The Homecoming of Director James Gray

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso

Lemonada Media

Society & Culture, Film Interviews, Tv & Film

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, director James Gray is back! We start by diving into the aftermath of Ad Astra (7:25), returning home to Queens with Armageddon Time (12:00) and the historical context of this new picture (15:18). After watching an early scene from the film (18:33), we discuss what the story reveals about race and class in America (20:35), his family’s personal experiences with those divisions (22:50), and the painful timeliness of Gray’s 8th film (25:39) as anti-semetic rhetoric continues to surge (29:51).

We also wrestle with the economics of moviemaking today (31:37), lessons learned from his directorial debut, Little Odessa (33:22), and how the words of novelist Marcel Proust (36:03) and photographer Susan Sontag (38:14) shaped his most personal effort to date, Armageddon Time.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San by writer and director James Gray.
0:46.0	Gray began his career in 1992 with the film Little Odessa.
0:51.0	He was only 23 back then and part of a wave of young bold American
0:56.1	directors like Stephen Soterberg, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
1:01.6	In the 20 years since his debut he's directed movies like We on the Night,
1:06.8	Two Lovers, The Immigrant, and Ad Astra from 2019. His films are often set in the outer boroughs of New York City, where he came
1:16.5	of age in the 70s and 80s. In his latest picture, Armageddon Time, Gray returns to what he calls the Archie Bunker part of Queens.
1:26.5	To set the stage, the film opens in 1980 at Public School 173, where we find Paul Graf, a red-headed 12-year-old who dreams of one day becoming
1:38.4	an artist.
1:39.7	But as Paul continues to flail in class alongside his best friend, Johnny,
1:45.0	his parents, played by Aunt Hathaway and Jeremy Strong,
1:48.5	decide to transfer him to a prestigious prep school.
1:51.8	Here's a clip from the trailer.
1:55.0	In this institution, you can be anything you want to be.
1:58.2	It won't be because of a handout.
2:00.3	It'll be because you earned your way there.
2:04.0	Someone's bugging it. What is it?
2:06.0	Sometimes kids say bad words about the black kids.
2:09.0	Who's that?
2:10.0	Somebody from my old school.
2:12.0	Did they ever come to your house?
2:14.0	What do you do when that happens?
	...

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