“You’re fighting the tide of a ferocious anti-craft movement,” James Gray explains in a conversation with Jeremy Strong. “People think that writing scripts and acting is much easier than other professions. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Photo: Focus Features
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That Jeremy Strong and James Gray have finally found each other feels like a rare instance of the cosmos smiling down on us. Gray is the acclaimed director of such films as We Own the Night, The Yards, The Lost City of Z, and Ad Astra — ambitious, moody dramas about the search for a personal code and the thorny bonds of family. He is known, justifiably so, as a serious craftsman and an actor’s director: He’s directed people like Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Pattinson, and Mark Wahlberg to career-standout performances. Strong’s epochal, ongoing turn as Kendall Roy on Succession isn’t a Gray protagonist, but he could easily be one. (Obsessive? Check. Self-loathing? Check. Daddy issues? Check. Morally whipsawed? Check.) More appropriately, Strong is known for his painstaking preparation for and serious commitment to his roles. These qualities endeared him to Gray when the actor came onboard to play Irving Graff, the complicated patriarch of the family at the center of Gray’s latest, the autobiographical Armageddon Time — a character who also happens to be based closely on the director’s father.
I meet the two men at the top floor of a midtown hotel the day after a reportedly rowdy New York Film Festival Q&A that saw Gray talking candidly about the frustrations of making his previous film, the Brad Pitt–starring sci-fi drama Ad Astra. In many ways, Gray says, losing his directorial voice and control on that project was what prompted a turn toward this exceedingly personal, candid, melancholy look at growing up in 1980s Queens. Talking to the two men starts to feel like a dizzying bull session, since each is steeped in the history of his respective profession, and they’re both armed with quotes, anecdotes, and stray observations. We talk about Armageddon Time and what it says about Gray’s life and the country then and now. But, well, we talk about other stuff, too.
Armageddon Time feels more understated and small-scale than your other films set in New York. Those films felt more outwardly ambitious, whereas this one feels like a miniature. Is that because you got those other stories out of your system and could finally look at this life without having to try and make it bigger?
James Gray: Maybe I would be able to better answer that question five years from now. I’m too close to it still. Maybe I made a mistake, I don’t know. Hitchcock used to say that movies were life with the boring parts cut out. I always tried to approach it that way in the other films. But here, I felt that to get more specific was the coin of the realm.
Jeremy Strong: In a way it seemed like James had to go into the jungle, into the Amazon, with The Lost City of Z and then voyaged to the outermost reaches of space with Ad Astra in order to come back. I just pulled this quote up: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
J.G.: What’s that from?
J.S.: T.S. Eliot. I think it’s in Four Quartets. James has said this before, and I think about it a lot now — this idea that “history and myth begin in the microcosm of the personal.” For me, it’s a sort of decoder ring for the movie. It’s not just, Now, I’m going to excavate my personal history. It’s a lens through which to tell a very big story, a very universal story.
J.G.: When you are doing a — what’s the fancy word, bildungsroman — what I tried to bring to it was a kind of political, dare I use the word, complexity. The story was told, warts and all. It wasn’t about how special I am or my parents were. I wasn’t a beautiful person. But the system itself deserves a kind of reckoning. American corporations have done a brilliant job in indoctrinating us so that class becomes isolated from issues of identity, even though we know class is a major factor in identity. It’s interesting that people have asked me a lot about white versus Black, but never middle class or working class versus flat-out poverty. Race and class are intermingled. That was one of the things I’ve tried to bring into the film — this idea of class striving and how that is connected to the idea of oppression itself.
The family in the film has a vivid memory of their own horrific persecution for being Jewish. But the film also shows how when you see yourself as oppressed, that can sometimes make you blind to your own faults.
J.G.: You can be the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time. It becomes a kind of Gordian knot. Look, it’s very hard to talk about this because it sounds self-aggrandizing. You can hope that the film works on these levels; if it doesn’t, for some people, then you screwed up. I can only tell you that it was certainly my intention to turn the idea of good versus evil, in the case of class and race, and say it is much more complicated and difficult to navigate the world. My father, if you had said to him in 1977 or ’78, “You are the beneficiary of white privilege,” he would’ve been totally at a loss; he would’ve thought you were insane. I would have had to walk him through the layers of history and of what actually happened in the culture and how his contribution to it mattered. That’s not easy.
And I myself had not thought enough about it. I mean, obviously, I was aware of this idea. But I had not realized the extent of it. Maybe this means I’m stupid. That’s very possible. I still live, in some ways, cognitively, in 1993 or something. But we all do. People who are with it in 2022 will be out to lunch in 2052. The best you can do is to try and learn about the world and be open to a different view of things. I’ve tried to do that. But you will fail. That’s part of what the movie’s about: The kid is a failure. That’s another reason why I felt I could make a film and try to subvert this idea of “lessons learned.” The kid fails and learns only to keep trying. But he does fail, and he is thrown into a world in which there are no answers delivered to him.
J.S.: You said something about miniature. It made me think of one of the first things James and I did together. I got off a plane from Copenhagen, and that day we went to the Queens Museum with his family. We went to see the panorama, where you see the city at this altitude, and you see the neighborhood in Flushing in miniature. It reminded me of the script for Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which was a masterwork as a piece of writing. There was that sequence where you see the genesis of all life before you essentially zoom in on this family in Texas.
J.G.: It’s so weird that you would mention that. Originally, our opening shot was very elaborate. It was in the clouds and went through the clouds down to Queens and then you saw the school and the house. We shot it. But it wasn’t good because it felt pompous and off-kilter — it was too Leni Riefenstahl. In the end, I used a piece of footage from Flushing Meadows Park. We had an outtake between shots of Tony Hopkins and Banks Repeta in the coverage — just a shot of these trees swaying. I like that way better because it’s in some ways the ethical and moral fulcrum of the movie, that scene. I loved how cosmic it felt with the wind blowing those trees and the clouds.
Jeremy, you came onto the film fairly late, after Oscar Isaac had to drop out. James’s father was still alive at the time. What kind of research were you able to do?
J.S.: Well, I wanted to know what he sounded like. One thing I did was, the first night we had dinner, I asked James the Proust questionnaire, and he answered it as if he were his father. He was going to see his father for brunch the next morning. So I had him record him. I had him on tape for an hour or so, and that ended up being the capsule that I needed to build from — because you want to get it right. There’s a strand through James’s body of work about fathers and sons, so this felt incredibly important to me. I didn’t want to just guess. I wanted to get it right.
What felt like the most perilous moment for me was the night before they started shooting. I had learned a Yiddish camp song that James’s dad used to do for his kids. Georgia, James’s daughter, taught it to me, and I recorded it. I learned it thinking maybe there’d be a place for it. There wasn’t, but it was important for me to just have in me. So I recorded that camp song on a voice note and texted it to James the night before. I thought, Oh, I’m going to get fired. But I think if you don’t feel like you might get fired sometimes, maybe you’re not risking enough.
J.G.: I thought it was incredibly funny when I heard it. Would you like to hear it?
J.G. and J.S.:
Give a yell.
Give a yell.
Give a good, substantial yell.
And when we yell, we yell like hell.
And this is what we yell:
Alamem, Alamem
Alamem a shtekl in dein nekl
Let’s get a boom boom
Knip shoyn knip shoyn
Rah, rah, rah!
J.G.: I can’t believe you remember that. My dad went to this Jewish summer camp in the Catskills in the late 1940s. He used to recite that to us. Some of it’s Yiddish, some of it’s nonsense, like Charlie Chaplin used to sing it. When he did that for my kids, they loved it so much, they committed it to memory. It’s actually one of the only real tangible things they remember about him now.
James, Jeremy was familiar with your work. Were you familiar with his when you cast him?
J.G.: No. My wife was like, “This guy’s great. You have to see the show. The show is great.” She’s much more current than I am. So I did my homework. I watched the first season of Succession. It is brilliant. I know there’s an ocean of fantastic TV. My kids, they’re always like, “How come you haven’t seen this or that?” It’s not out of snobbery. It’s literally this, and I’ve said this before: Before I die, I want to be an expert in at least one thing. I want to be an expert in old movies. I watch an old movie every night. A lot of studio system stuff. It doesn’t even matter if it’s good. My wife and children always make fun of me that I’m sitting in the guest house watching some Barbara Stanwyck pre-Code film or something.
Did you know that Jeremy was this thorough an actor?
J.G.: I did. Once I watched Succession, I did a little bit of homework. Two of the producers on this movie, Anthony Katagas and Mark Butan, had worked on Aaron Sorkin’s film Trial of the Chicago 7. So I had been primed. Here’s the thing: I love that. I don’t consider that difficult. Difficult for me is you don’t show up on time. Or you don’t remember your lines. Or you’re super-argumentative and get in the way of the process. Difficult is not you asking me a lot of questions about the character. That’s not difficult! Why is Joaquin Phoenix “difficult”? He’s not difficult. He’s great. He’s “difficult” in the best way. You want that difficult.
What is that makes Joaquin “difficult”?
J.G.: I don’t think he is at all, but I don’t think most filmmakers today are steeped in a tradition in which the actor is everything. They’re on the screen, and their emotional honesty is paramount. So I say to myself and to others, “In the end, they have to win the arguments.” It’s unbelievably difficult to act brilliantly in something. If I want to be an aeronautical engineer, in high school, there are many things I can learn that will apply to my future major in college and then profession. But with acting, putting on the high-school play has no applicable lessons learned for what it means to be an actor — because putting on the high-school play is about pleasing the moms and the dads in the back row, whereas acting for the cinema, at its best, is almost the opposite of that: ignoring the need to please.
With Joaquin, the “difficult” label comes because he gets very open about his vulnerability and his need to feel safe in a space. Joaquin in table reads, when it’s his turn to speak, he’d say, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, my line. Bullshit, bullshit.” He didn’t want to reveal himself there. You know, some people just roll their eyes at that. But actors need to be protected and loved.
Jeremy, you’ve already been through the wringer on this. That New Yorker profile helped create this image of you as a difficult actor. I read that profile and I thought, Oh, the writer is profiling Kendall Roy, not Jeremy Strong.
J.G.: [Cackles.]
J.S.: I don’t disagree with you about that. I will say, I went to that great exhibit of “The Red Studio” a couple of months ago at MoMA. There was a thing on the wall that said something about how this painting is emblematic of “the wonderful entanglement between painting and real life.” So, you use yourself. You use everything you can in your arsenal. Some of it is imagination. Some of it is yourself.
J.G.: What I will say is there is a diminution. You’re fighting the tide of a ferocious anti-craft movement. The idea of having studied with Stella Adler or Sanford Meisner or Lee Strasberg is a joke now. People think that writing scripts and acting is much easier than other professions. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s like your dentist is sitting there working on your teeth: “I wrote a script.” It’s like, “What are you talking about? You’re my dentist. Focus on the filling.” There’s something about the movies — and acting in the movies, in particular. We can identify with it so clearly, and it seems so accessible to us. “I’m gonna try my hand at acting!” Ease of access has brought on a disrespect for craft.
This does make me wonder: Why are we so fascinated by actors and their processes?
J.S.: I think of something Martha Graham said about dance: “There’s so little time to be born to the instant.” I think what you see with great actors is something actually happening in that instant. No one really knows how or where that comes from. In an age where we think we can explicate everything and reduce everything to its atomic particles, I think creativity remains, and acting remains, something that is profoundly mysterious. We have a desire to maybe understand it and deconstruct it or take it down.
I mean, you’re doing what you’re doing on a tightrope at 30,000 feet, and you have to forget that there’s a camera there, and you have to be as honest as a human being can possibly be. When you see Tony Hopkins in The Father and he says, “I’m losing all my leaves.” It’s what Robert Duvall calls “an all-universe moment.” I feel like I’ve understood more about human experience from actors being born into the instant than I have from almost anything.
J.G.: It’s why Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy has Ratso right on the edge. It could be a terrible performance.
J.S.: Oh, but it’s brilliant.
J.G.: Of course, it’s amazing. You know that old anecdote, which I think was mentioned in that New Yorker piece. “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Laurence Olivier saying that to Hoffman while shooting Marathon Man. It’s funny because they actually were apparently pretty close. Also, what’s funny is that I would take Ratso Rizzo over any Olivier film performance. Hoffman understood film acting maybe better than Olivier did.
J.S.: I don’t think that’s heresy.
J.G.: Ratso is almost a terrible performance. But it’s brilliant.
J.S.: That’s the risk you have to take.
James Gray and Jeremy Strong on the set of Armageddon Time. Photo: Anne Joyce/Focus Features
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve seen an actor do?
J.G.: The single most surprising thing I’ve ever seen was on take one of a master shot in The Immigrant, when we know that Marion Cotillard has stolen money, and they go back to the tenement. And Joaquin accuses her and says, “You stole. I saw you take the money.” And he called an off-camera actor, Dagmara Dominczyk. In the middle of the take, he just screamed, “Belva! Get in here!” She just walked into the middle of the take, and she actually did something great. When he said, “What do you say to her?” Dagmara went up to Marion and kissed her, which was an incredible choice. I didn’t know it was coming, and she didn’t. We could barely accommodate for it, but I used it. It’s take one.
J.S.: I remember when Mike Nichols directed The Seagull in Central Park in, I guess, the summer of 2001 — and I slept on Lafayette Street on a mattress to get tickets along with everybody else. I remember a moment where Phil Hoffman had to light a cigarette onstage, and it was windy at the Delacorte. And he must have lit a dozen matches and spent maybe a minute of time until it lit. I’ve never forgotten it because it was such a lesson in committing to the truth of a moment and to the truth of a need. Because that’s what you’re doing, pursuing a need. That crystallized something for me. It’s a little thing, but I found it so revelatory. He just took the time that he needed to take because he wanted to light a cigarette. It’s not like you’re playacting lighting a cigarette, you’re lighting a cigarette. And the difference in those two things is everything.
There is that scene in James’s film when I have to go into the bathroom and get violent with my son. We were a low-budget movie, so we only had two breakaway doors. The first door broke down right away, almost when I touched it. Half of the scene is written before the father comes into the room, banging on the door, “Let me in, let me in.” You need that for the scene to build. So the first take was useless, and then they put a new door in. But the new door was secured so well that it wouldn’t break down. James called, “Action,” and I spent some time trying to knock it down and threw my weight against it, tried kicking it down, while the scene is escalating and the rage is mounting. It just wouldn’t break down. So in my mind — a part of your mind that you never want to be awake when you’re in a take — I was like, Well, we should cut. But James didn’t call, “Cut.” I wasn’t thinking consciously about Phil Hoffman and the cigarette, but I think it had stayed with me. So in that moment, I remembered that there was a tool set in the basement of the house we were shooting in, in New Jersey, because I’d been down there. So I went down, and I walked past video village and everybody, and James still didn’t cut, which is an amazing testament to who he is as a filmmaker. I went down, and I found a chisel and a big kind of sledgehammer mallet kind of thing and went back upstairs. And I spent a few minutes trying to open the door, and eventually did and was in a white heat by that time. That is the scene that’s in the movie.
That scene reminded me of a horror movie, with the shot of the door and the screaming behind it. Like something out of The Shining.
J.G.: You got exactly the direction I gave cinematographer Darius Khondji. I said to this moment, it’s like a horror movie. We were thinking of both The Shining and Marathon Man.
J.S.: This man is carrying the weight of the world and the weight of their lives and futures, but also he’s in such a pressure cooker. James described him as “a Jewish Stanley Kowalski with a Ph.D.” He’s an educated man, but there’s something primitive, something inchoate about the way he is expressed in the world. He’s a boiler repairman. That kind of metaphor was really powerful for me. I mean, talk about The Shining. Up there at the Overlook: The boiler, it’s dysregulated, it’s going to blow. I think most of us feel that sometimes, that pressurization.
That’s the thing about the film. It’s so understated, but then there are these moments, like that scene, where it will go incredibly dark.
J.S.: I think it’s an understated movie, but I also think the stakes are extremely high. I think it brings these characters to these moments of choice and these moments of insolubility where there isn’t the possibility of making a good choice or a choice with integrity. In a sense, there’s this synchronicity of a loss of integrity happening within these people’s lives and a loss of integrity happening in the life of this country.
Irving is trying to put food on the table, and he’s trying to prepare his children for a tough and hostile and oppressive world. He wants them to survive. He has to choose their survival over the survival of this other boy. I think that is a cataclysmic choice for him but a necessary choice for him. I know James is not saying this is the right choice, but he’s showing us the difficulty of it. He’s acknowledging and naming these failures without prescribing an easy answer to these things.
The film has to do all that in a delicate way. We’re locked into the point of view of Irving’s son Paul, but then there’s that little moment toward the end where we see Paul’s friend Johnny, who is Black, with his grandmother. The scene is so brief that it’s as if the film is acknowledging its own limitations.
J.G.: Yeah. That’s the point of it. We should talk about this because as perverse as this sounds, limitation is not the same thing as a flaw. Every work of art is limited. Look, for example, at Raging Bull and Cathy Moriarty as Vickie. It’s not told from her point of view. It couldn’t be told from her point of view. It’s a limitation for the movie, but it is not a flaw in that movie because the movie acknowledges that as its limitation. The movie says, “This is the patriarchy and what it does to her.” The limitation becomes part of the acknowledged profundity of the work. I remember the first time I saw Raging Bull in a theater. It was at the Sutton on 57th Street. I was very young. I remember the reaction of some of the women in the audience. It was a very unpleasant experience for them.
The idea in Armageddon Time was this: Here is a glimpse — something you will never see more of — of this kid. I cannot show you more. There is a limit to what I could know as a 12-year-old, about him, about my parents, about everybody else. If I made his story, it’d be fake, faker than fake. Because I don’t know what his life was like. I would be imagining it completely. The flash cuts to Johnny’s grandmother — it’s not a Syd Field maneuver because it breaks point of view. We did try removing it, to stay totally in Paul’s point of view, but just with that one beat removed, the movie seemed so much smaller, and not in a good way. Think about it, The Godfather is three hours long, but there’s this one line — “That’s my family, Kay, that’s not me” — and if you cut it, Michael Corleone is much less clear.
Things matter in movies, details matter, moments matter, and breaking that point of view for me is what differentiated it. Part of the crisis that we face now and why we have a lot of shitty art is that there has been a false equation. We need to hear more from more voices, which of course is true — that is one of the great breakthroughs in my adult life. But that doesn’t mean every work of art needs to have all voices in it. That is not possible. If you try to do that, you have what I would call a mess.
James, you’ve been more open recently about the difficulties you had on Ad Astra. Why did they force these changes on you?
J.G.: It was a kind of a perfect storm. The birthing of it was so screwed up for reasons that had nothing to do with the movie. New Regency made the film, and they were trying to get it through Fox, and we were talking to Fox people, and then Fox got sold to Disney and folded up, basically. That was a proud studio at Twentieth Century Fox, and it’s gone. And then you have the Disney group, and that’s a very different M.O. So it was completely screwed up on a corporate level. Also, with a film that is quite personal, people sometimes see themselves in it and will argue that other things are better. I did not have final cut, so I could not say, “I don’t like it. That’s the way it is.”
Now, I was very upset about it because, as the writer-director, I felt that my view should win the day. And when people start coming up to you and saying, “Why’d you do all that stupid voice-over?” and you didn’t do it, that’s a very frustrating experience. But it’s not like I want people to hate the movie. The way I feel about it is — by the way, I’m not saying it’s as good — you hope it’s your own Blade Runner, where there are things in it that are clearly you that you love, and there are other things that were put into the film that aren’t you. There’s a lot I’m very proud of in the movie. But until then, I had been very lucky to have control over the films, and when the film stopped being a hundred percent mine, I became like a petulant little child.
But hadn’t people tried to mess with your movies before? You’d gone to war against Harvey Weinstein on The Immigrant. And you won that war. Maybe it was a Pyrrhic victory because Weinstein didn’t promote The Immigrant.
J.G.: But I had final cut. It’s that simple. I remember Harvey basically saying, “I’m not going to release it” or “I’m going to put it on Lifetime” or something like that. And I remember saying, “Okay. You can do that. I’m not doing what you want me to do to it.” This was an act of complete insanity on my part. But my thought was since it’s going to come out elsewhere, in time, if the movie has any value, somebody will discover it years from now; if it doesn’t have any value, I didn’t deserve for it to be known. To this day, I feel extremely lucky because there were a number of other movies that he simply shelved that really have not seen the light of day. I’ve had directors call me in tears, “How did you get your film released? Because my own movie is still on the shelf.”
I mean, I’ve been public about what Harvey wanted to do. It was horrible! It was movie-wrecking. He wanted me to play soaring music and have Marion Cotillard and her sister walking over a mountain, then cut to Marion in old-age makeup, and, you know, “When I was younger, this is what my life was, but now my sister and I are living great.” Kind of a combination of Titanic and Sound of Music. And I felt that the last shot of the film was very important, and I wasn’t going to compromise on that. He hated the last shot.
I’ll never forget this. He was in the editing room. He called me up, and he said, “My daughter was born this morning.” So I said, “Oh, congratulations!”
“Don’t you congratulate me! I’m in the editing room working on your movie!”
I said, “Well, I didn’t ask you to do that.”
He goes, “Fuck you! I’m doing this for you.”
“No, you’re not; you’re doing this for you. You’re trying to make a film. You’re trying to be a frustrated director right now.”
“Fuck you! I’m Harvey Weinstein!” I remember him saying this. “I’m God’s editor!” That’s what he said! So he then showed me what he did. He sent it to me. It was 88 minutes. It was completely incoherent. It had this voice-over all over it. It was, like, insane. If the film had come out in Weinstein’s version, what would’ve happened is you would’ve seen it and said, “James Gray is incompetent.”
Is there any chance we might see a director’s cut of Ad Astra?
J.G.: I’m going to need help. It’s a lot of money to do it, probably about 300,000 bucks. The question really is this: Is there a way to monetize it? I would love to do it different. The director’s cut is 12 minutes shorter, by the way. When is the director’s cut shorter than the released version? But there is somehow more Ruth Negga and more Donald Sutherland in it. There are other things that are much shorter. But I’d love to do it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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