While his newest work Paper Tiger screening at Locarno's magnificent Piazza Grande, James Gray also honored with the Pardo della Carriera for his cinematic achievemnets. It's a body of work that's still growing, as he assures in an interview with Lidanoir. After a masterclass and a public talk, the director still found some time for an interview about the personla inspiration for Paper Tiger, the crime drama's political texts, the vicious state of the world and love as the answer.
Lida Bach: Just yesterday you received the Pardo alla Carriera for your work as a filmmaker. How do you feel getting such a recognition?
James Gray: I feel kind of old. Thing is, I'm not old. I, it's a little weird. I think I'm a little too young to get it, but it's very flattering. I guess it means the work has meant something to somebody. At my age, Alfred Hitchcock had not yet made Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds. I mean, come on, I'm not done! I want to do some great films. I need more chances. So I'm conflicted. I'll take it. It's very nice, but I have to keep going and try to do better.
LB: You have already commented on the political points of Paper Tiger. Would you tell more about the theme of capitalism which changed its course radically in 80s USA and the world?
JG: I have real issues with the system. I'm very scared about it. I don't know what happens. I had this - I'm not going to call it a “masterclass”, that's what they call it - I'll call it more like a “struggling idiot class”. I'm sitting there and it's like 35 degrees Fahrenheit with like a hundred percent humidity. The climate is destroyed. It didn't happen for no reason. I have a lot of fear that the system we've currently constructed has no counterweight. It can eat us alive.
I went to the Soviet union in 1984. It was a totally broken country. Nothing functioned. So I'm not romanticizing socialist dictatorships. I'm extremely pro democracy. It's messy, but it's the only thing that works. But when your priority is a constant growth and embracing a totally transactional value system, you're going to wind up in deep trouble. I don't think it's my job as a creative person to come up with an answer. And I don't have an answer.
I don't know how to create a system which incentivizes integrity, love, tenderness …I don't know what that would be. Nobody else does either. But that doesn't mean the one with God is perfect. I have a lot of fear about where we're headed unless and until the human race finds some kind of alternative. Maybe it's ahead. I do have optimism at times. If you were to look at the entire history of the human race, it wouldn't be this, right? [paints an upwards curve in the air] It would be sort of like [paints a zig-zag curve going up]. Right?
You have minor blips, like Genghis Khan, but mostly it's headed in some kind positive direction. But it's a cruel, vicious world we're living in and somehow we need relief. I don't have that answer. Maybe about capitalism, humanity have been a bit naive.
LB: At the story’s center are two brothers who dream about a big financial opportunity. Do you see this as optimistic naivety?
JG: I think all of us are incredibly naive. You have no perspective on who you are to other people. You make decisions all the time that are against your own self-interest. On a daily basis, we live in denial about the most basic idea there is: that we will die.
We get up, we eat breakfast, we have a cup of coffee. We don't think for one second, my death is at hand. That's how we survive, but that's naivety in a different form. You can be the brightest person in the world and still make terribly inappropriate decisions. Unfortunately, that's who we are. We act out of desire, not out of self-interest. That leads us to ridiculous and totally misperceived opportunity and a completely cloudy view of what might be called reality.
Every day I do something dumb, don't you? And then you say, even sometimes when you're aware of it in the same day, you go, what the hell did I do that for? People with an opportunity, they see a dream that completely blinds them. To deny that is to deny reality.
LB: The concept of looking within the film is quite interesting. In dangerous situation, the characters are unable to see clearly. In the introductory quote by Aeschylus, the word “to see” is closely connected to the idea of knowing.
JG: Our perception of the world is … Obviously my view of the world is different from yours and our ability to see clearly all of the varieties of realities or threats in front of us is very poor. We do an excellent job on a daily basis, not just of denying death, but of denying the idea that we sit on top of a corrupt and violent world order. Every time you make any kind of decision, it carries moral and ethical compromise.
My children buy sneakers, some company makes the sneaker in Vietnam. You don't think about the people that made your sneaker because their lives are probably fairly bruising. So we are willfully blind to large parts of the world that are so unpleasant that we can't bear to acknowledge them.
This guy and his wife, who live this middle-class existence are willfully blind to an ocean of darkness underneath that allows them to live the life that they live. The idea for all of these sequences was that our ability to perceive clearly with a panoramic view, everything that is in front of us, is non-existent. The threat is always behind the corner. You don't always see it coming.
A brain tumor does not announce itself with a large trumpet and orchestra. So I always thought the use of off-screen space or our inability to see completely, what is that? It was a thing that reflected more clearly my own view of the darkness in this world.
The degree to which Aeschylus is connected to that, is harder for me to articulate, I'm sure it was there on an unconscious way. Aeschylus quote was intended to just say, it's going to be a story about ambition that is catastrophic for so many reason. I was trying to make sure that the audience could understand the stakes right away.
LB: “Paper Tiger” is a word for something that's harmless, but in the film, this thing is revealed to be very dangerous. Do you feel that people or we as a society underestimate the dangers around us and the threatening things that might destroy us or our families?
JG: Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't, it's a complicated thing. Certainly we underestimate a lot of the ferocious side of the system we've built. We do such a good job of pushing the unsavory darker elements of how the system works away from our daily lives that we do underestimate the degree of compromise that we make with that system. The title was meant to be a little bit ironic, that it's actually the opposite of paper tiger, it’s ferocious. It'll eat you alive. The system eats them alive.
LB: What were the references you had in mind when writing and then directing the film and were there were more cinematic references or literary?
JG: When I first started writing it, I didn't look at other movies, weirdly. I used to, watch movies all the time. I was trying to force myself to not think of other movies. By the way, it doesn't mean I don't rip them off. You'd rip them off anyway, because they're there in your mind, on unconscious level and sometimes semi-conscious. But I was trying to tell a story as directly as I could from my own memory and combining it with people I knew. And to try to express an unending series of dilemmas and insoluble knots that these people would have to try to untie.
I was trying to give it a novelistic idea of character conception, where the struggle is both external and internal. What is the correct choice, the ethical choice? How am I a moral or ethical actor in a world that is totally hostile to such an idea? I can say pretentiously that I came at it from a much more philosophical view than I did on other movies. As corny as this sounds, I was trying to make a film about love. Not love meaning like in some saccharine way. It's not the same thing as being moved about love where people want more than anything human connection, but things always get in the way when we desire connection. To me, it seems that's why our species is in trouble. You know, the Beatles were pretty smart. “All you need is love” - That's so smart, so clear. So true. And we didn't get there, did we?
I was thinking a lot of Cassavetes, not in style, but in a unflinching approach to domestic catastrophe. I was trying to nonetheless bring no distance to it that I love those people. I remember saying every day: “We love these people, right?”, to the actors.
LB: You and your brother actually experienced a situation similar to that scene in the car. Is that true and would you like that tell about it?
JG: Well, you've seen the movie. The only thing I can add to it is, I don't think people fully understand in New York in the late 1980s, there was 2,900 murders a year. It’s now somewhere around, I think 160 or something, it's the whole nature of the city was completely different. It was a much more for all of the things that are wrong now. And there's tons.
Certainly the federal or national political leadership in the United States is a catastrophe, but it's so much less violent than it used to be. I mean, there were large sections of New York that you just didn't go to. And the Gowanus canal, which is what's in the movie. I could have shot there. But I shot the Gowanus canal in New Jersey because what the Gowanus canal looks like now is so completely different. It would be like saying, I want to shoot the middle ages in the middle of Paris.
The city has been remade completely into a much more benign and friendly place. I don't blame my father because like I said, it's not just denial. But back then in 1986, nobody had any knowledge of what's called the Russian organization. That was so out of his understanding. I think that he made a sin, he left us alone, but it was not for nefarious reasons. We were just swallowed up by this city that was so inhospitable. It traumatizes you. You live with it, but you don't get over it. I was trying to find a narrative context and figure out the shape of the movie where I could tell this story in real life.
LB: Would you expand on the themes of love and relationship in regard to Scarlett Johnson and her strong bond with her children. How did you develop her character?
JG: I based a ton of it on my own mother. That fight is exactly something that happened in my house. These things happen behind doors all the time. Things happen all the time that are terrible and people fight. Even if they have love in them and they're totally well-intended, it leads to catastrophe.
And there's always a misalignment. People have dreams for themselves and it's impossible to conform your life to your dream. So I remembered that stuff in the movie. You don't know if the movie's good or bad. You make it and then you put it out in the world and hopefully people don't hate it. But, uh, from a creative standpoint, working with the actors to convey something without distance that would make you even almost a little uncomfortable to watch it, to me was a very refreshing, rewarding process.
And I just loved the actors for being so willing to be vulnerable. And, you know, Miles Teller's performance is amazing. He plays someone totally emasculated in that moment. It's not easy as movie star. You're trying to be this guy and Adam too. Scarlett, of course, to wear those glasses, to perm your hair like that 80s weird hair. She's incredibly beautiful in real life and you see that movie with these glasses and it looks weird. Those are acts of generosity to me to say, we don't have to put on the show. We will be honest in the moment.
I remember the first time when I was a kid, I was 11, December of 1990. I was 11, uh, with my brother, we went to see Raging Bull. Scorsese did in his films stuff that I'd never seen in a movie before, he's in that prison and he's punching the wall. It's like I was eavesdropping on somebody's private moment. I remember being so touched by that. Then I discovered A Woman Under the Influence through Marty's films. Anyway, I guess I have to go now.
LB: Thank you for the interview!