Ever since the release of his debut feature Little Odessa in 1994, Jewish writer-director James Gray has been amassing quite the cult following from cinephiles across the globe for his unfussy and understated storytelling style.
Gray went on to release the ambitious crime dramas The Yards (2000) and We Own the Night (2007), but it was his 2017 film The Lost City of Z that really cemented him as one of the greatest filmmakers of his generation.
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James Gray (GettyImages)
Now, three years after the release of Ad Astra, a thrilling space odyssey starring Brad Pitt, comes Gray’s most personal offering yet. Armageddon Time, starring up-and-coming sensation Michael Banks Repeta, Succession’s Jeremy Strong and Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway, is a semi-autobiographical story set in New York during the run-up to the 1980 presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
But after casting British acting legend Sir Anthony Hopkins as his own grandfather — a Russian Jew who fled Cossack persecution and lived in Britain for a short time before emigrating to the US with his mother — Gray raised a few eyebrows from a number of Jewish commentators with some wondering whether the role should have gone to a Jewish actor instead.
Speaking on a Zoom call, I tell Gray that, while I believe that the notion of Jewish roles being played only by Jews seems preposterous, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask him about the “Jewface” controversy.
“I think it’s the dumbest thing ever,” he tells me, without blinking. “It’s like a cancer that’s torn through culture, where it’s now an extension of social science or cultural studies.
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Anne Hathaway in the new film
"This is a completely art-killing bogus idea by halfwits. I mean, you could take it to its logical extreme, [like] Robert DeNiro should not be allowed to be in The Godfather or Raging Bull because he’s only half-Italian… The whole idea of the art project is to step into the consciousness of another person, and to try and understand other people. It’s not to make it some anthropological bullshit.”
Gray takes out his mobile phone and shows me a picture of a toddler in the arms of a smartly dressed, fair-haired ageing gentleman. “This is 1971, this is me at age two, and that’s my grandfather there — now that is not a person who is like your stereotyped schlemiel, and the degree to which people insist you need to cast someone like that — it’s an insult.
"What I’m looking for is a greater truth and someone able to capture duty and emotionality and compassion, and not an ethnographically correct statement.”
James grew up in Flushing, a fairly mixed area of New York’s Queens, where he and his family were, he tells me, “the only Jews on the block.
“The neighbourhood was quite working-class: white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. There was a TV show in the United States called All in the Family [based on the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part]. The main character was named Archie Bunker, this kind of working-class Wasp, this bigot guy.
"That was pretty much the type of people that lived in my neighbourhood. They did not want the Jews on the block.”
In Armageddon Time, Gray creates all sorts of parallels between the anxieties born out of Ronald Reagan’s imminent presidential victory and those of the Trump victory in 2016.
Does he feel as though history is always bound to repeat itself, no matter what happens?
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On set: James Gray (left) and director of photography Darius Khondji
“I’m of the mind that times change, things change,” he tells me, “but it takes a long, long time in order for that to happen.
"And if you were to chart the history of human progress, I do believe in it, but it would be peaks and valleys. So when you talk about Reagan and Trump, there is a difference, but not altogether that much of a difference.
"It’s worth remembering Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in 1980 near a small place called Philadelphia, in Mississippi — which is the location of the murders of [the civil rights workers] Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, the Mississippi Burning murders [of 1964, which loosely inspired the 1988 Alan Parker movie of the same name].
"And Reagan was talking about ‘states’ rights’, but we know exactly what he was really talking about. He was sending a message to the white South, that he was ‘their guy’. So when we talk about Trump and his overt racism, antisemitism and sexism, and making fun of handicapped people, all this cruelty, it’s really only one step removed from Reagan.
"Reagan used kind of racist tropes — talked about welfare moms driving Cadillacs and stuff, very clear attempts to marshal whites, and white resentment. I saw it as the beginning of that.”
Armageddon Time is not Hollywood’s only Jewish coming-of-age picture making its debut this award season; Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming The Fabelmans has some similar themes about origin and upbringing, and some are calling it the best film of his career. I wonder whether Gray is in any way annoyed by such comparisons from film fans and commentators?
“Not at all, he’s a great director, but his experience is, I’m sure, completely different from my own. He’s in some ways a Westerner [ Spielberg was from Ohio and has lived in Hollywood for most of his life]. I’m an East Coast guy.
"And we suffer from this idea that everybody is lumped into a group, but even the Jewish experience is really vast.
"My experience growing up has no resemblance to something out of Hester Street. It wasn’t like my grandfather was walking around going, ‘Hello I’m the pickle salesman from the Lower East Side, and my nose is big’ and these types of clichés and insulting stereotypes. My grandfather was a very urbane fellow, and really put a lot of stock in things like manners and etiquette.”
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Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in the new film
Gray has often spoken about his love of Hollywood cinema, citing the likes of Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin and Kubrick as huge influences, but it is his love of British cinema that has shone through over the last decade. It’s not difficult to see the influences of David Lean and Powell and Pressburger’s films in his much- loved film The Lost City of Z. I wonder how important those films were to him and what role they played in his formation as a filmmaker.
“Truffaut said, British film is a contradiction in terms, and he was absolutely wrong,” he tells me with endearing enthusiasm. “There has been a vast amount of great British cinema. It’s funny that you’re asking me this because during lockdown, I showed my children about 150 movies, which started with Coconuts, the Marx Brothers movie.
"One film they loved more than anything was [Powell and Pressburger’s] The Red Shoes (1948), and then I did my own sort of detour into their work, and I realised how formative it was to my own experience. The same is true for Martin Scorsese, who is obsessed with all their work, particularly with The Red Shoes. So it started there.”
What about Gray’s own working methods? I tell him I was impressed by what he considers as the most important things in storytelling: “Love. Warmth. Humour. Loss.”
“In some ways, it’s an extension of your question about casting non-Jews in Jewish roles,” he says.
“The thing that is most important to me, as a creative person, is to express the greatest sympathy and empathy for others.
"All art is political, whether it’s intended to be or not, and it’s also created within a context in which you are in your own ideological box. But it doesn’t mean that the fantasy doesn’t matter. We present stories, because we have to try and make sense of a very hostile world.”
It seems nothing is more important to James Gray than staying true to “love, warmth, humour and loss”. On the evidence of the past 30 years, I’d say he has shown us over and over again that he is a lover of cinema in its purest form and that his storytelling abilities never distract from his own overall vision.
In an industry obsessed with box office numbers and prize giving, does Gray care about any of that, or does he feel removed from such concerns?
“Look — if they gave me a prize tomorrow, I’d be thrilled. You say thank you, and you move on.
"But it’s not really like a competition, it’s not like the Olympics. Also, that we even should judge or compare one work of art to another. It takes a long time to be able to assess what the thing actually means.
"When Alfred Hitchcock made Vertigo, people said, ‘Hitch blew it this time, this movie doesn’t work.’ It took Truffaut — 15, 20 years later — to talk about its beauty. It takes time to judge these things and put them in their proper context.”
Armageddon Time is on general release from today
