James Gray first came to attention in 1994 with his directorial debut, Little Odessa, a Martin Scorsese-influenced drama about a hitman (Tim Roth) returning home to the Russian Jewish neighbourhood of his youth, Brighton Beach, New York, for a job. Next came The Yards (2000) and We Own The Night (2007) which both further justified the “Son of Scorsese” tag, while introducing two mesmerising performances by Joaquin Phoenix, who has become something of a Robert De Niro to James Gray’s Scorsese.
Now comes Two Lovers, a romantic drama written and directed by Gray, and starring Joaquin Phoenix as Leonard, a tormented photographer who moves back in with his Russian-Jewish parents in Brighton Beach following a suicide attempt. While recovering, he falls for two women — the nice Jewish girl his parents want him to marry (Vinessa Shaw) and, in Gray’s own words, a “shiksah goddess” played by Gwyneth Paltrow — and has to settle for one.
It is a dark and moving film built on an astonishing performance by Joaquin Phoenix, who has since announced his retirement from acting in order, bizarrely, to pursue a career as a rapper; making Two Lovers his last-ever acting performance.
“Joaquin has a quality that I love,” says Gray, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. “He projects a kind of internal conflict which is so great. He was consumed with getting the details right. I think he’s top notch for his age group, the best there is.”
Gray tailor-wrote the film — which is based on a Dostoevsky short story, White Nights — for Phoenix. “What I tried to do was make a film where there was no wall between actor and character, where Joaquin would be exposing himself completely. The same thing is true for the other actors. I said the same thing to Gwyneth and I think it’s her most vulnerable work.”
Every day, Gray would arrive on set at six in the morning to find both Phoenix and Paltrow already there. “I’d find Gwyneth sitting in a car with headphones on, her eyes closed, almost meditative. She knew that was what I was trying to get at: no walls, and compassion for everybody.”
Phoenix took it even further. “Joaquin would be sitting there in his brown jacket with tears in his eyes. I’d say, ‘what’s the matter’; and he’d say, ‘nothing, I’m preparing for the day’. He has danger. I don’t mean danger as in he’s going to kill somebody. I mean danger as in he might kill himself. There’s something ‘off’ about him.”
The film has an inherent Jewish identity. This was easy for Gray to depict — his own family are of Russian Jewish descent (Kiev on one side, Minsk on the other, arriving in New York in the 1920s). Gray loved spending time with his Russian grandparents in Brooklyn. “My grandparents created a household which was so Russian. There was no English spoken, it was all Yiddish or Russian. You would walk in there and it’d be like another country.”
In the film, Israeli actor Moni Moshonov plays Leonard’s father; Isabella Rossellini plays his mother. How did Gray get Rossellini into the mindset of a Jewish mother?
“I don’t know if Isabella would agree, but I feel as though Italian culture and Jewish culture are quite close. She understood her character very clearly. And I was consumed with making a picture which did not reinforce the stereotypes of the Jewish mother, particularly the New York Jewish mother.
“With Isabella, what I wanted was a kind of European elegance. I also cast her because she looks a lot like my mother. My mother’s been dead for many years but she had a very similar look.”
Gray was born in Queen’s, New York, in 1969 and briefly attended Hebrew school. “At the end of my first year — this was 1977, when I was eight — everyone in my class got a little miniature Torah as a graduation gift except for me. And my mother, conceiving of me as the greatest thing since sliced bread, was very upset. She marched into the school and said: ‘Why didn’t you give my son a miniature Torah?’
“And they said: ‘Well Mrs Gray, your son is not a committed enough Zionist.’
“Because, apparently, I’d asked some question in class, like ‘why do all Jewish people live in Israel?’ I didn’t know what I was talking about. And my mother was like: ‘What are you talking about, a committed Zionist, he’s eight years old?’
“And that was the end of that, I never went to Hebrew school again. Now I regret it a little bit, not because I’m religious but because the Old Testament is so important — it’s the basis for Western civilisation and culture.”
Gray now leads a secular life in Los Angeles with his wife and their two young children. He left New York at the age of 18 to study film at University of Southern California. He graduated in 1991 and came to early notoriety, aged 24, with Little Odessa, three years later.
Today, he is part of the Hollywood world, even if he is wary of it. With this paradox in mind, how does he feel now that Two Lovers has been sucked into the Tinseltown gossip machine because of Phoenix’s decision to quit acting?
“I’m grateful for any attention the film gets,” he says with a sigh. “Though I’m not sure this is the right kind of attention for now. I was trying to make a serious film and it’s very difficult for people to watch it and not get reminded of the craziness that’s going on around it. And that’s a little unfortunate because the movie is not some bizarre publicity stunt.
“Look, this stuff goes away and all that exists, if the movie’s memorable, is the movie. And if the movie’s not memorable, then it’s your fault anyway!”
