hazeleyes
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 5:01 pm Post subject: Chronicle Interview With James Gray |
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Interview with James Gray
I had to post this because it is from the Houston Chronicle.  We represent! 
 Chronicle Interview with JGray
Oct. 11, 2007, 6:48AM
Gray's patience is a virtue
Night director's wait pays off with the right star and the film he wanted to make
By ERIC HARRISON
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
Read film critic Amy Biancolli's review of We Own the Night in Friday's Star section. Joaquin Phoenix has been acting since he was 8 and has appeared in some high-grossing dramas, but Hollywood didn't consider him a star until he played Johnny Cash.
Phoenix earned an Oscar nomination for Walk the Line, but more importantly he had top billing. He got credit for the film's success. And filmmaker James Gray was able to stop twiddling his thumbs.
Gray directed Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron in his 2000 drama, The Yards. He wanted Phoenix and Wahlberg for his next film, too, but The Yards grossed less than $900,000.
He had to wait for Phoenix to prove he could carry a movie. Then, when Phoenix did curse the timing Wahlberg, who has a smaller role, said no because his son was about to be born. Gray had to beg him to take the part.
"I am permanently in their debt," the filmmaker says.
The movie, We Own the Night, opens Friday. It is worth the wait.
Phoenix delivers his most powerful performance as Bobby, the reckless son of a high-level police official and the manager of a nightclub that is home base for one of New York's most vicious drug dealers. It's set during the 1980s New York drug wars.
The club's Russian owner treats Bobby like a son, and it's clear he feels more at home in that world than in the one to which he was born. Turning his back on his family which includes a brother (Wahlberg) who heads a new narcotics task force Bobby loves only the club, the wild life and his girlfriend.
Bobby's dilemma is laid out in an early scene with Robert Duvall, who plays his father.
"Sooner or later," his father tells him, "you're either going to be with us or you're going to be with the drug dealers. It's like a war out there. Do you understand that?"
Bobby doesn't understand it. But eventually, he will.
The story, which Gray patterned on Shakespeare's Henry IV, plays out with stirring inevitability.
The film is fiction, but Gray says much of it is drawn from life. There really was a Brooklyn nightclub called the El Caribe. There really was a high-level police official who had a son on the force. There really was, as shown in the movie, an officer shot by drug dealers outside his home.
The movie also has a car chase a cop-movie clichι that feels fresh and real because it subverts so many expectations. It takes place in the driving rain, is shot mostly from Bobby's limited point of view, without music, and it's the good guys who are being chased by an enemy we never clearly see.
"I wanted to do a different take on the car chase, which is very difficult to do because there have been so many of them in the history of the movies," Gray says. "I think I watched all of them."
Finally, what most grounds the film in reality is the acting, particularly that of Phoenix, Wahlberg and Eva Mendez.
Gray calls Phoenix and Wahlberg "the best young actors in the country, and for very different reasons."
Phoenix, he says, is like "a young Montgomery Clift." His characters are full of internal conflict. And Wahlberg is like John Garfield, he says, exuding a blue-collar authenticity and power.
Though he considers the term pretentious, Gray says We Own the Night completes a loose trilogy that deals with issues of family, patriarchy and destiny, all played out against a criminal backdrop and Russian-immigrant setting. Gray is of Russian descent.
Little Odessa, the first film in the trilogy, was also Gray's first movie. It starred Tim Roth and Edward Furlong, and barely earned $1 million. (The Yards is the second.)
With its reliance on classic narrative structures, archetypes and melodrama, Gray's work is out of sync with the fast-cutting and ironic tone prevalent today. This may be why We Own the Night hasn't gotten the advance critical buzz some other films have received.
Gray knows he's working against the grain and seems unfazed by commercial neglect.
What matters, he says, is whether the work lasts.
"History will judge," he says. "You can make a movie that's perceived one way and 10 years later it's an entirely different perception," he says.
In the meantime?
"I live very frugally," he says. "I don't have a lot of expenses. I try to bring my expenses down so I can only make the films I want to make."
Unlike some directors who make commercials or music videos to pay the bills, Gray says he does some script doctoring-for-hire but mostly spends his time between projects writing his own scripts.
That's why he's in a position to immediately begin work on his next film, which he says will be a romantic comedy starring Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow.
"It's completely different in style and content from the other films I've done," he says. But then he chuckles.
"It's weird. You say that (it will be different), and then it ends up being the same movie. That's what they say that writers spend their lives telling the same story over and over."
eric.harrison@chron.com
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