James Gray: ​‘I’m sup­posed to show you all my vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, that’s the rea­son I do it’

A pro­found­ly hon­est film­mak­er, James Gray fre­quent­ly takes inspi­ra­tion from his own life and his family’s his­to­ry to cre­ate mov­ing por­traits of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can life. In his lat­est dra­ma, Armaged­don Time, Gray reflects on being an 11-year-old in the late 70s, as Ronald Reagan’s pre­mier­ship loomed in the near dis­tance and ten­sions flared between com­mu­ni­ties in New York City.

LWLies: The close rela­tion­ship you had with your grand­fa­ther very much inspired this film. Why do you think the rela­tion­ship between grand­par­ents and grand­chil­dren can be such a source of cre­ative nur­tur­ing for children?

Gray: My par­ents real­ly strug­gled with putting food on the table, par­tic­u­lar­ly in 1977. They had an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult time, need­ed gov­ern­ment assis­tance with food stamps, and they were quite humil­i­at­ed by that. I remem­ber, my grand­par­ents had retired at the most oppor­tune moment. They didn’t make a lot of mon­ey, they were both teach­ers, but they had saved and lived fru­gal­ly, so they had some mon­ey. I think so much of my father and mother’s anguish was about try­ing to make sure the fam­i­ly could func­tion on a dai­ly basis, the strug­gle to sur­vive, and the expres­sions of love and ten­der­ness, empa­thy, sym­pa­thy – those things couldn’t real­ly take hold when the strug­gle was dai­ly, and so heavy.

I remem­ber my par­ents tak­ing me out of pub­lic school and putting me into a pri­vate school. They nev­er once just said to me, ​“Are you okay? How are you doing?” I mean, maybe it’s a good thing. I have a lot of flaws, obvi­ous­ly, but I have grit, I fight for what I want. My broth­er has this too, and maybe that’s a prod­uct of a cer­tain tough­ness. On the oth­er hand, you don’t just raise peo­ple so that they can be fero­cious. There’s more to life than that. I have this fan­ta­sy that my broth­er and I have dis­cussed, where upon my father’s death, we would have found some safe deposit box and opened it up, and then there would be a note say­ing ​“I was real­ly tough on you and I didn’t baby you because I knew would help you lat­er in life, but I love you.” Of course, there wasn’t that note, but I kind of feel like that’s at the basis of a lot of his actions.

I think you get some­thing like a do-over as a grand­par­ent. You already know what to do. Part of what the grand­par­ent gives you is love with­out judge­ment and the pres­sures of the dai­ly rais­ing of the child. When you’re a kid, you only have to have one per­son who says you’re want­ed and loved. That can be enough to save you. And for me it was him. I think grand­par­ents have the ben­e­fit of a lit­tle dis­tance and a lit­tle experience.

How do you choose what details to include and what to omit when draw­ing from fam­i­ly history?

Wasn’t it Hitch­cock who said that movies are life with the bor­ing parts cut out? I remem­ber I asked Paul Thomas Ander­son once, if he did out­lines and he said, ​“No, I don’t ever out­line. I make lists.” I thought to myself, ​“What? A list is an out­line.” So you make lists, you make an out­line – I wrote down maybe 200 or so scenes or episodes from my life – and then you try to find the ones that are the most dra­mat­i­cal­ly impor­tant. The ones that actu­al­ly change the direction.

It’s not easy, because some­times momen­tous moments are very small. Some­body says the wrong thing to you, and it seems like a tiny thing, but in real­i­ty, your whole life changes. Some­times you need a lit­tle dis­tance to say ​“What is it that shaped this?” So many things go into his­to­ry. It’s not reducible to one thing. And so it’s vex­ing – if you try to solve a prob­lem or answer a ques­tion, you’re in trou­ble as a cre­ative per­son. All you can do is present a series of inci­dents or episodes with as much hon­esty as you can, and not try to make an answer.

I feel like that lack of an answer or solu­tion in Armaged­don Time is what makes the film dif­fi­cult to grap­ple with.

It’s fun­ny, anoth­er inter­view­er asked me ​“Is this anoth­er film where the Black char­ac­ter teach­es the white char­ac­ter a les­son?” And I respond­ed by say­ing ​“What les­son?” There’s no fuck­ing les­son. Both of these kids get thrown into a world of cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance. Even Paul’s grand­fa­ther does that. He says, ​“Your name is Graff now, so you can fit in,” but in the next breath he’s telling Paul to ​“Be a men­sch” and stand up for what he believes in. One of the things that I always found dis­turb­ing, but essen­tial, was the idea that not only was there no answer giv­en, but that the white kid in this sto­ry is thrown into this appalling world order, from which he actu­al­ly ben­e­fits. That is not typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood I felt, and cer­tain­ly worth pursuing.

My fam­i­ly was real­ly fucked up. The neigh­bour­hood want­ed us out, they didn’t want Jews on the block. So am I a crea­ture of priv­i­lege? No. And yes. Those two things co-exist, and I think con­tribute to argu­ing against this sim­plis­tic idea of white guilt. My father – was he the crea­ture of priv­i­lege? Did white priv­i­lege mean any­thing to him? No. He fixed boil­ers. But you see in the film, that’s what he does for the cop, that means Paul gets off light­ly. So he is the prod­uct of priv­i­lege, and there is a peck­ing order, but it’s just not a sim­ple thing.

We’re told dif­fer­ent things when we’re chil­dren, and it’s assumed that we’ll gath­er the moral and eth­i­cal frame­work nec­es­sary for exist­ing in the world just from the air or some­thing, but we don’t and we can’t. It demands a long term process. Reli­gion used to fill that hole. You know, para­bles in the Bible, for exam­ple, but I’m not reli­gious, a lot of peo­ple are not reli­gious now. My friend when I was young – he was not reli­gious. So I’m not propos­ing we go back to reli­gion. What I am say­ing, though, is you do have to fill that hole or else chil­dren are adrift. And I was adrift.

A friend of mine not­ed that it was inter­est­ing to think about the fact that in the 1970s many work­ing class Jew­ish peo­ple were still very much sub­ject to anti-semi­tism, but also ben­e­fit­ted from being able to assim­i­late and fit in with white society.

Yes. Nuance and detail mat­ters. I don’t think it’s quite white guilt in this film, because as a Jew­ish per­son, you’re caught in a very strange place. You do ben­e­fit, but at the same time, you’re not real­ly in the club. And you can be the oppres­sor and the oppressed at once – the striv­ing that my par­ents had to fit in con­tributed to their foot on the neck of John­ny. I don’t know if I see that in movies all the time. I tried to also acknowl­edge the lim­i­ta­tions of my own expe­ri­ence. It was nev­er my inten­tion to try and tell the sto­ry of some­one who is Black in the Unit­ed States. I don’t feel a lim­i­ta­tion is the same thing as a flaw…all art has lim­i­ta­tions. The beau­ties of the nat­ur­al world are not depict­ed in any way in Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca. That doesn’t mean it’s a piece of shit.

I think social media has con­tributed ter­ri­bly to a debase­ment of dis­course, and you can pay atten­tion to the details and dif­fer­ent threads of a nar­ra­tive that do mat­ter, or you think you’ve seen it already. I believe that’s some­what lazy. It’s the some nau­se­at­ing new strat­e­gy where we think everybody’s point of view has to be rep­re­sent­ed in a work. That’s not pos­si­ble. The need to hear from a wide vari­ety of voic­es is not the same thing as all voic­es need­ing to be in one work. This is my voice. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. You don’t have to see it, or if you do see it, you don’t have to like it. But it’s the only voice I’ve got.

I can’t empha­sise this enough, because I think this is, in some ways, the cri­sis of our age, cul­tur­al­ly. The thing that moti­vates me as an artist is the need to express myself hon­est­ly, and for you, for a spe­cif­ic amount of time, to have a win­dow into my con­scious­ness. That’s why it’s there. It’s not to see me giv­ing you 82 dif­fer­ent opin­ions on some­thing. And no work of art can explain every­thing. On social media every­thing gets reducible to two sen­tences, and nuance and mean­ing gets lost in the race towards virtue sig­nalling. I guess in some ways this is the anti-virtue sig­nalling film as I’m try­ing to say I was a very unpleas­ant kid in a lot of ways. I’m sup­posed to show you all my vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. That’s the rea­son I do it.

At the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, Paul Schrad­er was talk­ing about how his view on the world has changed since he began mak­ing films, and he said ​“Now I nev­er wan­na leave the room with­out say­ing I love you” which I thought was a beau­ti­ful way of artic­u­lat­ing it. How has your world­view changed since you start­ed mak­ing art?

Well, I’m not at the same place in my life that Paul Schrad­er is, and it’s very hard for me to have enough dis­tance to be able to answer that with clar­i­ty. But do you know Hoku­sai, the Japan­ese print­mak­er? He had a great quote, and I’d like to read it to you. [Gray asks the PR for his phone]

Dur­ing the lock­down, my son would take me out to the back­yard to look at insects. I was moved to tears almost all the time by it, in a way that shocked me. I was read­ing about Hoku­sai, but I didn’t ful­ly under­stand this quote until I was locked down, until I spent time with my chil­dren. Until I start­ed to get old­er and my mor­tal­i­ty became ever more clear to me. And I’d like to read this to you: ​“From the age of six, I had a pas­sion for copy­ing the form of things. And since the age of 50, I have pub­lished many draw­ings. Yet of all I drew by my 70^th year, there is noth­ing worth tak­ing into account. At 73 years, I part­ly under­stood the struc­ture of ani­mals, birds, insects and fish­es, and the life of grass and plants. And so at 86, I shall progress fur­ther. At 90, I shall even fur­ther pen­e­trate their secret mean­ing, and by 100 I shall per­haps tru­ly have reached the lev­el of the mar­vel­lous and divine. When I am 110, each dot, each line shall pos­sess a life of its own.”

I guess the rea­son I’m read­ing this is because the old­er I get, the less I under­stand about the world. And the more heart­break I feel on a dai­ly basis, and maybe it means I should take a pill or some­thing. I think it’s advanc­ing age. It’s my father’s death. It’s the lock­downs, it’s my chil­dren that have been born. But The Bea­t­les had it right. You lose the anger. And you realise more the impor­tance of achiev­ing a feel­ing of love.

Armaged­don Time is released Novem­ber 18 in the UK by Universal.