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Interview: James Gray on The Immigrant, Joaquin Phoenix, and More

Gray speaks to us about not directing Phoenix, his personal links to his films, and what he loves most about NYC.

Interview: James Gray on The Immigrant, Joaquin Phoenix, and More
Photo: The Weinstein Company

The first thing James Gray asks me is where I live. “Bensonhurst,” I tell him, with that slightly embarrassed, brace-for-impact tone I always inflect when I confess how close I am to Coney Island—and how far I am from midtown Manhattan. “I know Bensonhurst,” Gray says. “I know all about Brooklyn.” A Gotham-centric filmmaker to his core, Gray says this with a very mild, stereotypical New Yawk timbre, but the declaration isn’t one of arrogance so much as true hometown pride. All of Gray’s movies have been set in New York, and the one that put him on the map at age 25, Little Odessa, takes place just a stone’s throw from my apartment, adjacent to my landlord’s place and the beach where I spend my summer Saturdays. After making movies about crime and love that unfold in Brooklyn (We Own the Night, Two Lovers) and Queens (The Yards), Gray has finally made a period piece about New York as the entry point into America—or, more specifically, into the ever-elusive American dream. If Gray were to quit filmmaking tomorrow, The Immigrant would be his magnum opus, a paean to his Russian-Jewish grandparents who, like Marion Cotillard’s Polish protagonist, Ewa, came to this country in the 1920s, and a near-mystical deconstruction of the many contradictions that define American life. A man whose tendency to ramble is instantly forgiven thanks to the intriguing places his tangents take you, Gray told me about not directing Joaquin Phoenix, his increasingly personal links to his films, and what he loves most about this city.

So you’ve said that—

First of all, I’m just going to stop you right there. Whenever somebody says “you’ve said,” I have a pit in my stomach because I know that what I’ve “said” is going to be dumb. I think, “Uh oh, my moronic words are going to be put back in my face.” But go ahead.

Well I think this one’s pretty safe. You’ve said that The Immigrant is largely based on memories of your grandparents, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s.

Yes, I did say that.

Okay, so no worries about stupidity there.

None so far.

Well, I want to back up a little bit and talk about the personal connections of some of your prior films, specifically Two Lovers, which was my favorite film of yours before The Immigrant. What were the specific personal connections for you with that project?

The birth of Two Lovers is a strange one. What happened was, I had married my wife, and she got pregnant pretty quickly. We had been trying to have a child. And we went to the doctor, and I had to get all these genetic tests done. My wife, being the tall, Shiksa goddess that she is, didn’t have to get all these tests done; well, she had them done, but she tested negative for all of these genetic markers for diseases. I tested positive for three. I was shocked. They were genetic diseases that you might pass on to your child if both the husband and wife have them.

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Do you remember what they were?

One was called Gaucher’s disease, which is a nervous disease. Another one was called Maple syrup urine disease, if you can believe that. By the way, I don’t have these diseases. I have the genetic potential to pass them onto my children if my mate had the same genetic disorder. You then have, I think, a 50 percent chance of handing it down to the kid. Anyway, the point of all this is that I had been talking to the woman who was giving us the test results, and she said she had seen an orthodox Jewish family where both the husband and wife had tested positive for Tay-Sachs disease. And there’s no cure for that. If your kid is born with Tay-Sachs disease it’s invariably fatal. And I thought, “Well, that’s just devastating.” I thought it was like our genetic, 21st-century definition of fate. So, Two Lovers became born out of that. The woman told us that this couple had broken apart because they both had this gene. And then I started thinking about a story that was about that—this sort of self-loathing Jew who has this genetic thing, which became Joaquin Phoenix’s character. I don’t know how well you remember the movie…

It’s been a few years, but I remember it well.

Yeah, he tells the story, his backstory, and that’s why he broke up with this girl beforehand, and has this weird obsession with the blonde next door who represents everything that he’s not. So it came from that, and then, of course, many other things come into play. I had just gotten married, and in marriage, you always wonder if married life is going to mean good or bad things; it’s filled with all kinds of potential, but also concerns about what your life will be. Now I’ve been married for nine years, and I can say it’s been more or less fantastic, thank heavens.

But you would say that The Immigrant is your most personal work to date?

Well, it depends. Personal isn’t the same as autobiographical. Autobiographical means it adheres to the facts of your life. And a ton of this stuff is taken directly from my grandparents—how to eat a banana, and the whole monologue in the church, where Ewa says, “We are all together, and the ship is dirty, and we are like animals.” All of that is verbatim from my grandparents. But, personal, yes, in that, what you wonder about is what you can feel…it’s not just the mood of the film, it’s what the film, thematically, is trying to express. And how closely and how intimately you feel what the film is trying to express. So, in that way, is this film the most personal? The last two films I’ve made, this one and Two Lovers, are my favorite films so far, because they’re getting closer to the cinematic expression of the mood and the attitude and the behavior and the feeling that I want to communicate to the viewer. Am I making no sense?

You’re making sense.

So when we talk about this film…I guess I had been beating myself up for a long time, about one sin or another that I had perceived that I had committed. And I guess I wanted to try and say to myself and to others that, no matter what you do in life, there is the possibility of redemption. And forgiveness. And that nobody is garbage—nobody is beneath us. This idea of being condescending to this character, or condescending to anybody, is almost a cancer.

Did you find, in the process of making The Immigrant, that having these personal and ancestral connections helped you to craft a film that’s about certain toxic aspects of the American dream, but never, in my opinion, falls victim to cliché? Because this isn’t exactly an under-explored theme.

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Well, to me, I think that comes from my grandparents. They would always tell stories to me—in very broken English, because they spoke Yiddish their whole lives—but the sense I got was never one of, “America! What a country! It’s amazing! All the things that I could do!” That, to me, is the cliché. What I saw was a more nuanced thing, where the American dream was something that was there, and that was present, and that was both the truth and a lie. Because they missed the old country a lot. It represented a real emotional pull for them. That was their culture, their world, and they got pulled away from it. That had to hurt. Now, they’re in a new place, New York, where their heads aren’t going to get chopped off by Cossacks, but it’s not all roses. For me, the problem with the presentation of the American dream is it’s always either one of two things. One is that there’s no possibility that the American dream is true. It’s bullshit. Garbage. The other is that the American dream is fantastic, and you’re gonna get out there and make a zillion dollars the second you get here. Which is truly bullshit—mostly, unless you win the lottery. So, if that’s the case, what’s an interesting depiction of the American dream? I think the answer is it’s both: It’s true and it’s a fiction.

For me, it ended up being that the characters were embodiments of that double-edged notion, and it’s what gave them depth. People love to hail characters and performances as having dimension, or layers, but here, the layers seemed born directly from the pros and cons of being in a new land. I think Joaquin’s character himself embodied all of that.

Well, I’m glad you felt that way because Joaquin and I really talked about that. And not a lot of people brought it up to me, so it’s interesting that you’re mentioning it. We discussed that, in a sense, part of the reason he should be forgiven is he’s doing everything he can to simply survive. It’s probably the only reason. That’s why I felt it important that the cops called him a “kike” and that, you know, obviously…surviving is a form of heroism. And as grotesque as what he does is, he’s doing the best that he can, as horrible as that may sound, within the context of what we might call “the American dream.” Yeah, we certainly talked about, and thought about, all of these things. Whether or not they get communicated in the film is another matter.

What’s it like to direct Joaquin? The only professional exposure I’ve had to him is in press conferences, and it’s pretty clear he’s not keen to discuss the work. But he’s such a marvel to watch. What’s an anecdote or something that you can share about working with him?

Well, he doesn’t like to talk about the work at all. Once the work is done, it’s not just some amorphous group of “journalists.” If I go to his house for dinner or something—which is not common, by the way—when we’re not shooting, I don’t ever talk about work with him. Ever. I never talk about the characters or anything like that. It’s a very internal process for him. He’s not easy to direct, because you almost have to read his mind about what it is he needs from you to help him, especially if he’s in trouble, which, by that way, he’s usually not. He can do anything. He’s always trying to explore and investigate a new aspect. He’s an amazingly inventive person, and he’s always looking for ways to reinvent something.

What did he reinvent in The Immigrant?

So, for example, that character, the pimp, was originally written very much as a kind of brute. And he said, “No, no I think it’s very important that, at times, I be very nice to her, and proper, and almost pretentious. And then, at times, be very angry with her to manipulate her.” So, it’s to be a con man, in essence, which I thought was a much more complex and interesting conception. So when you’re working with him on the set, to me it’s most important to give him the space to roam. If he wants to leave the room in the middle of a take, he needs to be able to do that. I need to allow him to do those things to get things that are very textured and nuanced, eventually. I say very little and let him know he has the freedom to do what he wants.

You’re a New Yorker, you make a lot of New York films. What do you think is the toughest thing about the city and the most romantic thing about the city? Because I think The Immigrant strikes a beautiful balance of toughness and romanticism.

That’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that in my life. Literally. Well…the toughest aspect of New York, I think, is that functioning is very difficult. New York is a crazy experiment, where they basically took an island, which is about 26 miles long and I think three miles wide, and packed a zillion people into it, and built concrete jungles to the sky. And functioning in New York is its own form of heroism. It’s tough, New York life. Unless you’re so rich that you have chauffeurs and chefs and all that, but that’s not the way practically anybody lives.

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And the most romantic aspect?

It’s that we live in such close proximity, and we walk the streets and we have, like I said, this strange mixture of people from all over. And you never know when something very beautiful is around the corner. There’s an incredible sense of discovery. In L.A., if I know about a jazz band, I get tickets in advance, I drive there, I watch the show. In New York, I walk down the street, and I look in a window, and I see a beautiful book on some artist I’ve never heard of. And I’m constantly meeting people and running into people on the street. The other day, I ran into this couple, a husband and wife I hadn’t seen in years. There’s something very romantic about that to me. There’s a beautiful, earthy quality to urban life, to New York life.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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