James Gray’s Films Continually Wrestle With His “Fraught and Complicated” Relationship To The Myth Of His Hometown, New York City

When we think of great New York filmmakers we think of course of Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and countless other tales of corruption, redemption and black comedy), Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, need we go on) and also of Brian De Palma, of Jim Jarmusch, and of deep-cut directors like Bette Gordon, whose Variety brought us into the life of a ticket-taker at a downtown porn movie house. 

Certainly James Gray has earned a place among these greats. The Criterion Channel is making the case with a collection called “James Gray’s New York,” which showcases his first five features as a director. Little Odessa, Gray’s 1994 debut, is set in the title corner of Brighton Beach, where a hitman played by Tim Roth reluctantly travels to do a job and confront his fractured family. 2000’s The Yards, starring Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron, James Caan, and Faye Dunaway, is a searing study of urban corruption with a power reminiscent of On The Waterfront. 2007’s We Own The Night, about two warring brothers, one a cop, on a blithe nightclub impresario, reteamed Phoenix and Wahlberg and has one of the great NYC movie car chases, one taking place in pouring rain. 2008’s Two Lovers is a romance both tender and downbeat, with Phoenix pining after Gwyneth Paltrow, again in Brighton Beach. And 2013’s The Immigrant, with Pheonix, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Renner, is a 1920s-set picture originally titled Low Life; like Lucy Sante’s book of the same name (there’s no adaptation connection here, we hasten to add), its subject is, to quote the subtitle of Sante’s work, the “lures and snares of old New York.”

Gray, who lives in Los Angeles but who shot his most recent film, 2022’s Armageddon Time (not included in this Criterion Channel offering but, as of this writing, streaming on Prime Video) is a thoughtful and engaging conversationalist; partially as a result of that, this interviewer was not able to cover everything he had in mind in the 30 minutes we were allotted. Our nevertheless productive conversation has, as is customary, been condensed and edited for clarity. 

---

DECIDER:  In pop culture, not just films, but also in songs and literature, the idea of New York is often propagated as a place of freedom and personal growth and self-reinvention. Rather like the title song in Scorsese’s New York New York: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” In your films New York is often the exact inverse of that idea: the neighborhoods the characters inhabit are closed systems, bubbles, and in many cases, actual traps. At the beginning of Little Odessa Tim Roth’s character, Joshua, says to his boss, “Brooklyn’s not good for me.” I’m wondering if that was something that you had an overt consciousness of while doing each of these particular films.

JAMES GRAY: Well, that’s a great question. I would guess that the answer is that I wasn’t at first. I’ve grown more conscious of it as I got older. Maybe that’s not a good thing, I don’t know. But it comes, I think, pretty clearly from my parents and grandparents who, I guess my memory of my grandparents on my father’s side is very clear. They were Russian through and through and spoke no English, really. And my grandfather would come and sit on the couch, and he would cry. He would talk about how much he missed the old country. So to me, it was the opposite of the sort of cliche to which you refer, that this was an amazing place with lots of plenty. The thing that I had experienced was much closer to a quote that I read not too long ago, which is “I thought the streets would be paved with gold when I came to America, but in fact, they weren’t paved at all.” A very famous quote attributed to an anonymous immigrant about New York City. So my own feeling on it is that we like to propose the myth, but my own experience is a bit more complicated and fraught than that. Now, it doesn’t mean that that’s the entirety of the experience. I mean, I am someone who wound up becoming a filmmaker, and now I live in L.A., and my life is very nice in a lot of ways. So obviously there is some degree of social mobility, and all of that, but my experience of it from my parents and my grandparents was a lot of disappointment.

I do think that this feeling, and the articulation of it, has become more conscious as the films continue, and resolve in a certain sense in my last movie, which was directly autobiographical. I’m sure it’s in there a lot. You can’t avoid yourself, right?

When Little Odessa came out, it seemed to appear out of nowhere, and there wasn’t a lot known about you, so there was this feeling, relative to the specific authenticity of this film, despite it being a very sophisticated film in terms of film language, that you yourself may have been one of its people. A person with experience of some stuff that a lot of filmmakers don’t have. Possibly because of the scale of the characters; they weren’t outsize in the way you saw in something like Scorsese’s Mean Streets, where it’s clear that the filmmaker has some connection to the characters, but he’s also regarding them from a certain distance. In Little Odessa the sense of being there is very direct and dire. This is one of two films where the setting is very specific, Brighton Beach, and you’ve spoken about your grandparents being Russian. So you had a lot of exposure and involvement in that area of town. I’m wondering about the lore that maybe fed into Little Odessa.

Yeah, in that movie’s case, that was where my grandparents were. I grew up in a semi attached row house in a working class neighborhood in Queens and my grandpa, we would go to see him all the time. And I realized, among other things, that you could kind of get drunk underage there. At the time, the drinking age was 18. So I started going there to a place called Rasputin, actually quite a bit, when I was 14. And frankly, going there with my friends to get drunk. And it was a real scene out there in the late ’80s, because there was a huge influx of Soviet Jews who came to Brighton Beach starting around 1979. That was sort of the second wave of immigration into the United States. And in that group, I met a lot of those kinds of people, and I tried to put as much of their stories and my own stories into that movie as I could, because I knew that in order to differentiate myself — and I don’t mean this from some kind of marketing point of view, I mean creatively — that I had to put as much of myself into the movie as I could get away with as a first time filmmaker.

So basically to include a genre hook, of the hit man, but to include it only insofar as I really knew what I was talking about, was something I determined early on. And I had met somebody I based Tim Roth’s character on.  And I grafted some of my own family history into his history and used a lot of what I saw in that guy and had Tim play that guy. It was a strange experience. That movie is half autobiography, and half going to Brighton Beach. It’s kind of a mix.

And so that’s probably what you’re sensing in it. I mean, there’s tons of stuff in it. The mother with brain cancer, that was my mother; the character of Maximilian Schell is pretty similar to my dad. I have a brother who’s older. There’s a very similar dynamic in that family. The mood of that apartment was the mood of my house in that period of my life in the late eighties, early nineties. And I was trying to convey that, and so trying to be as personal as I could. It’s funny you mentioned Mean Streets because I regard Scorsese, obviously, as highly as anybody does, and I love him professionally and personally and think he’s a God. But the thing about Marty’s work is that it conveys his life and his upbringing, I think, and his early environment in a way that has a lot of humor and vitality in there. You only have to take one look at [Scorsese’s domestic documentary] Italian-American to see what his household was like and how his parents are brimming with vitality. And my own home life was not really like that at all. And the Russian hitmen that I met, they were not, you know, “Hey, you slice the garlic and you put it in with the scungilli.” No, it wasn’t like that at all. They were actually sociopaths and psychopaths. Psychopaths that presented in a different way than, for example, Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think those films are great. I think they’re the greatest, but I’m saying my experience was different. So I was trying to convey my own, the details of my own experience. 

Right. Your characters aren’t without humor, but their humor doesn’t derive from being  brash and outrageous. In Little Odessa, you’re kind of thrown in with Tim Roth’s anxiety first and foremost, and you feel how it’s tied to the environment.

Well, it is. It’s just a different section of New York. Italian culture actually is simply different from Russian culture. I think a lot of the tone of my films treating that comes from that, the specifics also of Russian Jewish culture. It’s a very repressed and fearful culture. And some of that comes from the long-term power of the state in Russia. It does wind up getting in the DNA somehow. And Russian art, for example, is very sorrowful in a way that Italian art is not. And in fact, may I say why Italian art is in some perverse way, my preference, because I would much rather see Verdi or Puccini over Prokofiev’s operas, which doesn’t mean they’re not great, but there’s a level of vitality in the Italian that I like better. But I just have to go with who I am and who my family was and is.

Your New York films are distinctive in part because they largely kind of stay out of Manhattan. You’ve got Brighton Beach, you’ve got the Bronx and Brooklyn, you’ve got Queens, you’ve got Ellis Island, The immigrant is mostly is in Manhattan, but I think you shot in the Bronx standing in for the Lower East Side. And the characterizations themselves are very outer boroughs.. But I think in The Yards, one of your great casting coups is to have Steve Lawrence, the crooner and Sinatra crony and more, who gives a great performance, but it comes out of something that held with Jerry Lewis in Scorsese’s King of Comedy. Lawrence plays this unctuous corrupt Queens Borough President. And the characterization comes out of his own experience. Lawrence and Lewis came up through show business working in mobbed-up nightclubs, with mobsters both Jewish and Italian, they know corruption in a very lived-in way. Steve Lawrence is able to give that off, that kind of slickness, that you wouldn’t get from necessarily a more studied, dramatic actor. I wonder how that came about.

That was one of the great casting feats I was able to do, I love that you liked that. That’s one of the great pleasures that I have as a filmmaker is being able to find interesting and sometimes not completely predictable paths for casting, because you have such wonderful access as a filmmaker sometimes. With the Steve Lawrence thing I had the best time. I remembered him from the Carol Burnett Show.. And my casting director’s a brilliant guy named Doug Abel, and he and I were meeting all of these Borscht Belt comedians for the part. Shecky Green, who just died; all these kinds of guys, and they were wonderful, but they all went slightly over the top in a way that somehow was not quite right. And Doug suggested Jerry Vale, and then Steve Lawrence, and I thought that was a great idea.

I went to [producer] Harvey Weinstein, I said, I want to put Steve Lawrence in it. And he said, absolutely not. No way. He’s terrible.  I said, well, if I put him on tape, will you watch him? So I had to tell Steve Lawrence he had to go on tape, which was an awful conversation. But I flew out to Las Vegas, which by the way was one of the great nights ever, because I saw Steve and [wife] Eydie [Gorme]’s show, which was a great show, and went backstage and met Bob Arum, the fight promoter, and became very good friends with Steve. And it was just a total Vegas experience. And he actually was willing to audition for me, and he was great. He was so great. And I brought the tape, I showed it to Harvey, and Harvey said, “He’s terrible, he’s over the top” — which he wasn’t, by the way. He was just that kind of guy. He was like, if you knew those Queens politicos, they themselves are almost over the top in that exact way. So I insisted.

What’s the word for what these kind of guys have — it’s a certain kind of a cheese factor that they’re either aware of and are okay with, or they’re not aware of. You’re not sure. And my father had known all those real-life guys, particularly a guy named Donald Manes, who wound up killing himself as part of the corruption scandal. Remember him? Well, my father knew him. He actually stabbed himself in the heart with a steak knife on the phone with his psychiatrist. I mean, you couldn’t make it up, right? 

So I based Steve Lawrence’s character on a combination of Donald Manes, and one other guy that my father knew in city politics. And Steve was so understanding of exactly who this character was for just the reason you said: his exposure to low level syndicate scum on the nightclub circuit. Steve would tell me about going to Havana, where he would perform when the roof would open up and you’d see the stars. He said it was like heaven, and yet you would be dealing with several of [mobster] Sam Giancana’s best friends who would come by and need to talk with you. And the level of understanding that the line between ethical behavior and ethical bankruptcy is beyond wafer thin. he understood that, and I loved what he brought to the film. It was Doug Abel’s idea really, and I think it’s a great one.

So: Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. I want to talk about their dynamic; they costar in The Yards and then We Own The Night; they were producers on the latter. What were they like to work with together? Did they form a bond? This was a period when Mark had established himself as a serious performer in Boogie Nights, and he did several films in that mode before deciding to do something entirely different with his career.

P.T. Anderson had shown me scenes from Boogie Nights in the editing room. I’m trying to remember what year that was. Jesus, 1996. 

But I remember Paul was telling me over and over again at the time, he kept saying, “Mark Wahlberg’s the guy, Mark Wahlberg’s the guy.” I was saying, well, who’s the guy? And Paul said, he’s like, John Garfield, earthy and blah, blah, blah. And Paul was really insistent, and I went and saw the footage and I was like, okay, yeah…but also, you can’t tell. It’s a context that Mark plays in Boogie Nights. You have no idea whether it’s the director, or it’s him, you know what I mean? You don’t know. So I met with Mark, and I learned Mark is genuinely street. Mark is a guy who actually is not some kind of cream puff faker. He is really tough, and he just was so passionate about doing it that finally I said, well, I’m going to trust in Paul and I’m going to trust his authenticity in that level.

And I thought on The Yards in particular — and also on We Own The Night — he was just marvelous. I mean, he was really earthy. But also extremely skilled, technically, as an actor, really technically skilled. He had been in De Niro’s orbit for some time and studied with De Niro’s acting gurus. 

And Joaquin was very different. Joaquin was combustible and untrained and had his own sort of method. And I don’t mean capital “M,” I mean small “m” way of working, but he was like, take seven would have six great line readings and two that you didn’t prefer. And take three would have one line reading that was great, and the rest, the scene would be off kilter. But you saw a brilliance in there, always. And so his brilliance was different. There was a different energy. Now, on The Yards, their first time together, he and Mark, for some reason, got along extremely well. I don’t quite understand that because they’re very different, but they really were very, very close, two peas in a pod.

And I just wanted to continue that relationship on the next film, We Own The Night, which was very hard for me to get made. And when the film did come out, it was hated in a lot of circles. Although now? It’s weird, I get quite a bit of fan mail about it. So I don’t know what that means, but that was my way of trying to extend that relationship. And also, as far as their roles were concerned, to prey on Mark’s feelings of toughness and to reverse it so that he becomes a shell of himself at the end, and to prey on Joaquin’s fears of toughness and to actually play into that fear of toughness, that vulnerability, and go the other way with it. That was what I was trying to do with We Own The Night.

“We Own The Night was very hard for me to get made. And when the film did come out, it was hated in a lot of circles. Although now? It’s weird, I get quite a bit of fan mail about it.

The way you frame your stories, they have a real grounding in reality. I love that opening montage of We Own the Night with the black and white pictures, and it’s this little mini story of New York City cop culture. But there’s also a part of film tradition that you’re drawing on with these stories, one that’s very much like a First National or early Warner Brothers picture, Manhattan Melodrama or The Roaring Twenties, where you have these two male characters who have a bond, and it’s as strong a bond as you can imagine. And eventually it’s ripped apart, but in its way comes around again— We Own The Night in particular that kind of melodramatic structure.

Both things are true. I’m sure. I was also very influenced, I remember — I mean, this is incredibly pretentious thing to say, but I was really obsessed at the time, and I still love it more than life, Visconti’s film, Rocco and his Brothers. And the degree to which Visconti’s pictures talked about the larger ideas of history and politics and economics and culture and class having a greater say in the unfolding of our lives than our own ability to shape it. 

But you’re quite right about the Warner Brothers thing because those, some cases, pre-code movies had a strangely direct reckoning with a kind of moral ambiguity that oddly departed from pictures in the late thirties, early forties. By the early forties, maybe because of the war, they became, with the exception of maybe some William Wyler stuff and John Ford pictures, they became very much focused on the positivity.

And so what you see, then, is the color MGM musicals, for example, which are the pinnacle of that kind of positivity. Replacing the brooding darkness of Scarface, for example, the Hawks version, or the savagery of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Those themes and their treatments were put aside, and then only had a reemergence, of course, with Bonnie and Clyde. So you’re right that those dark earlier pictures are the things that influenced me because I saw them as being somewhat honest confrontations with a moral and ethical universe ever in flux, profoundly in trouble, which is what I saw my father’s real-life existence being, and what I thought I was surrounded by. It’s funny, I was talking to my friend Matt, who’s a wonderful filmmaker too, I went to film school with him, and I said, it’s very strange. I look back on my life now how many murderers I’ve known. it is a really weird idea knowing all these people who wound up killing people. And I tried to put those people, those characters into the movies. I mean, I based Tim Roth’s character on a guy I knew, a guy who wound up murdering his mother. It’s a very hard thing for me to imagine murdering your mother. So anyway, the material is based on personal experience, but also the films that I loved that reflected that experience.

Speaking of Visconti, your Two Lovers, which is the first picture you co-wrote with Ric Menello, and it has a certain basis in Viscontis’s White Nights, in itself loosely based on a Dostoevsky story, is that correct?

It does. I mean, at some point, though, the Visconti picture is extremely surreal. I mean, it was all shot in Cinecitta with a very self-consciously theatrical style. I think it’s a beautiful film, by the way, and I really love it, particularly the scene in that little bar where [lead actor Marcello Mastroianni] dances to the Bill Haley song “13 Women,” which I think is amazing. But we veered away from that feeling at some point. And so it became less Viscontiesque than we originally had intended, and it became something else. And that was my attempt to convey the cramped interior, emotional, and physical space of that person, Leonard, the lead character played by Phoenix. And so we thought of the apartment, I tried to design it almost like Gregor Samsa’s home in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” this long hallway, and this bug who will not come out of his room, the ultimate anti-hero in some sense, it’s the film that embraces our understanding of myth, the most of any of the films that I’ve made, because he’s such an anti-heroic figure, and we see all of his personal foibles up close, whereas the other characters in the movie, except for maybe his mother, don’t see them at all.

And it has one of my favorite shots that kind of recurs in several of your films, but is particularly pointed here, which is the low angle shot looking into a window of a brick building with the light on and the invariable question is what’s going on behind there. Aspirations and desires are all behind that curtain.

Yeah, yeah. 

I remember Ric and I talking about what the feeling of the film should be. The phrase we kept coming up with was “a non-humorous take on heartbreak,” which was we couldn’t find a ton of films correlated to. I remember this. We couldn’t think of a ton of films made in that register. We thought of Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love, which a part of The Dekalog, I think it’s Dekalog number six, although you forget these things. And then we also thought about, of course, Rear Window, which is a very comedic picture, but with a very dark subtext. But also, what was another picture we thought of? I remember thinking we wanted a Polanskiesque take on a love story. And so these ideas led us to incorporating lot of the sounds of the neighborhood, which was also, again, Brighton Beach because we wanted the idea of the ocean. And the implied potential of some other place across the ocean, one that Leonard will never see. Because he will never be able to transcend his environment and he’ll be stuck working as a dry cleaner, even if he has decent means the rest of his life. It’s actually quite a dark notion.

All of these films are shot by very distinctive cinematographers.  I wanted to ask you particularly about two, Tom Richmond, who shot Little Odessa was a great cinematographer and also kind of a New York/L..A. legend in cinematography, and also of course about Darius Khondji; The Immigrant was the first of three films you shot with this master.

Yeah, Tom Richmond. I miss a lot. [The cinematographer, who also shot Palindromes, Waking the Dead, and a slew of other pictures, died in 2022.]  I used to talk with him every now and then. I had a fantastic relationship with him on that movie. He was so game to do it. Although he looked like he was like 80 years old at the time and had a very gritty way of talking. At first you wondered whether he could do it.  But then as soon as he hit the set, he was ferocious. It’s a very weird thing. I remember being a little concerned in prep, like, is he going to be able to be physically up to it, because he kept saying, oh, I’m going to BE the camera. And I thought, oh God. But then you got to the set, all of a sudden he’s like, give me the thing and I’m going to do it! That kind of thing. And he was so open to my feelings and thoughts, which is a remarkable thing for an established cinematographer like that to be with an idiot like me.

I mean, I was 23 years old, and he really embraced what I wanted to do. He let me set up all the shots, choose all the lenses, talk about the lighting. And so the way that that film looked is entirely my choices. Which is not to say that it’s me. What I mean is that’s actually a very generous thing for an established cinematographer to do with a 23-year-old. He did not try to take over, and he was just there to embrace and enhance my original thoughts, which I thought was tremendously generous of him. We lost touch a little bit after Little Odessa, because what happens sometimes with these things is you fall out of rhythm. If you wind up making another movie and he is doing another movie when you’re doing that, and then all of a sudden the schedules go off and now you’re not working together You know what I mean? It was one of those things, I don’t remember the picture he was making, but Harris Savides had reached out to me to shoot The Yards, and I just lost touch with Tom. But then I later reconnected with him, and we had a very good relationship, and I loved him very much. In the case of Darius, I’ve made three pictures with him. I find him to be really one of the great artists working in the medium, and I’ve never worked with anyone who has a better sense of color than Darius.

He has an eye for color that is way better than mine could ever be, and a sensitivity of an artist. And he brings to a picture another layer that you do not have in your head. We had a very contentious relationship on another picture I made, which was not a New York movie. called The Lost City of Z, which was such a difficult shoot. We were in the middle of nowhere really, in the jungle, and it was very difficult. Darius would be waiting for a cloud, and crocodiles would be swimming 10 feet away from me. So it was just a very difficult experience. But he handled it like a champ and tolerated me nobly. And in the end, the results are so beautiful that I had to bring him back for a third. And on our third picture, Armageddon Time, the relationship was incredibly harmonious. Again, in that case, our relationship is I choose the shots and the lenses, although if he makes a suggestion, I’m always open to it. The shots and the lenses and the staging are mine, but the lighting and the color is very much his input. So we have, strangely, a clearly delineated relationship. More along the lines of what the British industry calls the lighting cameraman.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.