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Karen
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Joined: 25 May 2007
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Location: London, UK
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| Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 8:40 pm Post subject: Interview with James Gray (nov 2007) |
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I think we have read some of this but not all so:
LINK: MOVING PICTURES
James Gray – His “Own” Self
By Elliot V. Kotek (November 2007)
We Own the Night director James Gray riffs on the Cannes film festival, brotherhood, Wahlberg and Phoenix, and, of course, the Beatles...
Moving Pictures: Was it weird going back to the Festival de Cannes with We Own the Night?
James Gray: Déjà vu all over again, as they say, you know. I mean, Cannes is a very strange place. It's a very difficult place, actually, to watch a film; because you're hostage to - well, you're always hostage to context; but Cannes has a kind of a love and hate relationship with movies, because they love to love them; and they love to hate them; and they wanna hate and love them; and then they wanna hate them after they've been loved; and after they've been loved, they wanna hate.
You know what I mean? It's like a whole thing. It's almost like sport. It's like spectator sport for movies. So I must say I enjoy it very much, although it's a very tense thing while you're there and you're working, and it's very tense because you've just made a film. You have no idea what people are gonna think, and then they think something, and then they think the other thing, and it's insane. It's insane.
Moving Pictures: Each of your movies has had a festival presence.
James Gray: That's right.
Moving Pictures: 'Cause even Little Odessa went to Deauville and won Venice. Do you think film festivals play a role in the marketing of your films?
James Gray: I think they've played less of a role than you might think. I don't think anybody cares about Venice awards or Cannes awards. I mean, the last several Palme d'Or winners have done really nothing in terms of financial success, or even cultural exposure, for that matter. Pulp Fiction is almost the exception to the rule.
So you ask a question, which is a good one, but I don't think that festivals really matter except to show movies that otherwise wouldn't be seen; and I think that's very helpful.
I've been very lucky, because my films have gotten distribution; and this film is gonna be released in about 3,000 movie theaters. So truth be told, my films don't need to go to the festivals. They don't. They go because it's a tremendous honor. And when you're asked to go - if you're invited to the Cannes Festival competition, it's literally like saying, "We think you are one of 15 people on Earth who makes films that are for us." And that's a great honor. It's one of the only moments where you truly say, "I'm grateful just to be nominated."
Moving Pictures: You mentioned the word "hostage," and your films have all captured specific moments in time in New York. Is New York a love affair for you or a hostage situation?
James Gray: What a great question. Nobody's ever asked me that. That's pretty good.
Well, I think it's probably both, right? That, in a way, what you're doing when you make a picture is you're trying to reveal the ego and the id. You're trying to reveal dark and light. You're trying to do many things. So you ask a good question, but it doesn't have a glib answer.
Moving Pictures: In the film, I think I saw Robert Duvall wearing a Freemason ring.
James Gray: You're quite right about that. Wow.
Moving Pictures: And so I was looking at all the elements of brotherhood in the film. There are literal brothers, then the brotherhood of the Masons, and the brotherhood of the police force.
James Gray: Um-hum.
Moving Pictures: The brotherhood of the Mafia itself.
James Gray: Uh-huh.
Moving Pictures: What was there especially about that theme for you? Is it a personal thing, or is it historical context that you've been interested in?
James Gray: Well, it's both; and the whole idea - to me it's a very profound narrative idea that human beings have a constant need, a desire, a longing, to fit into a system, an aspect of the system; and when you say "brotherhood," that's really what that's about. It's people longing to be part of a larger system. It's their bulwark against loneliness, you know? It's the battle we all face, and it's also a product of the fact that there are ideological and cultural codes that are so potent in our lives; it makes life bearable to be part of some group.
Moving Pictures: Has that changed...?
James Gray: I think it's been exactly the same since the beginning of time. Since man acknowledged his mortality, it's been the same, and that's the number one thing that we struggle with. And you can say all the ******** you want about what it means to be a person - I think that when you cut to the quick, when it really gets down to it, human beings and their neuroses and all of the screwed-up things that we are, it all comes from the fact that we know we're going to die.
On an unconscious level, it haunts us every day; and all of it - whether it's religion, greed, or, you know, obsession or compulsiveness - all of this is a way to grapple with mortality. And I think that's the struggle that's been the same since the beginning of consciousness.
Moving Pictures: Is it the same as, well, for Eva Mendes's character wanting to be part of the institution of marriage?
James Gray: Absolutely, absolutely; and she has her place in that world and she does not have her place in the other. So they're very, very different worlds, and it destroys their relationship.
Moving Pictures: Did anything change about working with Mark and Joaquin since The Yards?
James Gray: Well, only in...a good way. I mean, they're excellent, excellent actors, and they really...have honed their craft.
Wahlberg is unbelievable that way. I mean, he will -- and he's a much better technical actor than he's given credit for. You can say to him, "Mark, can you - you know." And he'll say to you, "Jim, I cry on the third line. On the next take, I will cry on the fourth." That kinda guy. And he has more training than he admits, and his craft is really so strong now; and he's able to digest the meaning of a scene.
Joaquin's craft is also advanced, but Joaquin now gets more detail oriented and asks you more questions and needs more expatiation and more disquisition and more discussion; and he drives you crazy. But what you get is so beautiful.
So they're just better. It's like them times two.
Moving Pictures: [Laughs] So, did you find that in directing them now, it was more collaborative than it was before?
James Gray: It was more collaborative. Certainly in the case of Joaquin, it was more collaborative. Mark has this kind of bogus security, you know, where he feels as though - you know, he'll tell you, "Jim, I don't need you to act. Just tell me what you want me to do. I'll do it." And then you tell him, and then he uses that as the springboard to give you something new.
I made an attempt to include them in the workings of the story. And, you know, over and above everything else - you can talk about it as much as you want, but over and above everything else - they're unbelievably bright, both of them.
Mark is one of the shrewdest judges of behavior you will ever see in your life. Joaquin has some incredible emotional intelligence as well as, you know, kind of a just standard intellect. But he's very emotionally aware. And it's a pleasure to work with people like that, you know. You don't get the shot very often.
Moving Pictures: It was funny when Duvall sat down with Joaquin and the judge. You really got a sense that Duvall wasn't sure what he was gonna say. And then he starts saying to Joaquin...
James Gray: "Don't laugh. Don't laugh." He's a jerk; he's sitting there laughing at his father. A lot of that was improvised.
And an amazing thing that Duvall does that I'm really glad I got to keep in the film [is] where Joaquin sits down and he says, "I got a job, Pop. I got a good job." And Duvall goes, "That's the whole point of this conversation. That's why you're here, because of this. That's why your brother was shot - 'cause of this club."
And then there's a moment of silence, and Duvall just kinda goes like this. And he says, "Ahhhhh, he said you're using your mother's name." In other words, he's so distraught. It's like they have - you see in that scene - in a way it says everything, because they have no commonality at all. There's a gulf between them that's huge.
Moving Pictures: It made me think of Little Odessa, although I haven't seen that film in a long time. But I remember...
James Gray: Neither have I, by the way.
Moving Pictures: I remember the father in that thing being really abusive, and the mother was...
James Gray: Verbally abusive; yes.
Moving Pictures: Dying, if not dead. And then the Russian immigrants, of course.
James Gray: It's that same movie over and over again.
Moving Pictures: That's the thing. A lot of people say a lot of the really good filmmakers were able to explore the same themes over and over, in a way that we accept, because we're willing to go with them down that path. Were you conscious of that?
James Gray: I was. I was and I am. You know, to me it's a waste of time to try and be someone that I'm not; what you get when that happens is a kind of ersatz quality. And, you know, there are things that concern me, and that's human beings trying to fit into a system that's larger than they are.
It's about destiny. It's about, you know, ideology and culture playing a very large role in peoples' lives. It's about hopes and dreams versus the reality of your life in the end. These are things that interest me. I can't become somebody I'm not.
Maybe as I get older, the interests will change; the thematic interests will change. But my bet is, you know, the expression "Show me a boy at seven, and I show you the man." Somehow I feel like I was formed, and that's about it.
It doesn't mean the subjects stay the same, but the essential thematic concerns don't vary very much. You could watch Stanley Kubrick's work, right? And I'm not saying I'm as good as Stanley Kubrick. But you could say, "Well, Barry Lyndon is nothing like Clockwork Orange." But it is.
They're the same movie made by the same guy. 2001 is the same as Barry Lyndon. There's the same kind of almost comedy of manners element to it. You know: "What's that? Chicken?" in 2001 versus, you know, kind of the almost fastidious nature of Barry Lyndon. You know, human behavior of preoccupation with the darker side of human existence. I just feel like there's nothing - absolutely nothing - wrong with that.
Moving Pictures: I find, also, when people make a film that's set in a certain period of time, journalists seem to ask them about, "Well, what was it like recreating that period?" But, for you, I felt this film didn't just recreate that time, it recreated the look of films at the end of the '70s. Like Fort Apache, The Bronx...
James Gray: Right.
Moving Pictures: Even Hill Street Blues, the lighting...
James Gray: Right.
Moving Pictures: And the way the cop room wasn't glamorized.
James Gray: Right.
Moving Pictures: Did you go back and look at that stuff, or did you just have a retained memory of that stuff?
James Gray: Oh, of course. No, we watched many, many films from that time period. You know, 1988 was a difficult period for us because the movies stopped reflecting life around 1981 in this country. At least mainstream pictures did. So we had to watch kind of independent cinema from the '80s.
In the '70s, the movies reflected the period much better. In the '80s, it became about fantasy. If you were to go and put all the mainstream pictures made within the system today [into] a time capsule and said, "Is this what life was like in 2007?" - well, you would have Spiderman, right? You would have Lord of the Rings. You would have one of the big movies. You would have maybe a James Bond movie thrown in for good measure.
Moving Pictures: And a Shrek.
James Gray: The Shrek movie. You would have nothing that resembles our lives in 2007. So in doing the picture that was set in that time period, I stole essentially from my memories of the time period and from films that predated by about five or six years. And that's the reason that we arrived at that aesthetic. Because in order to steal the aesthetic from 1988, you would be stealing a fantasy.
Moving Pictures: At what point did you choose the title?
James Gray: Right at the beginning, I was doing research for the picture and I read a story in The New Yorker written by a guy named Marcus Laffey called "Cop Diary." He talked about that being the slogan of the Street Crimes Unit: "We own the night."
And to me, it sounded very poetic, almost like a film noir by Nicholas Ray in the '50s or something. And it seemed, in a way, also subversive because, perversely, nobody owns the night in that picture. You know, Joaquin becomes a different person and not altogether a happy one; and, of course, Mark is diminished. So in a perverse way, the title had a kind of irony that I thought was interesting.
Moving Pictures: I was gonna ask you about Blondie and The Clash then.
James Gray: Well, The Clash I'm obsessed with. I think The Clash [is] the second-greatest group of all time. Behind... who?
Moving Pictures: Are we talking about the Stones?
James Gray: No; we're talking about the Beatles. The Stones are great. The Stones are like No. 3, No. 4. Who thinks the Stones and The Clash are better than the Beatles? [Isn't] the Beatles the best group ever?
Moving Pictures: No.
James Gray: [Laughs] No? Forget whether they're your favorite group ever. I'm not asking that. I'm asking how you beat like what those guys did. That's, like, insane. Like, you could choose; that the same group that did "Helter Skelter" wrote "She Loves You." They're literally all over the place. Their musicianship is insane: "Eleanor Rigby," "Tax Man" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" are on the same album. You know, the Beatles are the most underrated artistic force of that century. They are. They're like beyond genius to the point where it's insane.
I'll prove my point to you. Which Beatles is not that interesting to you? If I say to you, "The Rolling Stones," we know what that is, right? It's Ehhhhh-ehhhhh-ehhhhh-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah. But now, by the way, great song ["Satisfaction"], totally genius. I love Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, obviously. I think they're great. But you know what that is.
If I say, "The Beatles," it could mean "She Loves You" and it could also mean "Yesterday," which is a cheesy song. That one I don't like. Or it could be "Back in the USSR" or it could mean, you know, "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "I Am the Walrus." I mean, literally, it's like the diversity is unparalleled.
Moving Pictures: I interviewed Joaquin Phoenix in Toronto, and he started talking about the Beatles.
James Gray: Yeah, he's a big Beatles fan, too. He knows what's going on.
And if you looked at John Lennon's work, there would be a huge continuity. And if you look at Paul's, his work is, you know, not the same as it was back then; but there would be a big continuity. As a group, a collective genius, it's unparalleled. It's insane. Their third best group member wrote "Something," one of the greatest songs ever written. Their third best guy wrote "Here Comes the Sun." Their third best. [Laughs]
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maya
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| Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks Karen great Articule, the man's got to have class he loves The Beatles, i'm reading your articule and listening to the Beatles, now thats good timeing xxxx |
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hazeleyes
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| Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 4:53 pm Post subject: |
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I agree with you Maya. I have new found respect for him now that I know that he places the Beatles ahead of the Rolling Stones. Good man!
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vlinnertje
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| Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:48 am Post subject: |
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Thnx Karen I havent seen that article before 
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Thnx so much for my great siggy Sabine !!!!
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