James Gray: ‘I’m hostile to the idea of whose story can I tell? It’s my right to put it out there’

Less than a year on from the New Yorker magazine’s highly unflattering and controversial profile of Succession star Jeremy Strong, one can rely on the straight-talking New York director James Gray – who cast the actor as a fictionalised version of his own father – to provide a corrective.

“It’s revolting to question an actor,” says Gray. “Acting is not easy. A lot of times, people think that acting is like a different version of high school acting where you want to impress the old grandmas in the back row. But acting on a professional level is actually self-effacement and it’s a very vulnerable place to be.”

Over the last decade, Gray’s work has become increasingly adventurous in every sense of that word. The Lost City of Z (2016), a wildly impressive channelling of Aguirre, Wrath of God for 21st century audiences, followed Victorian explorers (Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson) into the Amazon jungle; Ad Astra (2019), a metaphysical space opera, launched Brad Pitt’s astronaut into deep, dark places.

Desire for fame or money or whatever is a complete folly. My soul was filled with that idea while shooting and editing the movie

“There are a lot more logistics involved in those kinds of movies and part of me loves it,” says Gray. “You know, it’s almost like marshalling an army or something for battle. Part of me also felt that I was getting away from intimacy and tenderness and warmth and all those things you like to convey through actors. And I wanted to get back to that a little bit after what were those two very difficult films. I’m not unhappy that I made them. But they were very hard.”

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Post-Ad Astra, Gray staged The Marriage of Figaro, a lavish co-production between Los Angeles Opera and Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Oddly, this fascinating career detour provided the spark for the filmmaker’s most personal work to date.

“It was a strange moment because I was living in a kind of gilded cage in a residential neighbourhood in Paris,” recalls Gray. “My family hadn’t joined me yet. I was by myself, I would go to the theatre or go into the basement of the theatre and work on the opera with the singers, which, by the way I loved and they were great. I love Mozart so that was fun, but then I’d go home at night and have nothing to do except to read. I started thinking about my childhood. That’s how I started to come up with the new film.”

That new film is Armageddon Time, an emotionally bruising sketch of Gray’s life as a preteen growing up in the New York borough of Queens and a profound negotiation with class and race in the US.

Paul Graff, as played by Banks Repeta, is Gray ersatz, a young boy descended from European Jews who survived the Holocaust. He is close to his maternal grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) who emigrated to the US and who explains that, back in Ukraine, “there were soldiers and sometimes they’d go out looking for Jews: they hated us then and they hate us still.”

He encourages the boy to speak out against the racism he sees levelled at his African-American best friend, Johnny (Jaylin Webb).

After Ali lost to Larry Holmes in humiliating fashion in September of 1980 and John Lennon’s murder, the idealism of the 60s finally died. And Reagan’s ferocious capitalism took hold

Paul’s parents, meanwhile, played by Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong, are – given their own family history – understandably concerned with “getting a leg up” and assimilation. These are the Graff family, formerly the Grassersteins, just as Gray’s own family was once “Grayevsky” or “Greyzerstein”.

The writing process made for a good deal of personal meditation.

“After I wrote the first draft of the script during lockdown, I went back and I vowed that I would reread Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” says Gray. “I didn’t get through it all, I only made it through Swann’s Way, because I have three children and it turns out it’s impossible for me to finish anything, basically. But at the end of Swann’s Way, there’s a passage which is pretty amazing where he talks about places in which we live, being just as impermanent as our own lives and our own selves.

[ James Gray: 'I went back to the US and got told I was nothing' ]

“And I remembered going back to my old house and showing my children where I lived,” he says. “There was very little evidence that I’d lived there. The physical space itself had started to change. They added a wing to the house and all this other stuff. You just realise the ephemerality of our lives. We’re here for a very brief blip. And if we’re lucky, we’ve made some small contribution to the positive forward motion of the species. Desire for fame or money or whatever is a complete folly. My soul was filled with that idea while shooting and editing the movie.”

Twitter is noxious in this respect, because it has emboldened this kind of compartmentalising and an imbecilic reduction of complexity

In that spirit, “remember your past” is a refrain that Aaron Rabinowitz (Hopkins) preaches to his grandson Paul. The 1980 setting adds resonance; the election of Ronald Reagan as US president is a historical cornerstone. “That was a huge part of the reason I made the film,” says Gray. “I feel that 1980 is a really important moment because, for me, Muhammad Ali and The Beatles both represented the idea of integrity. Ali, famously, was prohibited from boxing in 1967 to 1970 and the Beatles stopped performing live in 1966 and started just recording. There’s no guarantee they were going to be successful.

“Part of the crisis that we face in the world, is that with capitalism, we haven’t really figured out how to monetise integrity, and the only thing that matters is money. That was Ronald Reagan’s idea. If you rape the planet or kill other people, it’s fine as long as you can make money. After Ali lost to Larry Holmes in humiliating fashion in September of 1980 and John Lennon’s murder, the idealism of the 60s finally died, and Reagan’s ferocious capitalism took hold.”

One of the stranger aspects of Gray’s past, as chronicled by a key scene in the film, is an odd connection to the Trump family. Armageddon Time features both Fred Trump and his daughter Maryanne (played by John Diehl and Jessica Chastain, respectively). Gray attended a private academy funded by Fred and attended by both Maryanne and Donald Trump. The former delivered a motivational speech to the students, which Gray has recreated for the film.

It’s not my job to police culture, or police art or police myself

“I kind of don’t know what to make of it,” says the filmmaker. “I felt that it was necessary to put it in the movie, because it happened to me and it’s weird. Privilege is a layer of the story. People at school were more privileged than I was and looked down on me as the weird Jewish kid,” Gray recalls.

“At the same time, Maryanne Trump came to school, and gives her speech: ‘I’m a woman and a man’s world’. By the way, it probably did represent a tiny bit of difficulty for her, but in the grand scheme of things, of course, she was worth $400 million. It didn’t really matter that much. I remember looking at her, thinking, ‘lady, you’re crazy, you were born on third base and you think you hit a triple?’ At some point, you realise that everybody is stuck in his or her ideological box and it is very difficult to look outside of that box.”

Armageddon Time arrives at a moment when personal essays and autofiction are increasingly dominant across the arts. With that voguishness, a parallel conversation has sprang up around memory and ownership. At the extreme end of the spectrum, the use of the real-life details underpinning Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person had tragic consequences. Meanwhile, various members of Swedish memoirist Karl Ove Knausgård’s family have threatened legal action and one former girlfriend likened reading his work to getting “punched in the face”.

All of our striving, as a species, is for greater and greater layers of complexity. That gets entirely undone by fools. And that’s dangerous

As Gray notes, both his brother and father were alive as he wrote the script for Armageddon Time. And besides, he’s not in the business of self-censorship. “It’s not my job to police culture, or police art or police myself, censor myself,” he says. “In fact, I have a great resentment towards those who do think it’s their job to police culture. Joseph Goebbels was into policing culture. I understand there are a lot of people, from all sides of the political spectrum, who believe that their side is the virtuous and ethical and moral one.

“I have news for all of those people. In 50 or even 20 years from now, the landscape may be very different and it might not be so pretty for them. I’m hostile to the idea of whose story can I tell? Who can I put in the movie? Let others decide whether I have succeeded or failed. It’s my right to put it out there”

If Gray sounds peeved, he’s right to be. An alarming amount of discourse around Armageddon Time, much of it originating from Twitter, has concerned the casting of Anthony Hopkins in a Jewish role. Elsewhere, one reviewer outrageously dismissed the film as a “white guilt manifesto”; another questioned Gray’s right to chronicle racism in the US.

“We are in the realm of the imbecile,” says Gray. “You have to try to forget about it because it’s inherently anti-Semitic to devalue that aspect of the movie and it’s a grotesque oversimplification of the ideas in the film itself. But let’s assume that the person is an imbecile because that person’s conception of identity is reduced to race, which means that person is‚ without knowing it, possibly racist.

“Race is only one part of our identity. Class, for example, is a major factor of our identity. And the reduction of identity to the physical differences between people, means that this person is part of the problem, and not the solution. Twitter is noxious in this respect, because it has emboldened this kind of compartmentalising and an imbecilic reduction of complexity. All of our striving, as a species, is for greater and greater layers of complexity. That gets entirely undone by fools. And that’s dangerous.”

The United States likes to think of itself as a classless society, which of course, is absurd. Europe seems willing to acknowledge history and class

Among contemporary American auteurs, Gray cuts a very European figure. His films – including The Yards, We Own the Night, The Immigrant, and Armageddon Time – premiered in competition in Cannes; Little Odessa and Ad Astra, meanwhile took home major prizes from Venice. The reviews for We Own the Night – a masterpiece, says this European writer – revealed something of a transatlantic divide. That may not be accidental, says Gray, who cites Luchino Visconti, Ettore Scola, and Pier Paolo Pasolini among his influences.

“I love European cinema but if I had to boil it down, I would say 1945 to1980 in Italian cinema was a huge influence on me. There seems to be a commitment to storytelling and characterisation that reflects the layers of history and how history interplays with economics and class. The United States likes to think of itself as a classless society, which of course, is absurd. Europe seems willing to acknowledge history and class.”

Armageddon Time is in cinemas now