BLOOD AND WATER
On We Own the Night (2007)
Well, in the interest of honesty I must tell you I—after The Yards I really didn’t want to make movies anymore. A large part of me wanted to quit. I had had a brutal time getting the film finished and been in huge fights and as we’ve just discussed, the type of movie that I like is not being made really anymore. So I had gotten very depressed, and I took the film to Cannes, there were boos and so forth and I was very dispirited and I thought, you know, why do this? I may as well try and paint or something like that. And I remember, Marty Scorsese said something, he said “there’s two kinds of directors, one of them just does it, he keeps doing it, just keeps making films, and the other one they quit, he quits.” And so I thought about that for a little while and I thought “well, I don’t want to be that guy that Scorsese talks about (“he quit he quit he quit he quit...”), I had like nightmares (“he quit he quit he’s a quitter”) so I thought maybe I better start trying to make another movie. – James Gray
Six years between Little Odessa and The Yards. Seven years between The Yards and We Own the Night. To anyone watching only casually it may have appeared like Gray was another Terrence Malick type figure who took years and years between projects, unconcerned about churning out movies and only deeming to give us one when he was good and ready to do so. But this was far from the truth. The desire to make film after film was there—but given the type of films he wanted to make, everybody seemed to be doing everything they could to prevent him from being able to make them, directly and indirectly. The system was set up against him: studios preferred creating marketable concepts in-house and then grabbing directors for-hire, whereas Gray wanted to write and direct from his own (less than obviously marketable) scripts. Coming off of The Yards fiasco, there was another, more visible, obstacle in the way of Gray’s continued career as a director: Harvey Weinstein. As part of the deal to get more shooting days on that film, Miramax had made Gray agree to two future films with them (as if either team had come out of the experience ever wanting to work with the other again.) Weinstein used this agreement as a cudgel against Gray’s attempt to find work. Complicating things even more, Gray had broken a Hollywood taboo by speaking out against Weinstein and Miramax’s handling of the film in the press. Gray’s producer friend Paul Webster:
I warned James against it. For a young filmmaker like that, who’s got a career ahead of him, it was an incredibly naïve thing to do. You can never beat those guys in the press, they just understand the media too well. The corridors of power are too dark and murky, and you get lost in them.
According to Peter Biskind, a fan of The Yards and author of a book about Miramax, Miramax threw legal obstacles in Gray’s way when he got an offer to write and direct from Warner Brothers. Gray had to hire a lawyer and was worried that he’d go bankrupt from having to defend himself against Miramax. Per Gray, Weinstein “made it his business to try to get me not to work.”
That offer from Warner Brothers came courtesy of president of production at the time Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who had worked with Mark Wahlberg on David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1998) and was then introduced to Gray through him. Producers Paul Webster and Nick Wechsler, continuing their support of Gray, also triangulated on di Bonaventura to get We Own the Night financed. With di Bonaventura already being a fan of The Yards, he then asked Gray to write him a movie with a car chase. Gray started his research in the spring of 2001 and delivered a script in December of 2002, having written it in about nine months and with the express desire of once again working with both Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. After 2002, the film officially entered development at Warner Brothers (di Bonaventura apparently saw in the script many of the compelling qualities of their hit movie Training Day). But there was still a long way to go and many obstacles to overcome.
Development took about a year. Then, in 2004, they tried to finally get the film made. But We Own the Night was being produced as an explicitly commercial prospect, and the studio didn’t think that Phoenix or Wahlberg had enough drawing power as stars. Details about this period are scarce, but Gray reports that around this time he “did the dance” with a certain actor who then wound up not doing the film. That actor: Brad Pitt. (Pitt, who Gray met after the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, had been circling Gray projects—this, then The Lost City of Z—for over a decade before finally starring in Ad Astra.) Then, in 2005, Warner Brothers fired Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who had been the reason the film was at Warner Brothers to begin with. Development continued there with Jeff Robinov, but he and Gray never really got on the same page. Warner Brothers put the film in turnaround.
The path forward was narrowing. Gray knew that with Warner
Brothers dropping out he’d have to make the film independently. Given this
fact, Gray made the push to make sure both Phoenix and Wahlberg were in the
picture; the two both lent their names as producers in order to attract
confidence from financers, as the profiles of both had now been risen to where
the film would get made, with Walk the Line[1]
(2005) and The Italian Job (2003) respectively. The baton was
eventually passed to 2929 Entertainment, who Wechsler had a relationship with,
the company co-founded by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner and led by production
chief Marc Butan. After much consternation and waiting, and with the desired
actors on board (Wahlberg barely so, as he was juggling a number of projects
including Scorsese’s The Departed as well as the birth of his second child),
We Own the Night finally started shooting in spring of 2006—$21 million
for 48 days. Universal acquired US distribution rights during shooting, most of
the enthusiasm out of that camp courtesy of Jon Gordon, who had worked with
Gray at Miramax before moving studios; but in a déjà vu scenario, Gordon was
fired from Universal just months after their acquisition, leaving the film up
for grabs at a bidding war in Cannes 2006—the same place where, finally, the
film would premiere one year later.
__
Other factors, these more inward, were of course involved in the long wait between Gray’s second and third film. Gray wanted to “fail to the limits of his talent.” Once he had the idea that he wanted to use towards that purpose, as with The Yards, it was nearly impossible for him to give it up. He obsesses over it, dedicating himself to it so fully that to abandon it for something else would seem unthinkable.
The idea’s initial spark came the summer before The Yards was even out in theatres. July 2000. Gray had seen, on the front page of the New York Times, a color photo of a group of policemen ugly crying at a funeral. He cut it out and tacked it on his office bulletin board, and then stopped thinking about it. After his meeting with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, he returned to it to find the beating heart of his eventual cop movie: this wouldn’t be a procedural, or an archetypal movie about crooked cops, but rather a complete exploration of the emotional lives of policemen, above all other elements. It was to complete a loose trilogy, the closing chapter in the first period of Gray’s directorial career. Little Odessa had been about the gangster side of things, The Yards about the local politics side of things, and We Own the Night would be from the perspective of the law, the cops. (All three share the same lowercase font credit style: directed by james gray.) Dismissed by some as a guy churning out pastiche crime thrillers, in reality Gray was slowly creating a three-sided masterwork from the bare bones of the genre exploring the emotional tremors resonating throughout society/cinema’s main life/law conflicts.
From raw feeling to rigorous structure: it was on a day in 2001 that Gray began to discover the kind of story he would graft his emotional idea onto. He had gone to a Shakespeare performance in Central Park, of Measure for Measure, and it was a revelation. At age 31 Gray finally came around to Shakespeare, spurred by the performance into buying the Arden Shakespeare and reading almost all of the plays for the first time. Of all the plays, Gray came circling back to Henry IV parts 1 and 2, becoming obsessed with them and finding in their rigorously plotted storylines the kind of structure which he would replicate for his emotional cop movie. As Gray waited to actually make the movie, the parallels between Shakespeare and the world were becoming more noticeable to him. In Measure for Measure’s tale of abuse of power, a parallel with Bush, 9/11, and the Iraq War. In the Henry IV’s story of a monarchy, a parallel with the Bush family dynasty, W.’s election, and the hierarchical communities of American ‘royalty,’ the mafia, and the police. We Own the Night would, implicitly, be a “timely” movie, as much as one could ever bestow the word on one of Gray’s works of timelessness.[2]
As part of Gray’s research for the film beginning in spring of 2001, he spent about a year and a half on-and-off going on ride-alongs with the NYPD, accumulating ceremonial and anecdotal tidbits which would make their way into the movie. He accompanied them on rides through South Bronx housing projects conducting “verticals”—systematic floor-by-floor sweeps of public housing buildings to “root out crime.” Thrown into the action with minimal protection, Gray attests that once he even had to mace a guy. Hopefully the questionable ethics of such policing tactics is clear, as is the fact that Gray had nothing further from his mind than the idea of making a “pro-cop” movie. (In fact—and this will be discussed more later—it should be noted that the idea of distilling any Gray movie to a pro-this or con-that stance on “hot topics” is antithetical to everything his cinema stands for........). Indeed, the film draws its title from the motto of the NYPD Street Crimes unit, a unit which was disbanded in 2002 over the murder of a Haitian immigrant.
But Gray’s attention to blood-and-grit detail does wonders for the period atmosphere, even if the film is a far cry from the strains of “gritty realism” that dominate many attempts at the genre. (Production design courtesy of Ford Wheeler, who had started as a set decorator on Little Odessa.) It’s less a realism for realism’s sake than an attempt to ground the emotional proceedings in a realistic milieu of high-wire danger. The film is set in 1988 Brooklyn—at the height of the crack epidemic, during the darkest period for murder rates (1987-1992), during a time when the crime rate in NYC was 73% higher than the national average. There’s even a cameo from Ed Koch, New York City mayor until 1989, playing himself. Jordan Mintzer attests that Gray’s office had a shelf filled with books on the NYPD, such as 1990’s Cop Shot: The Murder of Edward Byrne, a detailing of the murder of an NYPD officer which was used as the basis for the Mark Wahlberg assassination attempt in the film. Additional research came via Gray befriending former NYPD officer Edward Conlon, who detailed his time on the force in Blue Blood (2004) and had written under the pseudonym Marcus Laffey for The New Yorker in the late '90s on “Cop Diary” while he was still an active officer. (He has a cameo in the film as the officer guarding Wahlberg’s hospital room when Phoenix comes to see him, and his name is also used as the gunned downed officer given a moment of silence at the opening gathering.)
The film begins with archival material: a series of black-and-white photographs from Leonard Freed’s book Police Work (1980). (Although one of the photographs was actually taken by Gray’s wife [m. 2005], documentarian Alexandra Dickson Gray.) One could be forgiven thinking that Gray was setting out here to make the Ultimate Cop Movie or some such thing, when really it’s just another in a series of films dedicated to being a part of a specific cinematic lineage that just happens to be about cops. Before shooting, Gray set up what amounted to a crash course in this specific lineage for his crew so that everyone would be on the same page. Although Gray says they looked at less movies for We Own the Night than his previous films, he still screened around seven movies for whoever from the crew could make it: The French Connection (1971), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), The Conformist (1970), The Godfather I & II (1972/1974), Raging Bull (1980), and The Leopard (1963)—and for The French Connection and The Godfather: Part II, Gray screened Friedkin and Coppola’s very own personal prints of their movies. Given the opportunity to bathe in a good portion of Gray’s aesthetic/mental/emotional cinephilic heritage, before and after the screenings the crew would then listen to Gray talk about film history and how each film related to what they were doing on the current project. One can point out little tiny things that Gray took from these films—for example, from Panic the realist touch of using playing cards to cut drugs, or an homage to The Conformist via a swinging lamp in the film’s poker scene—but asides from these little pieces of trivia it’s not hard to see the bigger atmospheric or cinematic ideas borrowed consciously or unconsciously from this batch of older movies.
Gray was once again starting out fresh with a new cinematographer at his side. The Yards’ cinematographer Harris Savides was slated to return after they worked well together on that film, but as the film kept getting pushed back the timing eventually went sour as Savides’ work on David Fincher’s Zodiac went long. But Savides, along with Mark Romanek, recommended to Gray cinematographer Joaquin Baca-Asay as a suitable replacement. Baca-Asay was mostly doing commercials at the time (probably the most recognizable title he worked on prior was Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker from 2005), but Gray was impressed by him and his work; while participating at a Sundance lab in Utah, he had seen 2002’s Roger Dodger, shot by Baca-Asay in an “un-showy, very immediate way,” and which he had underexposed to Gray’s liking. They had a similar task on hand in regards to We Own the Night, because since the time The Yards was shot Gray’s preferred film stock (5277) which he’d used on that film had gone out of existence, and he was forced to use something else. In other words: the new kind of film stock was too good. Gray remarks that he and Baca-Asay “drained the colors as we went along, because Kodak stock is so sharp and clean that we had to try to pummel the film into not looking that way. When we did the DI [digital intermediate], we didn’t do any color correction but just ran the film through the process, that way it would lose a generation of quality. A DI is usually done to spruce up a film, but we did one to degrade it.” Whatever they did, the film retains the ochre warmth of The Yards while simultaneously looking different, newer. Add to that the film’s dual color scheme (warm ochres for club scenes, pale blues for cop scenes) and really very little of it reminds me of the look of The Yards at all. (There’s a reason I’ve titled this Act 2, Scene 1 instead of Act 1, Scene 3—maybe it’s just me, but even if it’s part of an unofficial trilogy I sense a jump here in multiple ways.) Upon meeting him, Baca-Asay had shown Gray some of the artwork of one Vincent Desiderio, an American contemporary realist painter. A quick glance at his work shows parallels in both styles present in We Own the Night, the warm amber glow along with the hazy soft blue.
Following from this, the importance of duality, of dichotomy, in
both the film and what the film is about, jumps out at us. Club life versus cop
life, crime versus the law, friends versus family. And then you have the film
itself, which is its own stylistic dichotomy, or paradox: it’s Cassavetes
acting inside Visconti frames, a vicious piece of work inside an elegant shell,
a movie where form and content are constantly fighting for supremacy as to
which one is actually making it all work. It’s a character piece fighting to be
an action film, a mythic drama trying to be a genre movie. The
contradictions—especially when they melt away into pure movie momentum—are
thrilling. It makes sense, then, that the ending is pure dialectics (—we’ll get
there.)
__
In many ways We Own the Night exists as a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, and as such it exists as a very particular time capsule of their talents nearly a decade removed from their magnificent pre-fame turns in The Yards. In that film they played brothers only figuratively, but here it’s literally; there’s even another messy fight scene between the two, but this one is far from the youthful chaos of The Yards’ cosmic brawl tumbling out into the streets. Here, it’s weightier, more banal, over quicker, as much a battle of verbal insults as physical attacks. Wahlberg has bulked up into his now recognizably adult frame. Phoenix, thin and sharp in The Yards, has put on weight, leaning on the far side of two states of physical being that he will switch in and out of for performances for the rest of his career. The film is a testament to how far each of them had come, Gray included. All in their twenties when making The Yards, all in their thirties when making We Own the Night. Their presence in the film is half of its reason for existing, and one senses that it meant the world to Gray to have both actors return. Wahlberg, who was busy making a number of other films when the time finally came for shooting, reports that Gray literally begged Wahlberg to do the movie with tears in his eyes.
Wahlberg was just barely able to squeeze in We Own the Night on his schedule, with the assurance that he’d be able to film all his scenes in a two week period; on top of juggling other roles, his partner was in the midst of expecting their second child, so he had a private jet ready in case she gave birth before shooting was up. It’s curious to watch him in We Own the Night now, because while he no longer has the youthful looks he had in The Yards, it’s also the only adult performance of his that registers anywhere near the same emotional wavelength as his performance in that film. One no longer really expects a performance of that type out of him, sadly. Many filmmakers have coaxed great performances out of him, or at least have made great use of his presence—Scorsese with The Departed (2006), M. Night Shyamalan with The Happening (2008), Michael Bay with Pain & Gain (2013), to name a few—but all those performances have specific energies miles removed from his work with Gray, who at the end of the day may go down in history as the only filmmaker to really understand that Wahlberg had something deeply, painfully emotional within him as an actor.
But Wahlberg’s part here is a supporting turn; the show is all Joaquin Phoenix’s, who turns in a performance befitting what Gray has called a “ferocious shoot.” For Gray, he’s an actor the heir of Montgomery Clift and Al Pacino, someone whose internal conflict can tear apart the screen with the slightest piece of movement or non-movement. This is what Gray loves in an actor—the old “to be or not to be,” personified—and it’s why there honestly may not be another actor/director pairing as great as Phoenix and Gray’s four film run in the history of cinema. But their second collaboration was a ways different from their first: in the time since Phoenix’s passionate and chaotic performance in The Yards, he had perfected his craft as an actor. For Gray, lover of actors, this dictated a switch in style; after abandoning elaborate long-take master shots on The Yards to accommodate his younger actors, he could now return to the technique given the new maturity of his actors, Phoenix in particular, on We Own the Night. Formal elegance is present in both films, but here it registers with a slightly more mature bent; as it is, one could argue that nearly the entire film could be contained in a supercut of all the slow zooms in on Joaquin Phoenix’s face. And yet none of this elegance and craft, from Gray or Phoenix, can reduce the fiery intensity of Phoenix’s presence in the movie, in what is a truly brutal performance. Gray attests that Phoenix really got hit, really inhaled charcoal, and even vomited filming the scene of Robert Duvall’s death, so tapped into the role he was. One might balk at the method acting clichés of such an approach, but such was Phoenix’s honest personal approach to the material. During the shoot, Phoenix and Gray would spend the first two hours of every day in the trailer talking over the emotional beats of the film. And it shows.
The whole cast was game, everyone lifting everyone else to their best work. Robert Duvall, the second Godfather veteran to appear in a Gray film, is a perfect fit (Gray remarks that the Mark Wahlberg/Robert Duvall and Joaquin Phoenix/Robert Duvall relationships mirrored that of their characters in the film), even if Gray had originally wanted to cast James Caan again—but the studio didn’t think he was a big enough name. (Anthony Hopkins was also wanted at one point, but he wasn’t available. Ditto Gene Hackman, but he wanted too much money. Also an unnamed “big name actor” who had a good table read, but “it didn’t work out from day one.”) Not even Duvall was a lock; he had loved the script and agreed to do it (although he really wanted to play the Russian club owner, here played by Moni Moshonov, an Israeli actor Gray had discovered in the film Late Marriage [2001]), but he dropped out as a Western miniseries he was producing, starring in, and then editing (Walter Hill’s Broken Trail) went over schedule. The editing went faster than expected and Gray begged him to come back on board, which he finally did after Gray was able to postpone the filming of his scenes.
The other star of the film is Eva Mendes, whose role is quietly
the heart of the movie, fading away from Phoenix in parallel to his coming
closer to his family. Gray had discovered her serendipitously: sitting in a
hotel room watching TV, he saw her appear on an interview show. He wanted to
meet her. She was at first reluctant to take on the role, and stayed that way
for around a year’s time; but, as is becoming a common theme with the casting
of this picture, Gray continuously begged her to do it and she finally gave in.
The partnership panned out, and Mendes went all in on the picture. Her and Gray
talked about Cassavetes a lot, and he even had a particular piece of music he
would play on set just for her—Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Her presence in
the film, physically and emotionally, continues a tradition of strong female
supporting performances in Gray films, a point which many dissenters use to
shallowly criticize Gray’s films; yet these performances (Moira Kelly, Charlize
Theron, Eva Mendes) are bigger than their screen time may suggest, and quietly
exist at the center of Gray’s critique of masculinity.[3]
__
A brief moment to recognize the film’s score, done by legendary
Polish musician Wojciech Kilar, classical musician—of Exodus fame, a
piece of music I most associate with Malick’s Knight of Cups (which was
also used in one of the trailers for Gray’s The Immigrant)—and film
composer, who had scored dozens of Polish films, a few Polanski movies, and
Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Gray had discovered him via Exodus
while listening to a classical music radio station, and decided he wanted
to work with one of the last classically trained composers on We Own the Night’s
score. Kilar, around 80 years old at the time, didn’t play Gray bits of the
score as he worked; he did it all, and then Gray traveled to Poland to hear it
and record it. What he accomplished was a quiet thing of beauty, the film’s
theme a variation on Exodus, a darker
version of the incessant harp melody of that piece. (Christopher Spelman, who
we will finally see work with Gray in an official capacity on the next film, is
here credited as a “musical consultant.”)
__
Many will deem such a style classical, but I find it to be the opposite. For, modernity in cinema is less about inventing something new—an idea which has obsessed Hollywood for the last few decades—than about returning to the past to build upon cinema’s foundations. The films of James Gray, both in their thought and expression, are classic works which reinvent our conception of classicism. They are, therefore, entirely modern. – Jean Douchet
It takes more guts and more talent to make a classical film than a modern one. – Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970 (as quoted by Gray—I haven’t yet been able to verify that this was ever actually said by Melville, but it sounds like something he would, so...)
I’ve always thought of the films I’m
trying to make as things that can retain their relevance—something completely
divorced from what’s in fashion. I’m much more interested in the content than
in the form of the film—and I’m certainly not negating form when I say that!
What I mean is, there seems to be a belief prevalent today that form is it,
form is everything. The idea of “content” is almost hackneyed and pedestrian in
the eyes of some. When making a film, form is in your face every day: Where do
I put the camera? Do I move it? Where will I cut? How will I cut? How’s the
pace? And so on. Content is harder: it’s more cumulative, demands greater
contemplation. It demands to be merged with, and emphasized by, the form. That
synthesis is really your craft. A sense of story, politics, history,
character—that’s what I view as “content.” That’s harder than moving the camera
or jump-cutting your way to happiness. – James Gray
“I’m more interested in the content than in the form”—wait, hold up! Card-carrying post-Cahierist auteurists might get their feelings hurt. It’s OK: the form vs. content debate is really less of a debate than a failure to see that everything both does and does not matter at any given time. Form can be content just as content can be form. “Good” form can make up for “bad” content just as “good” content can make up for “bad” form. Deciding on your critical tactic is really just a matter of recognizing the kind of filmmaker you have on hand. With James Gray, you’ve of course got incredible form, but a closer look leads to a renewed appreciation for the difficulty of constructing a classical film narrative: story, structure, plot, character—that is, charting an emotional arc that the form can then carry to realization with a smoothness that belies the difficult task of creating a clean narrative.[4] For Gray, as in the ancient myths, having your story be “predictable” isn’t a pejorative—you’re not supposed to not know where it’s going. One didn’t attend a Shakespeare play to experience the plot twists. In fact, Gray explicitly stated that he wanted his movie to be “the antithesis of the film of twists and turns.” Gray set out not to make a cop movie, but a myth, an anti-CSI/Law and Order type of moving image art that dealt in archetypes from thousands of years of history—from the story of Joseph from Genesis[5], from the Aeneid, from Shakespeare’s Henriad.
So for Gray, the most important part of making a movie may in fact be the writing of it (which makes sense, given his absolute reluctance to date of filming other people’s scripts.) His scriptwriting is not done in a fit of poetic reverie, but is rather something of a scientific process—for Gray, “screenwriting is not an art, it’s a craft.” He’s spoken of how he does it: he begins, alone or with his co-writer, by filling out index cards with ideas for scenes, making these cards as detailed as possible and then pinning them up on bulletin boards around his office. Then, after more thinking and/or discussion and looking for common threads, work begins on a treatment, again as detailed as possible. Next, an outline is made—a “step outline,” as it’s known in screenwriting terms—and that outline grows more and more elaborate as more detail is added, eventually ending up at around the 50 page mark. By the time the actual writing of the script comes around, as it then does, it more or less writes itself. For Gray, usually, the outlining takes months whereas the writing takes mere weeks.
That Gray has had the word “classical” thrown at him time and time again makes sense, but beyond the fact that his film language skews towards more “traditional” forms of decoupage, it might really come down to the fact that, more than most, Gray is simply concerned with telling a story (something that has increasingly been seen, by a certain subset of cinephiles, as if not the antithesis of cinema then one of the less important aspects—to even mention “storytelling” is to risk being lumped in with the pejoratives of 21st century prestige television.) Gray has said as much:
And to do it in a format that is considered classical—which I think is bullshit; it just means the story functions. Literally. I mean, sometimes I get the sense these other filmmakers are not telling stories not because they don’t want to but because they can’t do it. It’s all about craft. It’s not a measure of genius or artistry; it’s craft, learning how to tell a story.
If the craft of storytelling is at the heart of Gray’s cinema, then it becomes interesting to see just how certain sequences, especially ones ostensibly concerned primarily with form or the thrills of entertainment, function as part of a grander scheme dedicated, above all else, to story. One can’t read a piece on We Own the Night without mention of the rain-slicked car chase sequence, but as amazing as that set piece is, it ironically exists mainly for two reasons that are less exciting than the action itself: first, as a story element, and second, as a commercial necessity.
For We Own the Night really only exists because of its car chase. The project’s inception with Warner Brother’s Lorenzo di Bonaventura was explicitly predicated on Gray’s inclusion of a car chase, and Gray was happy to oblige if that’s what it took for him to make the film he really wanted to make. In preparation, Gray watched every film with a car chase that he could get his hands on—"everything from Keystone Cops to Bad Boys II,” as he put it—to get a feel for what had and had not been done. He wanted to do something unique, and inspiration struck one day as he was driving to the WB studios along the 101: a terrible rainstorm struck, covering Gray’s windshield and blinding him for a short time; when the rain was wiped off, he was greeted by the sight of a truck ahead of him starting to fishtail. Gray was able to maneuver around it, but the experience scared him for two main reasons: the torrential, visibility-ruining rain, and the terror of his subjective point of view from within the car. Around the same time, Gray had seen Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away (2000), and was also inspired by Zemeckis’s decision to film the plane crash purely from Tom Hanks’s subjective viewpoint, never cutting to a shot of the plane going into the water. So with the conceptual hook of rain and a subjective point of view, Gray set out to make his own car chase sequence.
Ironically, Gray has said that shooting the sequence was the least interesting part of the production for him, as everything is pre-planned to such a degree that it’s just a matter of getting it on film. (William Friedkin, who Gray consulted beforehand, told him that doing the car chase in The French Connection was the most boring thing ever; as it is, We Own the Night borrows that film’s decision to keep the soundtrack music-less for the duration of the chase.) Given the importance of the weather element to Gray’s conception of the sequence, he was forced to innovate even more once finding out that no sane stuntman would be willing to do the maneuvers necessary on actually rain-slicked streets. It would have to be done digitally in post-production, a first for Gray who had only ever used digital tricks in post-production on very small details before. He ended up working with the L.A. effects house Digital Domain, who were recommended to Gray by Mark Romanek and David Fincher, who persuaded the studio to work with Gray (Fincher was working with them around the same time on the effects for his Zodiac.) To get the level of desired detail on the physics of the rain, Gray referenced things as diverse as the rain scenes in John Frankenheimer’s racing movie Grand Prix (1966) to a YouTube clip he found of a guy driving in the rain, which he then gave to Digital Domain as a reference point. Gray says that he worked with one of the approximately four people in the world who were capable of doing the 3D water stuff, a guy who had also worked on The Perfect Storm (2000) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004).
All of these little details are more or less lost to the immediate viewer experience, however, one which is traumatizingly subjective at the same time as it’s overwhelmingly mythic. The rain is like weather out of an Akira Kurosawa film, representative of forces outside of one’s control; in other words, it’s less an action scene than a fate scene, where Joaquin Phoenix is left lacking any control, completely at the mercy of the moment as it unfolds in front of him amidst nature’s fateful terror. It’s an action scene of impotence, in that sense like something out of De Palma, a scene where, according to Jean Douchet, Gray is “constantly revealing the impossibility of making an ‘action’ film (in the American sense of the term).... Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, James Gray gives us a car chase where there’s no real chase, because in his world such a chase simply cannot happen.”
Even if the inclusion of a car chase is partly perfunctory (in commercial conception if not at all in execution), it still isn’t something that can be seen as necessarily foreign to Gray’s cinema. In fact, Gray is fond of occasionally quoting François Truffaut’s dictum that cinema is “part truth, part spectacle,” and takes that to mean—as a filmmaker who makes up a good portion of what could be termed the “middle” of American commercial cinema—that it’s no crime for the bitter pill of truth to be coated in a little bit of sugar for the average moviegoer. That Gray’s first three movies all partake in one aspect or another of genre cinema is not just a small concession to the reality of what movies get shown in mainstream movie theatres, but also a recognition that the history of great movies—movies of great truths, especially ones that have connected with mass audiences—is full of the influence of genre cinema. (Gray, who has always been remaking The Godfather in one way or another, could more truly be seen as trying not to replicate the movie but rather the movie’s specific kind of success: a genre film with grand emotional and thematic resonances that a mass, specifically American, audience would latch onto in great number and for many generations.) We Own the Night contains three action sequences placed with purpose at three specific junctures of the film: the botched surveillance/drug raid, the car chase, and the final shootout/reeds manhunt, dotted throughout the movie not just for structural or emotional purposes, but also for the simple reason of strategically keeping the audience’s attention, keeping their pulse elevated, or as Gray puts it, “wrenching them out of their complacency.”
This also plays into the idea, very relevant in Gray, particularly in his first three movies, of genre as a kind of cinematic trojan horse.
To me, trying to reinvent the genre will inevitably lead to a kind of a self-consciousness, so the way we approach genre is simply to use it as a weapon, as a way to make a certain Trojan horse. The story is the genre and inside the story is what you want to say on a personal level, so I don't really think of that stuff consciously while writing a script or making the film. I just try to stay as honest as I can in the story, if that makes sense.
Connected to his idea is the idea, taken from classical Hollywood, of an A story and a B story, the idea that there is a surface story to the movie while there is also a more buried story, a secret subversive thread that arises to seemingly contradict, or at least question, what is ostensibly being implied by the surface story. Speaking of those classic Hollywood movies, Gray speaks of films “that exist on two planes.” It’s almost too obvious to mention how We Own the Night operates on these two planes, and to Gray’s credit I would argue that there are many more planes of meaning and/or ambiguity involved than just two, but it’s clear how the surface story of Phoenix becoming a cop (ostensibly a good thing, societally speaking) is subverted by the B-story, the buried story, of the sadness of Phoenix having the life and spark drained out of him by the very same occurrence.
The A/B dichotomy is just another example of the cultural dialectics at play all over the film, such as was mentioned before re: the film’s ability to be both a genre-fulfilling cop movie at the same time as a more mythic text that engages in ideas ostensibly far removed from the gritty goings-on of the average genre film. Fascinatingly, Gray mentions that a reference point, beyond his mid-century European touchstones like Visconti, was Japanese films of the 1950s—films that “were also focused on how history and fate affect destiny.” But We Own the Night becomes a particularly fascinating object in how it draws atmospherically and thematically from the sea of European or Japanese arthouse titles while also, at the same time, being a full throttle genre movie, a visceral policier that hits genre beats while remaining above all focused on what Gray calls “the idea of the flow of history as an unstoppable force.” It’s an idea that Gray shares with/steals from Shakespeare, whose Henry IV duology provided Gray “the mythic structure [he] could hang the story on.”
My first intention was to make a film out of an archetypal, mythical story, some would say, out of clichés. I drew from the Bible, hence the name Joseph for the character of Mark Wahlberg, I drew from Shakespeare's Henry IV for dynastic father-son stories and relationships between brothers, etc. I borrowed from a large body of classical literary sources to come up with a film that I wanted to be the antithesis of the film of twists and turns. I wanted to rely on simplicity, linearity, narrative clarity, in order to achieve the mythological, operational dimension that I wanted. I longed for a film with two reading levels. A surface story: a man wants to avenge his brother and father attacked by the mafia, etc. And then a more buried, deeper level: the story of a man who achieves a certain social and filial redemption but in exchange for renouncing his soul, what makes up his identity. He renounces himself, he loses everything, to be what his father wanted: it's a very sad, tragic story.
The parallels are fairly obvious: Pheonix is Prince Hal, the one
not preferred by King Duvall relative to the “mediocre great warrior” Wahlberg
as Hotspur, and as Hal ascends to the family legacy as king he leaves behind
his buddy Falstaff, here played by Danny Hoch as “Jumbo”. Gray’s intention with
the structure of the film, as with all of his films, is to let the film subtly
drift into a more mythic register as it makes its way to its end point, even to
the point of quietly abandoning realism: as Joaquin Phoenix enters the reeds of
Floyd Bennet Field in hunter’s pursuit of Vadim, unglamorously kills him, and
re-emerges from the reeds with billowing smoke and brewing storms (inspired,
says Gray, by Kurosawa’s Stray Dog [1949], Ran [1985], and
Mikhail Kalatazov’s Soy Cuba [1964]), the filmic elements have warped
any adherence to strict realism into a meditative and heightened atmosphere—as
it comes to a close, just before the important coda, the film briefly floats
above its own realist surface.
__
Up to this point we’ve seen that James Gray films tend to be pretty unabashedly autobiographical. No secret there. But as we continue on in our chronological look at the Gray filmography, it will hopefully become clear, and Gray himself has said this, that the works become less and less directly autobiographical and more and more indirectly autobiographical (i.e., personal) as time goes on (with the recent premiere of Gray’s newest, Armageddon Time, a shift in this generality appears to be upon us, which we will have to address down the road...). It’s easy to see how Gray’s first two movies trafficked in pretty explicit autobiographical territory—his mother’s death from brain cancer in Little Odessa, his father’s legal troubles in The Yards. But for the longest time I had trouble discerning in We Own the Night that autobiographical hook on which to hang a certain personal/familial emotionality which I had become accustomed to with Gray. But the answer was somewhat hiding in plain sight: of Gray’s immediate family, containing him and three other members, he had already made a film “about” his mother, a film “about” his father—for his third film, the third member: his brother.
Very little is known about Gray’s older brother, Edward; one of the few times Gray mentions him, he says that he was “sort of a ne’er-do-well,” then saying that funnily enough he “is totally reformed and lives the life of 2.2 kids and a dog named Spot.” As of 2019, he worked as a physician in Pennsylvania. But of all of Gray’s films, We Own the Night is secretly the film that is most about his relationship with his brother. And We Own the Night is also the last film of a certain era in Gray’s life, as it was conceived before he got married and became a father. Before those people entered his life, as he puts it,
...you’re trying to reach out to the most important personal connections—that’s my brother, my father, and then my mother is third on that chain, not because I didn’t care about her but she died a long time ago. So then you start to experiment with how you can express the strangeness within your own family dynamic. In the films, I talk a lot about my relationship with my brother, my father, my mother who’s dead or dying… It’s all the same dynamic in my own family. It’s my way of putting myself into the films as much as I can so it has relevance and emotional truth.
Without too much speculation, one can assume that the Phoenix-Wahlberg-Duvall relationship triangle does in some respects mirror that of Gray and his brother and his father. Gray, the wannabe filmmaker who was never particularly encouraged along those lines in terms of a career (recall that his father wanted him to go into computers, a more stable career field), something of an outsider who resisted the pressure to conform to society’s, and his father’s, ideas for what he should be doing for a living; Gray’s brother, on the other hand, seemingly more “normal” and possessing a career held higher in society’s esteem (and one may assume the father’s as well). With a little effort and emotional projection, one can read the following words from Gray not just as a statement of thematic intent, but as a not-so-hidden claim that We Own the Night is a veritably autobiographical film about Gray’s life as a director of movies:
I was trying to make a film about the pressures of conforming. And I was trying to make a film which was about a man who would be seen as doing the right thing, by the people around him, and even by society, but that would not be the right thing for him and would demand terrible emotional sacrifice from him. Because sometimes what people say is the right thing to do, is not the right thing to do for you.
It's hardly a stretch to see how this could be made to be about Gray’s reluctance to accept Hollywood offers, and the scorn he has received for doing so, which he has done so as not to have to make a “terrible emotional sacrifice”—so We Own the Night is secretly about his fear of conforming to commercial pressures and becoming an artistic hack.
I won't take the fraternal autobiographical readings too far here, but thinking of them myself has provided a fair amount of edification in thinking about the film and it’s place in Gray’s emotional life, so it’s worth mentioning. (And this isn’t the only family connection the film utilizes—Gray has relatives who are cops, and also two of his family members make cameo appearances in the film: his father, with his back to the camera pointing at Wahlberg during the coming home party, and his newborn son, seen swaddled in a yellow blanket at the opening cop gathering.) Once again we’re in a Russian immigrant milieu, where the characters’ identities are rooted in history, both cultural and familial, and the consequences are unavoidable; it’s significant that Phoenix’s attempted escape from this family identity is accompanied by a name change: from Grusinsky to his mother’s maiden name Green, representing a conflict between Old and New world, between unchangeable heritage and adopted identity. As Phoenix remarks to Duvall, “people can pronounce it,” and it’s also easier to get along with without the baggage, perhaps a hint at the way immigrants often changed/abbreviated their surnames to remove any ethnic baggage the name may carry. (It may also be interesting to note the similarities between the names in the film and Gray’s own; Green, a mono-syllabic color word beginning with “Gr”, and Gray; Grusinsky, and the name that Gray’s grandfather arrived at Ellis Island with, Greisenstein or Greyzerstein.)
The relationship between brothers in We Own the Night is its own kind of variation on the fraternal relationship in Little Odessa, even while feeling quite a ways removed from the brooding, unspoken bond of those two. (There, when Edward Furlong tells Tim Roth that he loves him, there’s no like response; here, when Wahlberg tells Phoenix the same, it’s reciprocated out loud.) It’s a different time: more than a decade had passed since Gray made that film, and in the meantime both him and his characters grew up. If Gray’s first two films were made by/about children (or at least not-yet-adults), then We Own the Night is the first truly adult film of Gray’s and his cast; there’s been a ton of maturing all around.[6] There’s a conviviality to We Own the Night that wasn’t quite there before, at least in the early sections of the film. Funnily, I find these early sections one of if not the weakest stretch of Gray’s filmography, simply because for whatever reason it doesn’t feel like a natural fit for Gray to attempt to portray a character that is ostensibly happy and fulfilled in his life. I won’t linger on this point because I’m far from attempting to make any kind of concrete criticism, but it’s worth noting, if only for my own sake, that this stretch is partly why I’ve never quite held We Own the Night in the same esteem as the works surrounding it (although I’ve always still adored it—just a bit less.) Although structurally, these scenes are necessary—the thing I find most fascinating about the film is how it’s really just one long disintegration, a descent from euphoric passion into the shadowland of haunted banality. I actually maybe think that the movie, in its depiction of this descent, is even more dialectical than even Gray intended. Part of why the section depicting Phoenix’s happiness falls slightly flat for me is that I don’t think he’s entirely fulfilled here—complete, or near complete, detachment from the family unit will always be a thorn of sadness, however large or small, for anybody who experiences it. And the final shot, Phoenix a ghostly shell of himself, as tragic as it reads and is, is not entirely without good: the lines between the two brothers—“I love you very much.”; “I love you too.”—have always rung true for me (especially coming after the fade-out on their embrace at the end of the previous scene), that however much sadness has entered Phoenix’s life because of the loss of his girlfriend[7] the rehabilitation of the fraternal relationship has been a good—if not unambiguously so, a good nonetheless.
But this is dialectics, nuance, complexity, paradox, contradiction—all things so often absent from the American cinema, but found in We Own the Night, especially its ending, in spades and spades. It’s not black-and-white that Phoenix goes from a good life to a bad one. Family is still important, and to go back to Gray’s line—that it has the capacity for both destruction and great nurturing—we see that while his re-entombing inside the family is a death knell to Phoenix’s life of fun and partying and unfiltered romantic love (which is a true sadness—just look at the way Phoenix deflates upon realizing he has mistaken someone else for Amada in the crowd), it’s also a reigniting of meaningful familial bonds (which are true ones—just look at the way Phoenix reacts to both his brother’s near-death and his father’s death). There is little in Gray that is unambiguous, where complexity doesn’t reign, so this makes sense—it’s a movie that lives on nuance, so of course strong readings in favor of one way over the other are going to be lacking. The ending is pure knottedness, the contradiction, the paradox, revealed on screen and never resolved. Family is gravity, or say family is just another word for fate. (If the take-away nugget of the first two films was that class is another word for fate, here, and the next film too, you could slot in family). You can’t say that Phoenix leaning against Wahlberg in his car after the final shootout, or the exchanged “I love you”s at the very end, aren’t true expressions of deep brotherly love. That they also represent, in their presence, the absence of something also good, is just one little part of what is really a gigantic web of pure dialectics, where any attempt at laying out all the threads in neat little rows is impossible and one must simply live with the irreducibly complex and specifically cinematic articulation of it. The “Amen” that echoes throughout the graduation hall at the end of the fraternal exchange serves to make the entire preceding film into a kind of prayer, gathering all of the film’s yells and whispers towards the confusion and sadness at all the emotional contradictions in the world and leaving them in the viewers lap unresolved.
This irreducible complexity is the stuff of movies and it’s the stuff of life, so any attempt to force an in-line political reading is necessarily going to fall short of what’s actually on screen. “James Gray really said ACAB” or some such reaction will never do justice to the movie, while at the same time it’s not 100% wrong—We Own the Night is very aware of the abuse of power that police are systematically inclined towards, that their existence is far from an unambiguous societal good. Phoenix, beating up Jumbo towards the end of the film: “You know I’m with the police now, and I can do anything to you.” The whole film undercuts the societal assumption that being a cop is a good thing: just look at Phoenix’s face at the end of the film, now officially a part of the NYPD, following in his father and brother’s footsteps: he’s a ghost of himself, all life drained from his face, girlfriend gone, the implication being that he’s looking forward to a mostly sad and lonely career. (As Robert Alpert writes, “if the tragic ending of Little Odessa is that Joshua rejects his father, the tragedy of We Own the Night is that Joaquin Phoenix becomes his father.”) But the film has more on its mind than some didactic political point, and lives its contradictions to the point of unfashionability: critiqued though they be, the police characters are still treated with the total filmic sympathy that Gray accords to anyone that makes it into his frames, human beings before they are cops. The film isn’t “pro-cop,” but what it does do is validate the emotions of the cops—simply because they’re human, and all human emotions are valid because they are real. This is Gray’s modus operandi: embracing all human emotion, no matter the source or the cause, and validating it via the camera. And this is really just another way of saying that he loves his characters (and not the shallow kind of love; he doesn’t “like” his characters, he loves them, flaws and all, because they are human, and this is the kind of love that humans are to be shown, deserving or not.) We Own the Night, so entrenched in the world of the police, is really something of a cultural study of their ways and mores, showing just how specific and insular their world is; maybe the most significant shot in the film in this regard is of two young black boys on their porch observing, through the cemetery bars, the pomp and circumstance of Robert Duvall’s all-stops-out police funeral, a glimpse of the world outside the film that conjures, briefly, the vast and very different worlds that exist outside the purview of these uniformed men and their particular emotional lives, which they see only dimly if they see at all.
But the real movie is in the faces, all the faces, in the bodies collapsing, in the looks, the glances, the whispers, the fights, in all these moments where the emotions are subtly beamed straight at the viewer, where you truly get caught up in the movie’s momentum towards its final destination and are lost in fate’s inexorable pull as embodied in Gray’s cinematic form. Given the sheer amount of things the ending of We Own the Night embodies, it’s one of the greatest endings in the history of cinema—and I wouldn’t even put it in the top three endings of Gray’s filmography. We’ll get there in the next three entries in this series; but this is a good taking off point. Looking back, We Own the Night feels very much like a transitional work: the cap to an unofficial trilogy with Gray’s first two films, the first of an unofficial duo of films with Two Lovers working with the same cinematographer and made back-to-back, the quickest Gray has ever made two films to date. It feels like his most mature film up to that point, and he will only mature more over the next decade plus. So we say goodbye to one era and hello to another; and not just us, but Gray too. The dedicated viewer may have noticed that at the end of every one of his films, at the very end of the credits, Gray has the credits music fade away and replaces it with ambient sounds—on Little Odessa it was the sounds of wintry Brighton Beach, on The Yards the sound of a train, and here the sounds of a prison—that goes on for two minutes. I’ll let Gray have the last word on it:
I like to make sure the audience is
left, ultimately, with the sound that first made me feel the mood of the piece....
It’s my own personal way of signing off with this stage of my life. This is
where I was at this part of my life and this was the mood I was trying to
impart to you and it’s coming full circle. That sounds really pretentious, but
it’s the truth.
__
While Gray continued to fall short with mainstream American
critics, the French, once again, had his back: We Own the Night was
nominated for Best Foreign Film at the César Awards (as was Two Lovers the year after), a
more visible sign of what year-after-year had been a consistent cultural and
critical support, something Gray almost totally lacked in his home country. (Why?
Gray suggests that in a country that says you can do anything—pull yourself up
by your bootstraps, etc.—Gray says that’s not true.) Gray partly chalks it up
to a simple matter of distribution: his films get better distribution in
Europe, and as a result he has a greater following over there. (As far as I can
tell, Gray is also very much loved in Brazil—maybe more than anywhere else.) The
French latched onto him right out of the gate: Little Odessa even
appears on the cover of Positif’s January 1995 issue. (A film which apparently
remains something of a cult classic there: in 2014, a 50-minute documentary on
the film was included in ARTE’s Il était une fois... series.)[8]
Both The Yards and We Own the Night appeared on Positif’s year-end top ten lists, as well as their best of the decade list for the 2000s: The Yards tied for 24th, We Own the Night tied for fifth. On Cahier’s best of 2008 list, Two Lovers placed fifth. The release of every Gray film is accompanied by an outpouring of intelligent critical writing in France, both in print and online. More than a few pieces of information throughout this project I encountered on French websites, in interviews with Gray or other articles, that were nowhere to be found in similar English pieces. In general, the amount of critical intelligence directed at Gray and his work in French overwhelms—really, overwhelms—the amount on show in America. To say nothing of UK critics, which have been Gray’s worst critical enemy, to the point that Gray lashed out specifically at Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw’s blatantly inaccurate review of The Immigrant. It’s the strength of the British contingent at Cannes, Gray suggests, that has caused many of his films to be booed there. Four—as of a few months ago now, five—of Gray’s films have premiered at Cannes, often to mixed or hostile reactions. He has never won any awards there. Even though it’s a French festival, and they keep inviting him back with loving intentions, the international nature of the festival, as well as its odd environment and tradition of vocalized reactions, has led to the occasional boo at Cannes for Gray’s films. Representative of many English critics’ traditional impatience with Gray’s films at Cannes, at Two Lovers’ premiere in 2008 it was reported that Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum's reaction upon a slight delay was to scream “I’m not going to wait an hour for fucking James Gray!”
Gray once confessed that he dreaded going to Cannes with a new film of his: “Screening my films in Cannes feels like going to a funeral. As if someone has just been diagnosed with cancer. It’s like death.” Even when attending as a spectator and jury member in 2009, Gray was later greeted by untruthful articles claiming that he and Jury President Isabelle Huppert hadn’t gotten along. (The rumor was that Huppert wanted to award the Palme d’or to Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, and that it’s eventual winner, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, was a compromise.) Gray later said that the whole thing was invented after he told a joke to a journalist, and that they had in fact gotten along well.
Gray’s films have already been honored in multiple retrospectives at the Cinémathèque Française, three times throughout the decade of the 2010s by my count, most recently in October of 2019. His first four films were also the subject of homage at the second Festival international du film policier du Beaune in April of 2010. It was around this time, and especially with the release of The Immigrant in 2014, that the critical tide began to shift and Gray finally began to be appreciated in America. But while the second half of his career has been spent with a least a decent amount of critical goodwill stateside, it’s almost a case of too little too late: the first decade or two of Gray’s career had been a constant struggle for local appreciation. The fact that an American filmmaker is more beloved in France can often be flouted as a joke, but I think it’s difficult to realize just what it can mean for people to respond to your work in a foreign country when your own has all but shut you out. It must be incredibly touching. This can be seen in a moment (1:07:15) at the end of a masterclass interview at the Forum des images in Paris in 2008; Gray takes a moment to thank them, and then begins to choke up:
I do want to say—this sounds so phony
but it’s true: you cannot understand what a total honor this is, and how moving
it has been for me to be here this week, and your city is so great and it’s
been—I’m about to cry—it’s been an amazing experience for me because sometimes
you make these films and you feel like you’re in a black hole and you don’t get
a response really, and even to hear people hate it it’s an amazing thing...
[1] A film which, amazingly, was partly spurred
into existence by Gray himself. This quote comes from Gray: “When Johnny Cash
told me he could quote 'that Phoenix fella' at will, I decided to put the two
of them together for dinner. What followed was, of course, a meal for the
ages.” Gray, a friend of director James Mangold (both had films at Sundance in
1995), was even shown an early cut of the film. The film went on to $140
million and made Phoenix bankable.
[2] For what it’s worth, I had never spent a
single second pondering such parallels in my time watching and thinking about
the film until I read Gray’s thoughts on the matter. Veteran cinephiles who saw
the film in theatres contemporaneously with the Bush presidency would perhaps
have more to offer in that realm.
[3] An interesting tidbit, something oddly
present in a number of Gray’s films, is what I call the “hallway shot,” where a
female is shot head-on walking down a hallway, often in slow motion. Seen in Two
Lovers on Paltrow’s final approach to Phoenix, and in Ad Astra as
Ruth Negga walks the corridors of Mars, here in We Own the Night Mendes
joins a party with slow motion and a cigarette—as one critic has said, “we tell
ourselves that Wong Kar-wai is not so far....”
[4] Which isn’t to say films with “bumpy”
narratives or less than clean arcs can’t be as good or better. Take this as a
lesson in how to shift critical focus towards the goal of edification:
depending on the film in question, simply follow the path of most edification:
in this beautiful world, given the situation, saying that a film has a clean
narrative or a bumpy one can both be good, edifying things.
[5] Gray reports that he tried to read Thomas
Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers (1933) for the film but wasn’t able to
finish the book; which is somewhat ironic, given that Mann and that work in
particular was a great favorite of Gray’s beloved Visconti.
[6] I can’t find a better place to put this
observation so I’m just dumping it here: if The Yards is Gray’s On
the Waterfront (1954), this is his East of Eden (1955).
[7] Named
Amada, which is Portuguese for “beloved”; it also happens to be what Eva Mendes
and Ryan Gosling named their second daughter.
[8] It’s made an impression, to say the least. Legendary French actress Sandrine Bonnaire has even expressed a desire to work with Gray based off of it:
Q: Which foreign directors would you like to work with?
A: Ken Loach, for his realism à la Pialat. And James Gray, because
Little Odessa gave me an incredible
energy. I managed to find his address, but I dare not write to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment