said, it has to be long enough to absorb your bladder capacity,” Gray said. “Who, by the way, do you know when people say, ‘Oh, well, what do you think about the streaming thing and all that?’ I only have one real beef with streaming, and that’s the stop button, because my job is to keep you there for an hour and a half, two hours, maybe even three. Where you don’t fall asleep, where you are frustrated, where you don’t move.”
He said, “I can’t stand the people who go, ‘I saw the first half on Tuesday, but I’m going to catch the second half on Saturday.’ …You can’t do anything about it, and no, it’s not based on streams, because most people watch your movies now at home. And whether it’s Netflix or Peacock or whatever, it doesn’t matter. The stop button is a problem.”
He pointed to his early relationship with “Vertigo,” a Hitchcock film he disliked in the first half, as an example of the virtues of experiencing a film entirely in one sitting. “The result is much more rewarding when you have to experience the whole thing because it’s like a dream, and you can’t stop your dream. And sometimes you don’t like your dream … sometimes the only way you can get yourself out of that dream is to convince yourself that it’s a dream in your dream. REM sleep is one and a half to two hours a night. What’s the runtime of a movie.
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