Interview with James Gray who with Armageddon Time tells his personal story, as did Cuarón, Sorrentino, Iñárritu, Branagh, Spielberg: this is why Hollywood directors decided to tell their story.
After the move to the Cannes Film Festival 2022 and the Rome Film Fest, Armageddon Time Of James Gray goes out in Italian theaters on March 23. As other directors before him have done in recent years, the author has decided to tell his own personal story.
After Cuarón, Sorrentino, Iñárritu, Branagh and Spielberg, James Gray also brought his family to the big screen: to play his parents he chose Anne Hathaway And Jeremy Strongwhile the role of the grandfather was entrusted to Anthony Hopkins. For himself as a teenager instead he bet on Michael Banks Repeta.
We are at New Yorkmore precisely in Queens, USA 80s: in addition to recounting the idiosyncrasies of his family members, the director also recalls the racism of those years, still never really overcome, embodied in the relationship with his friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb), from whom they continually try to distance him just because he is black.
Armageddon Time: Interview with James Gray
Armageddon Time, the review: time to grow up
Armageddon Time: James Gray talks about his family
What’s scarier? Go to outer space and deep into the jungle, or tell your parents?
It’s much scarier to go home. Space and the jungle present physical and logistical challenges: maybe you have to carry your equipment up a mountain. In the jungle there are insects. But the hardest job is trying to be honest with yourself. And make a not always beautiful portrait of your family. It makes you feel exposed, vulnerable.
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What is this obsession with directors who tell their own story? Cuarón, Paolo Sorrentino, Iñárritu, Kenneth Branagh, you, Steven Spielberg… Why? What is happening?
Maybe we are all getting old! We try to reclaim our youth. I think it is due to two factors. The first is that it’s a long and beautiful tradition. Wonderful: it allows you to be personal, to put a part of yourself into the work. The other thing, and I know it’s maybe a little depressing, is that cinema is in a precarious, difficult situation. The pandemic has done a lot of damage. Many of us, and I know this because I know Iñárritu very well, are very good friends, I know almost all of them, they feel that cinema is getting out of hand. So we want to make personal films while we can. I know it’s a bit of a sad answer, but it’s the truth.
Armageddon Time: Jessica Chastain’s cameo
There is a nice cameo in the film: Jessica Chastain is Maryanne Trump. It’s interesting: you said you remembered that speech very well. Did she impress you with the idea of privilege?
The speech you cite is a funny story. My brother was also in the audience. I called him and said, “Ed, can you write down everything you remember about that speech? ‘I do too and let’s see how similar they are.’ He did it, I did it and they were identical. The which makes me think it’s pretty accurate. When, at 12, I heard her talking I thought she was ridiculous. This woman talking had hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and all she was doing was saying how much she owed work. I thought it was crazy, that he had no idea what he was saying. If you want to call it an awareness of privilege that’s fine, but I remember as a kid thinking it was crazy.
Armageddon Time and Racism in 1980s America
You wrote the film before 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement arrived: why is racism still so present in America in your opinion?
It is impossible to tell the story not just of the United States, but of the world, without running into issues of class and race. These are issues that have worried the country for some time, since its inception. Not even from the slave trade, but from what happened to indigenous peoples. To tell the story of my country without talking about these things is to ignore the proverbial elephant in the room. I had to do it. But you are right: the context and the story are constantly changing. I wrote the film in 2019: who knows how it is received by the public today.
Armageddon Time and family dinners
I’m Italian so I understand the importance of family dinners. How did you make those scenes come true? The food, the words: what was it like for you to recreate those moments?
At the time, those family dinners seemed very important to me. They always became chaos. They started in an orderly way: my mother would announce dinner and at a certain point, usually because of me, I was just a jerk, I said things like: I don’t like what you’ve prepared, I order something else, and suddenly everything it became insane. I tried to remember all possible details of those dinners. I made a list of things that happened: my father was always blowing on his coffee. He drank coffee during the meal: something I never understood! He ate spaghetti with tomato sauce and drank coffee: he was disgusting to me, I didn’t understand him. I have tried to include all these details because a work of art, if I may say so, truly lives in the details. Without details it means nothing: a movie comes down to the plot and you don’t know if it’s good or not. The important things are how my mother dressed, how she set down the plate. The gestures my brother made to me, the kicks he gave me under the table. Everything had to be there.