James Gray: The Whole Nine Yards

The Harvard Crimson: You directed your first picture, Little Odessa, when you were pretty young.

James Gray: Yes, I was 26, and I just turned 31. And I have a very depressing experience on this, because I considered myself not so old. I went to a dinner party and the daughter of one of the people at the dinner party came up to me and asked me how old I was and I said "Well, how old do you think?" And she said 42. I was like, oh my God. And not only that, listen to this. Detour magazine calls up my agent and says, we want to do a big story on James Gray for our young Hollywood under 30 issue. And my agent said, "He's 31." And they said, "Oh. Do you have any other clients who are under 30?" I don't really care about this thing from Detour, but it's like now that I'm 31 I'm establishment, you know? Over 30 and you keel over. It's really bad, it's why movies really suck, actually. They're aimed at people who are idiots, they're aimed at young people who are idiots, they're aimed at young people who have no interests, really, in anything.

THC: You grew up in New York, but you went to film school out at University of Southern California. How did you like it?

JG: I grew up in New York and was living in Queens until I was 18, and then went to University of Southern Crappola [USC] film school. It's a wonderful program, but it's much less my taste than I would have appreciated. I remember freshman orientation when they went around the room and said, what is it that you're into, what movies do you love, why are you here? I remember they went around the room and it was like, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Wars, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Wars, Eight and a Half, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Wars. I was like the artsy-fartsy guy, I was the weirdo. I loved it, it set me up very well because I wound up making a thesis film which enabled me to make the films I do now. So from a professional standpoint it was really good. But in fact it was just bad, it was kind of almost a trade school kind and not really the sort of artsy-fartsy thing I was hoping for.

THC: In Little Odessa, you worked with Vanessa Redgrave and in this one, you directed Faye Dunaway, both of whom have reputations for being divas. How was it to work with them?

JG: I have had nothing but great relationships with actors. I've never had an actor that I've had a horrible time with. I don't know why. Well, in Redgrave's case, I don't see her so much as a diva as someone is just as close to genius as anyone I've ever known. I mean, you hear that all the time, it's like genius, genius, genius, they call everyone a genius, right? Like, he's a genius of sanitary engineering, everyone's a genius. But it would be very difficult to dispute Vanessa Redgrave's acting prowess, I mean, she's unbelievable. And to me, the same is true with Faye. Faye was brutal to the makeup and hair people, but I don't get exposed to that. You have to understand that I don't ever sit with the actors in makeup or hair or costume. I miss the horrible part.

I tend to be very arrogant in one respect, which I think is an important thing, ashamedly enough. I tend to be arrogant in asserting what I believe to be the good things they're doing in the scene, and to be very, very assertive about what I think sucks. And it's something I've never been afraid of, so if Vanessa Redgrave was doing something I didn't like, I wasn't afraid to tell her. And amazingly enough actors kind of crave that. If you tell them that you don't like something, they're okay with that, because then they feel like, okay, the guy or woman who's directing me at least is paying attention. So I've had nothing but great relationships with the actors.

Dunaway is difficult to work with, not because of the diva thing, but because she always wants to do more, she always wants to be more explosive, more dynamic, more dramatic. And my case is the opposite. I like actors to do less. And I wanted a performance from her that was completely restrained. I put her in these terrible glasses, dyed her hair sort of dark brown and I sort of wanted her to fit into the movie's tapestry. And I think she was at first very resistant to that. I think, actually, her performance was wonderful.

THC: Mark Wahlberg's performance was also very understated-was that your doing?

JG: He's also very good. We actually talked about that a lot, the style of performance that he gives in the movie. This is a totally sophomoric approach to creating a character, to characterization-it is one of the high school staples of this country to read Kafka's Metamorphosis. But I gave him the Metemorphisis to read for that character because I had wanted him to be almost this sort of Gregor Samsesque character. In fact I designed the set of his apartment, with that really long hallway to his room, straight from that story. And maybe this doesn't really come across but the reason I did that is I had wanted to do a movie about someone who was sort of lost in his own dimwittedness, in a way, tragically undereducated. If you look at the way American society is moving, at the top of the sandwich they're interested in dot-coms, and they're getting better educated all the time, and they will be able to be major participants in the coming explosion of wealth creation. And then there's the sort of bottom 50 percent who are woefully undereducated. I wanted to make a movie sympathetic to the situation of someone who is ill-equiped for that part of the world. Wahlberg and I had discussed this at length.

The idea was to consistently present even more than a story, even more than a movie about particular characters, almost like a worldview, almost like a kind of overarching, I don't want to say vision, that sounds so pretentious, but almost like a vision of what late 20th-century industrial American life is like. Because it's such a dying part of the economy-that part of New York is almost no longer. So I had wanted to give it almost a requiem feel about it, for lack of a better way of putting it.

The difference between drama and classic tragedy is that in a drama people seem to have a kind of active role in what is occurring on the screen. So in something like On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando, you know, "There's a right thing to do Malloy and a wrong thing to do!" And all this becomes a sort of moral parable. He can either act doing the right thing or act doing the wrong thing, and that's pretty much the way the world is established in that film.

What we tried to do was make something a little more tragic in nature, in which the fates, in which the system at large, was dictating the characters' behavior and people had much less of a role in determining their own fate. This is something, of course, that can be quite frustrating for a viewer because you watch Mark Wahlberg and he spends the movie going, "This is excellent," as he chews his food. But he's really a sad guy. But that's something that I like. I knew people like that growing up, and they're either dead or in jail, you know. So I wanted to put something like that on the screen. In fact, that's how Wahlberg got onto the movie. He said, "That's my life, Jim. I came home and my mother threw a party for me and it was the most depressing thing ever. That's my life, Jim."

THC: What about Charlize Therzon? She seems to be totally different in every movie.

JG: She's pretty transformative. Actually, I was very surprised by how good she was. I cast her because she was dying to do it. She kept calling me up. And I was like, "Why do you want to do the movie so badly?" And it turns out she had issues with her stepfather; I think what made her really connect to is was the scene where she goes to see James Caan. After saying fuck you the whole movie, she says, I'm sorry I've been horrible to you but please help Wahlberg. And I think that was the scene that got her hooked on the movie. She wanted to do it so badly. There was something she did which unfortunately wound up on the cutting room floor. It was a scene I couldn't fit in no matter what I did. There was a scene in which they whole family's together and they're eating Chinese food and Charlize, I remember, was eating an egg roll. And the way she was eating that egg roll and watching James Caan during that moment. And then she took a soy sauce packet and opened it up with her teeth. It was incredible footage. You could tell that she was totally about that character. And I couldn't fit it into the scene because every time I tried it was all about Charlize eating an egg roll and not about the conversation, which was a major part of the story. But she's an astonishing actor. She's really good.

THC: So what's next for you? Are you working on something now?

JG: I'm beginning to write something on what's called the Street Crimes Unit, which is an elite wing of the New York Police Department, who are hand picked. They number only about a hundred. They're almost all exclusively WASPs. There are a few who are not. And they pick people every year, cadets, who "have the eyes." And what that means is that they can watch you walk down the street, cross the street, and judging from your gait, if it's weighted to one side even slightly, they can see if you're packing a weapon, a concealed weapon. They can look at your neck, and if they see a pulse rate that disturbs them, they take you to be a suspect. And they use methods which are of questionable constitutionality. I'm fond of saying "I did Russian gangsters in the first movie, and I did businessmen in the second, so why not the police in the third." And I think it may be about the formation of the Street Crimes Unit.

THC: Rumor had it that you went to Harvard...

JG: My agent went to Harvard. And Darren Aronofsky '91 went to Harvard. I was talking to him and I was very disappointed-I was disappointed by your institution. I was talking to Darren in casual conversation one day and I mentioned Puccini, the music of Puccini, I can't remember what the context was, and he had no idea who Puccini was. I was really upset by that. I went, "Darren, Puccini? Madame Butterfly? Tosca? Do you know operas?" He went, "No, what is that?"