True Romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

For decades, the American critical establishment has had a hard time taking genre auteurs seriously—Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Clint Eastwood were all hailed as masters in France long before America really paid attention. And while James Gray’s movies—1994’s Little Odessa, 2000’s The Yards and 2007’s We Own the Night—fared decently stateside, it’s the French who really embraced these noirish New York City symphonies. His latest, the Brighton Beach–set Two Lovers, was a hit across the Atlantic this past fall, and it’s being released here February 13.

On the surface, the film—an unabashedly romantic melodrama in which Joaquin Phoenix vacillates between Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw—looks like a departure from Gray’s earlier grit. “I thought about it very consciously, trying to get away from the genre underpinnings,” he says on the phone from his L.A. home. “I wanted to do something that relied not at all on those constructs as a crutch.”

At the same time, the 39-year-old director is too much of a cinephile not to be acutely aware of silver-screen myths and aesthetic codes. “The thing I steal most from in Two Lovers is Italian films from the ’50s,” Gray admits. “Certainly the ending on the beach is totally ripped off from La Strada. And I stole quite liberally from the Visconti movie White Nights [1957], based on the Dostoyevsky novella. I wanted to copy their commitment to an honest emotionality.

”Words like emotionality and authenticity pop up a lot in the conversation, and refreshingly, Gray doesn’t use them as Hollywood shorthand for unearned depth. Unlike many of his peers, he doesn’t filter his love for cinema through a layer of irony—his films aren’t quippy at all, for example.

“I have a real antipathy toward irony,” Gray says heatedly. “I think it’s an altogether unethical decision to make fun of the characters. To me, authenticity of emotion is the most important thing a work of art can convey. And by the way, that’s not the same thing as realistic—you can make something that’s very formal.”

Indeed, the Queens native has emerged as one of the most visually confident American directors, though his classically elegant style resembles neither Hollywood’s overedited gloss nor Amerindie arte povera. “Just as surely as there is a hackneyed commercial cinema, there is a hackneyed art cinema,” Gray declares. “Bicycle Thief or Umberto D, for example, actually had a certain elegance. Neorealism doesn’t mean, ‘Take the camera off the tripod and have it look crummy!’ There was a desire to get to a greater truth through the melodrama or the story itself.”

This attention to craft has also produced an abundance of subtle (i.e., non–Oscar bait) and remarkable performances in Gray’s films, from Edward Furlong’s lonely teen in Little Odessa to Paltrow’s vulnerable, surprisingly likable Michelle. Gray, a longtime friend of Paltrow’s, maintains that “she gets kind of a bum rap. She’s very bright and extremely attractive, and she does not suffer fools gladly; some people who don’t know her don’t like that. But I do know her, and there’s something quite lovely about her personally, and I wanted to put it in a movie.”

Vinessa Shaw didn’t have to battle a negative rep; her challenge was to make a decidedly nonshowy part memorable. She recalls that Gray was adamant about Sandra not being a caricatural Brooklyn girl. “He didn’t want her to have a glaring accent, for instance,” says the actor, 32. “And I was thinking, Darn, I wanted to do an accent! [Laughs] Then he said, ‘Fine, you can do it. But if I hear it, you’re done!’ I did it the first day and I was so nervous.… He didn’t say a word and then called me up afterwards and said, ‘You did an accent, didn’t you? It was very good.’ What a relief! He made me be very specific about Sandra, and very careful about making her real.”

As for the third point of the amorous triangle, Phoenix turns him into a swirl of hesitations and frustrated desires; Leonard is not always sympathetic, but you can’t help rooting for him. So how did the director react to a recent announcement that his symbiotic star, with whom he’s made three consecutive films, was retiring from the screen? “It bothers me from a very selfish perspective,” says Gray. “But I’m less worried about it than I should be. I think that I’m going to get him to do another movie with me. I just don’t know what that is yet.”

 

Below, more from Gray in outtakes from the interview.

Do you have any idea why your films are more popular in France than in America?

I honestly don’t know. I never ever constructed a film with a French audience in mind. I think it has to do with the original inspirations for the movies themselves: My taste tends to be 1950s and ’60s French and Italian movies. They don’t often deal with complex and twisty plots, which tend to be more of an American thing, and tend to try to be more emotionally direct—which may be more of a European thing?

There are a couple of other factors that come into play in terms of the gulf between American and European reactions to things. It would be too easy for me to say, in relation to me, “Americans are idiots and the French are geniuses.” The real issue is that sometimes there is a degree of cultural distance that’s required to judge the work. Italians thought Fellini’s movies were terrible at first. I’m not trying to compare myself with Fellini, I’m just saying this is the best case. The Japanese thought Kurosawa was risible. Hitchcock wasn’t really treated as a serious filmmaker in the United States. It took the French to discover Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock. Conversely, Americans were at the forefront in discussing Fellini, particularly 8 1/2. American critics appreciate films that are overtly experimental and overtly ironic because they can process that, it’s stepping a step back from the codes in the culture.

Editing seems to have replaced attention to shot composition now, but you’re one of the few American directors to be particularly interested in purely formal elements.

That evolution is a by-product of two things. The first is that the system doesn’t enable you to make as many films. Hitchcock made how many movies? Fifty? Ford made 70, 80? You weren’t demanded to make a fantastic movie out of the box, so you could develop what you’re talking about, because what you’re talking about is much harder than editing. It involved meticulous planning and an understanding that narrative itself is about context. Building a movie that’s narratively based is like a house of cards: If one thing isn’t right, the whole thing falls apart. That takes a lot of craft to do. Whereas movies that seem experimental and are sort of doodling in a way demand much less craft.

Now, there’s also a technological reason to the devaluing of craft, which is that technology has made making films so much easier and more people make movies than ever before. It’s an altogether good thing, but the by-product is that my dentist will come up to me and say, “Hey I just made a movie!” And it’s no good. It’s never any good. Ease of access doesn’t guarantee excellence of result, so that narrative craft and the attention to detail are lost because basically anybody can do it—but not anybody can do it. And by the way, the same thing happened to painting too. I’m a huge fan of Abstract Expressionism—Pollock, Rothko, I love those guys. But it led to a belief that craft wasn’t important, which isn’t really true: Jackson Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton, he was technically an excellent artist. You look at the early work by Picasso and he was a classically trained artist, so that foundation was there to experiment. Today doodling is quite encouraged. I’m not at all politically conservative but I have a sort of artistic conservatism, I think.

Your mise-en-scène choices always seem very deliberate. For instance, there seems to be a lot more close-ups in Two Lovers than in your previous films.

Is that true? You might be right, I just never, never think of it in those terms. When I’m thinking of the visual strategy of a film, it’s more or less what will reveal an emotional honesty in each scene. There’s no question I had designed Two Lovers to be a very intimate movie, but where the camera was placed was dictated much more by the fact that we didn’t build any sets. Everything was shot on a practical location and you have much less room to move around in that case.

I was very aware of what’s not in the film. The camera is very stately: You’ll do a tracking shot but you won’t do a shaky handheld shot.

This is probably going to be a very unpopular thing to say, but just as surely as there is a hackneyed commercial cinema, there is a tremendously hackneyed art cinema: make it technically slighly inept to imply a certain verisimilitude—and that’s nonsense. I feel that has become the clichéd language of the art film. This is not interesting to me. First of all, everybody does it now. But also you’re removing the idea of subtext. One of the things that bothers me so much is—and I’m not talking about mainstream cinema because you can’t get anything from it anymore in the United States—but what I find upsetting in art cinema of the past 20 years or so is, there’s no more subtext. The subtext is the text. You watch the film, it’s about this issue and that’s it. If that’s the case, it’s no longer art, it’s agit-prop. I’m trying to make films where the story is seemingly simple and hopefully there’s something else going on underneath, and hope the film exists beneath the surface, for some people.

The Yards had both aspects—the political element was right out in the open.

The inspiration for that was Hands Over the City [1963] by Francesco Rosi, with Rod Steiger. And I stole a lot from that. Rosi is a great director because as political as he was, there always seemed to be another component in the film, a certain personal angst brought to the story. I’m referring to the mother’s reaction to seeing the corpse in Salvatore Giuliani, for instance. Rosi movies are in reverse: You have the politics on the surface and beneath it is a beautiful emotional undercurrent. Which is equally as legitimate, I’m not saying one thing is better than the other.

The main themes in all your films are political but you don’t hit the audience over the head with them. For instance, there’s the idea of social and familial determinism. It seems to be going against the idea of the American Dream, which says that you can be what you want to be. Whereas you say, No, people can be held back by their milieu. And I think Americans don’t want to hear that.

There’s no question that’s true. It’s a very un-American message. It runs completely contrary to American ideological necessity. Countries have lies that they propagate to exist, and the American lie is, Everyone can be all they want to be. It’s not a complete lie, in some cases people do achieve great things from nothing, but social mobility in the United States is really not any greater than it is in Western Europe. It’s an ideological construct that helps us exist and survive. And you’re right, my films very consciously say the opposite [Laughs]. I’m sure that bothers people, maybe not consciously but certainly unconsciously.

The Brighton Beach is a familiar one in your movies. But just as you changed tone for Two Lovers, did you ever consider changing locale as well?

Never. I loved the beach, I loved the far distance away from beautiful Manhattan, and yet it’s still urban and in New York. I made two films there before and there was something that felt very good about that to me, it felt very personal.While your films seem male-dominated at first, your female characters are actually very rich and interesting. And very adult, which is refreshing in the current climate.

How did you choose Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw?

When I’m talking to actors and actresses, what I’m really looking for is an understanding that there should be no distance put between themselves and the character. They should put themselves into the role as humanly as possible. In the case of Gwyneth, she had not done a lot of movies lately. Joaquin and I loved her, we thought she was so great. She will admit herself she wasn’t thrilled with some of the pictures she had done. She was a little tired, she had had children and wanted to take care of them. I sort of nudged her out of retirement a little bit. I’ve known her socially for a long time. She and Brad Pitt had seen my first movie at Sundance in 1994 or ’95 and they were big fans. I just maintained a relationship with her because I really liked her. The thing is, she uses Joaquin’s character quite a bit in the film, but at the same time he does pursue her doggedly and she’s never less than completely honest with him about her feelings. “Leonard, I want you to be my friend,” she says over and over again. It gets me a little bit disturbed when I hear people say, “How are these two hot women interested in Leonard?” But that’s not really the story of the film. She’s not really interested in him in that way. They do end up making love but she’s so emotionally vulnerable at that moment. Even though they do have sex, it’s not because she’s so into him and thinks he’s the best thing ever. It’s because it’s there and it happens. All of this goes to say, you look for a certain understanding of the more melancholy movements of life as well as the more cheerful ones.

What about Vinessa?

To my mind, it would have been a huge mistake to cast a homely girl in that part. Because then it would make it very clear why Leonard feels the way that he does and it would be a very shallow conception of character. [switches into Mr. Moviefone voice] “One goes hot, one goes grotty!” What it’s about is the fact that she’s lovely but she doesn’t fit his fetish, he’s blind to whatever positive qualities she has because there’s a whole host of things attached to her that have nothing to do with her. I told the casting director I wanted a young Claudia Cardinale, in her Rocco and His Brothers phase. Then I went to see 3:10 to Yuma and I thought, Who is that? She looks great, she’s really earthy. I met her and I was wondering if she could pull off playing a Jewish girl, and then she said, “Well, my real name is Schwartz.”

Your next project is called The Lost City of Z, about a British explorer disappearing in the Amazon in the 1920s. That looks like a big departure for you.

It’ll have similar thematic ideas to the other pictures, but a different world. Paramount hired me to write the script and to direct. Brad Pitt’s company brought the picture to me for him to star in it. I’ve known Brad for many years, he’s a wonderful person. And he has a striking resemblance to the real guy [Percy Harrison Fawcett] the story is based on—a very dashing figure. Originally it was an article by an excellent writer named David Grann. He basically expanded on it and wrote a book. It’s very epic, extremely ambitious, quite sprawling. I’m looking very much forward to it, I must say. I have huge hopes for it. I think it’s going to be quite something if I can pull it off. A good idea for a story is a good idea. This was a tremendous opportunity to pursue a story with great complexity, one that covers civilization both in the Amazon and in Europe.

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