Yahoo Movies James Gray Gets Up Close and Personal
U.S. film writer and director James Gray (“Little Odessa”, “Two Lovers”, “The Immigrant”, “Armageddon Time”) drew several laugh-out-loud moments from a packed theatre during a masterclass at the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon.
In a disarmingly honest conversation laced with humorous self-deprecation, the Venice Silver Lion Winner (“Little Odessa”, 1994) opened up about his love of cinema and the ups and downs of his career.
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Speaking about the highly autobiographical nature of his new film, “Armageddon Time”, a deeply personal look at his Queens childhood in 1980s America, Gray explained that it was a natural evolution after his two previous films, “The Lost City of Z”, which is partly set in the Amazon and left him physically exhausted, and “Ad Astra.”
About the latter, Gray said: “Creatively, it became a very torturous experience. The film was taken from me, ultimately: it’s not my cut of the movie, and I find it a very painful experience to have people tell me things they hated about the movie that I had nothing to do with.
“I was so deeply upset, I had lost all my enthusiasm for making films. And I said, ‘If I’m going to do it again, if it’s going to be bad, it might as well be my bad.’”
It was while he was directing the opera “The Marriage of Figaro” in Paris in 2019 that his next film came to him. “I started to think of the bedtime stories I used to tell my children, so I tried to strip away everything else and just go back to what I love about movies, and that’s why I made the film.”
Gray’s love of movies made him the perfect candidate for a masterclass at Lumiere, a nine-day long celebration of cinema young and old in the French city of Lyon, the birthplace of the Cinematograph.
“I’d like to be an expert in one thing before I die,” he told the Lumière audience. “So I watch tons of old movies: I watch a movie every night, usually pre-dating 1980. My children and my wife think I’m a fool, they want me to watch new TV shows – I try to get interested in that, but I really don’t give a shit,” Gray joked.
He added: “To me it’s the responsibility of the artist – if I can use that big, fancy word – to remove the wall that is naturally constructed between artist and the work, actor and character, director and actor, director and script, to try and be as honest as I can about myself and get more directly at what my definition of good art is. It may not be other people’s definition, but, to me, that’s the coin of the realm,” he said.
Asked why death is always a part of his films, Gray quipped: “Well, nobody beats the house: Everybody’s going to die. Sorry to break the news,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience, before resuming on a more serious note: “I certainly did witness a lot of mortality as a young person, which culminated with the death of my mother [from cancer], and I’m sure that made its mark on my work and on who I am: You make the work in some ways as a kind of a coping mechanism,” he said, adding to the audience’s delight: “I’m not very funny today but you’re not asking very funny questions!”
Five of Gray’s eight films are being screened at the Lumière Film Festival, including Cannes 2022 competition entry “Armageddon Time,” which premiered ahead of its French release in November. The filmmaker is a household name in France, where five of his eight films have been presented at the Cannes Festival.
Introducing his latest work, Gray told the audience, “History and myth always begin in the microcosm of the personal. So, I said it’s time to be very personal, as personal as you can get.”
“Armageddon Time” is set for a limited theater release in the U.S. on Oct. 28, followed by a nationwide release in November.
The Lumiere Film Festival runs in Lyon through Oct. 23.
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