Intimate Impressions: The Cinema of James Gray – Coda

LOVE

 

Are you happy with where you are as a filmmaker right now? 

No. – James Gray, 2019

 

We’ve talked about all of the James Gray films that I have at my disposal to see. We eagerly await his latest film, Armageddon Time, reaching theatres shortly. What now?

In 2019, just as Ad Astra was entering theatres, Gray undertook a project that would be a first for him: directing an opera. A real opera, with stages and singing, not just another one of this film-operas. It seems like such a natural fit that one wonders why it took so long for Gray to do it. In fact, he had once been offered a chance to direct an opera in Qatar, of all places, but had had to decline because of scheduling reasons. And his acceptance of the offer from the Theatre des Champs-Élysées in Paris only came after five years of convincing by its general director Michel Franck. Franck, who loved Gray’s films, read in an interview about Gray’s interest in opera and reached out to him about doing one. But Gray was reluctant to accept for fear of making a fool of himself in the medium that, even more than cinema, he once called “the greatest art form that’s ever been invented.” Plus, the offer came in the form of a bizarre prospect: he was to put on Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (1786). A comedy where Gray excelled at drama, a Mozart where Gray’s real interests lied with the Italians and the verismo tradition; plus, that wasn’t even Gray’s favorite Mozart opera: he much preferred Don Giovanni (1787). (He had also included snippets of Cosi fan tutte in The Lost City of Z). But Franck must have been persuasive, because Gray finally accepted. In preparation, he even called up William Friedkin for advice (who had directed one of the most momentous opera productions of Gray’s life, of Puccini’s Sour Angelica, which more or less directly inspired Gray to make The Immigrant.) Not only was he facing down one of the most famous operas in history, but he would also be working in the shadow of its greatest productions. Gray particularly loved Giorgio Strehler’s 1973 staging. Even the great Luchino Visconti had tackled the material not once but twice. First as a 1946 play (no Mozart, music instead by Renzo Rossellini, and with Vittorio De Sica as Figaro) and then as a 1964 opera in Rome. Gray went into rehearsals the first week of October 2019 for a post-Thanksgiving premiere, running at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées from November 26 through December 8. I’m not sure whether future European dates, in places like Lorrain, Lausanne, and Luxembourg, took place before the pandemic led to mass cancellations. (It appears, upon further research, that a number of these schedule dates were eventually moved into 2021 and did, indeed, happen.) The planned American premiere of Gray’s staging at the L.A. opera in 2020 was cancelled—but looking now, it appears to be back on, coming to Los Angeles in February of 2023.

“Opera acts on me as a powerful detoxifier against the vicissitudes of cinema. I find there a pretext to reinvent myself. And there’s pleasure there.” Faced with the task of staging an almost 250 year-old opera by one of the greatest geniuses of, well, anything, Gray decided on a simple approach: he would become invisible. He would become merely a conduit for the genius of Mozart, focusing on every intention of the 1786 work and letting it speak as it will to modern day audiences, not making it relevant but letting its inherent relevancy be revealed through a dedication to the work itself, as it was. It was an attempt to knock down the wall between the opera and the public—the same idea Gray approaches his films with—and to reconnect with the spirit of 1786. Mozart’s modernism would reveal itself on its own terms. Gray refused to entertain the idea of a modernizing “update” to the play; it would be presented as it originally was, or as close to it as was possible. He would work with the actors in order to bring down the wall between themselves and the characters; Gray reports that through the duration of his work with the actor-musicians, he continuously re-read Stanislavsky. And he found it liberating to work with the farcical aspect of the play, as a certain single-minded somberness had been something he saw as a flaw in his own work.

In Figaro itself, Gray still wound up discovering his pet themes. The opera poses questions that wouldn’t be out of place in a Gray film: what forms do desire and love take in a class society?

I found that what was personal about Figaro, which I thought was so beautiful, was the degree to which desire destroyed people’s self-interest, and how the idea of the class divide separated us and made fools of us. So I was trying to think of myself and you know, how I felt personally about that thematic thread.

The character of Figaro could be seen as acting a bit like Joaquin Phoenix in Two Lovers, who “hatches silly and childish plans” while under the influence of desire. The original title of Beaumarchais’ play was “A Mad Day, or the Marriage of Figaro”—the madness of love and desire, perhaps. Regardless, Gray signs his first opera and I envy all who have had or will have a chance to see it.

 

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I did the Amazon, I did Neptune, so it’s time to go home.

When I first started research on this project in the early weeks of 2021, Armageddon Time was merely a title with a few interesting details attached to it, waiting for its chance to get made after nearly all film production had been shut down by the pandemic. Gray had flown to New York in the summer of 2019 to check details for his next movie he was writing, a script that he mostly wrote in his Paris hotel room during downtime from the opera he was directing. Then, in 2020, you know what happened. I knew that it was going to be an autobiographical kind of story set in Gray’s childhood, about him and his friend who were separated by class and race in the 1980s. I knew that it would be a kind of memoir, and that Gray said it was to be in the vein of Two Lovers. I knew that two of Gray’s inspirations were Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), and that Gray was going to try and make it his warmest, most open film, filled with as much love and humor as he could. I knew that it would be a smaller film, something that Gray would have total control over after the compromises of Ad Astra. It wasn’t until October of 2021 that the film began shooting, and half a year later it was announced for Cannes 2022—a return for Gray after nine years away. Enough details and critical appraisals have dripped out of Cannes and elsewhere to have a much better idea about what the film is or could be, but I’m not going to spam this paragraph with everything I’ve learned about it so far. (The fact that this series ends today one entry short of a neat ten does, I suppose, leave room open for future noodlings on the latest entry in the James Gray canon....) Regardless, I look forward to seeing it in a few weeks like I’ve never looked forward to seeing anything before.

And I’ll be encountering it in a movie theatre, at that, a place that is inherently Grayian. “You go into that movie theatre, it’s like a womb. The relationship with the screen is so intimate.” This a philosophy born less out of some unthought ideological purity towards the theatrical experience, and more as an extension of Gray’s films—films which ask the viewer to put away all distractions and be absorbed, be enveloped, into the film and its world and its story and its emotions. Gray, who structures his films to be watched in one go and with rapt emotional attention, possesses an overwhelming desire to communicate a filmic sincerity in the most intimate and clear way possible; of course he likes theatres, where the filmic experience is born out of light in a dark room, where the emotions are literally projected onto a screen bigger than us, where an alchemical relationship can form between a film and its audience—the ideal conditions for the disappearance of that wall Gray likes to talk about, the one that exists between film/audience, director/film, actors/characters, etc.

The same ideas extend to Gray’s love of 35mm, relative to digital (even though Gray has rolled back some of his harsher earlier comments about digital, even deciding to use it on his newest film.) The emotional tenor Gray’s films hover at has simply been easier to capture and convey on 35mm film; the inherent quality of it, its texture, gets at emotions and moods that digital can’t quite get at. (Of course the same holds true for what digital can do that film can’t.) For Gray, film and digital are two different mediums. Film grain, for the painter Gray, is like brushstrokes on a canvas; and those are the brushes he's chosen to use. The degree to which Gray is dedicated to a certain analog kind of filmmaking can be demonstrated by a very striking fact: untrusting of digital archiving, Gray pays his own money—sometimes up to $50,000—to strike brand new prints of his own films, to become his own archivist; he keeps them in a vault. But if film grain offers one kind of brushstroke, digital offers another, and following Gray’s arc of maturation over his career, we can also parallel that with a greater understanding of what digital has to offer him.

The digital world has brought an extra layer of artifice, which is the very thing as filmmakers that we’re always trying to destroy. So of course I was concerned about that, I mean, how could you not be? Plus, I’m such a die-hard film guy. So you’re introducing this new technology, but in the end I wound up really loving it because it’s just another tool for you to use. It’s like if you open up the set of paints, and all of a sudden you’ve got like a nice new fan brush you can use. So you have to look at it that way.

All the digital work on Ad Astra demonstrated this perfectly well; Gray, who had previously been painting 18th century religious masterpieces with one brush, was all of a sudden painting modernist abstract masterpieces with another. Having learned that Armageddon Time sees Gray, alongside Darius Khondji (back for round three), shooting fully digital for the first time in his career, I once again repeat what I said earlier: I can’t wait to see this film. I can’t wait to see what he paints with these new tools.

 

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So for a quarter of a century, James Gray has gone from a just-out-of-college hotshot nobody to one of the more respected elders of a certain tradition of American cinema. The filmmakers he grew up loving and admiring—Coppola, Scorsese, etc.—are now his colleagues, friends, and supporters. This even though for the first half of his career, Gray dealt with the challenge of not being accepted by his own country, having to flee to the French for the critical support he deserved. His whole filmography is really just one long demonstration of the fact that initial audience/critical response means basically nothing; the real goal is timeless, lasting art. And Gray does it in classic fashion—“A director makes only one movie in his life,” Renoir said. “Then he breaks it up and makes it again.” Gray has been making the same film over and over again, although with enough maturation each time out to where it remains the same film in the same sense that it remains the same filmmaker: it absolutely is, but he’s a little older (read: wiser) each time out. But why has he been making that film, in particular? Well, to take Gray’s thematics and make them his meta-thematics: because he had to. It’s the same idea of fate in his films: because of who he is, where he grew up, who raised him, who his ancestors were, who he fell in love with, etc.—Gray was fated to entertain certain themes, certain environments, certain moods, simply because of the specific place that he has been slotted into in the universe. Something that he had absolutely no say in; forces outside of his control. The same goes for the actual making of the movies, their production. As Jordan Mintzer writes in his book,

...if I had to pull away one unifying idea from the hours of discussions we had together, as well as from talks with the actors, producers and technicians he has worked with, it would be this: No matter how committed you may be to the art of movies, your art is constantly jeopardized by forces outside your control. (9)

The films are, in some sense, unconscious creations, resulting from a man expressing himself and having only the specific self he is to express. Gray himself understands this:

Hell, even something as ridiculous as the weather can exert a huge influence over who you are as a person. Someone from sunny southern California is going to have a different outlook and manner from somebody from Seattle, where it’s raining all the fucking time. I grew up in New York, where you’re either huddling inside so you don’t freeze your ass off in the winter, or closing all the windows and cranking up the air conditioner—or in my day, lots of big fans—so you don’t die from the heat in the summer. I can only think that all those cramped, cluttered, closed-in interiors in my films are there because so much of my life was spent indoors in those conditions. The same goes for my preoccupation with class and class difference. My family certainly wasn’t destitute, but I was always conscious while growing up of not having much money, and I was always sensitive to those signs, both obvious and subtle, that other people and other families were better off than we were. So while you can make choices and decisions when you’re making a film—and when you’re making a film you’re always making choices and decisions—a lot of what you end up putting in there has chosen you without your knowing it. 

 

Through the films, we encounter the man: James Gray. Human being first, filmmaker second. In the process of writing this project, I was shocked by the degree to which I became not just aware of but moved by the arc of Gray’s career. Whereas before I had simply watched the films and loved them, in working through this project it became above all about seeing the maturity of the filmmaker, about growing up with him, in a way. I thought going into this that I would become closer to the films; what ended up happening was I became closer to the man behind them. The very things that Gray’s films ultimately put forward—love, love of characters, no judging, no distance, total compassion—were the things I found myself abiding by in thinking of Gray. And the feelings I felt and the things I thought about the Gray of age 25 were different than the feelings I felt and the things I thought about the Gray of 53. Through the films and their circumstances of production, it was like I was meeting Gray at specific points along his life. He himself has spoken about his films in this kind of way:

I feel that each film that I’ve made is the best that I could do at that time of my life. And I don’t think I’ve ever left anything on the table. The only compromised circumstance I’ve ever been in [pre-Ad Astra] was the studio cut of The Yards, where the ending was different. But the Director’s Cut is out there on DVD, so people can see that and that represents the best I could do at that time in my life, at age 29. Little Odessa is the best I could do at age 23. Two Lovers and We Own the Night were the best I could do at age 34 and 38, respectively. And so on and so forth.

If Gray put all of himself on the table as a filmmaker, I felt it was only right to put all of myself on the table as a viewer, as a thinker, as a writer. A mutual exchange, one which is the heart of that thing we call auteurism.

It only dawned on me how much this project was like one long demonstration of auteurism’s effectiveness a few months ago, on May 19th to be exact: the date of Armageddon Time’s Cannes premiere and also, coincidentally, Gray’s 53rd birthday. I had seen the video of the post-film standing ovation the film got at Cannes—and the image of an immensely emotional Gray trying to come up with something to say in the face of this overwhelming appreciation—and I teared up. I had become so vulnerable to this one man’s work, that in just scrolling past a snippet of low-quality video of him emotionally overwhelmed, my own emotions immediately rose to the surface.

I have never met James Gray. I don’t know him. I am very different person than him. Having now spent many hours of my life reading and listening to him, there have even been times where I don’t particularly like him. But I love him. And here is the overwhelming proof that whether or not auteurism is “true”—and I honestly don’t care whether it is—auteurism without a doubt works: a deep, true, and prolonged engagement with a person and their films will necessarily yield more from them. As Kierkegaard once wrote, “Is an author less rich in thought for the reason that an ordinary perusal of him discovers nothing, whereas a reader who has made him his sole study discovers greater and greater riches?” It’s true: an open and deep study of an artist will cause you to become exponentially more vulnerable to them. You don’t love them—you love them. The films become like humans and the human behind them becomes even more human. Flaws and all, you care about them (both films and human maker.) The filmmaker is no longer a stranger who happens to makes things you like—you actually start to care about the state of their soul.

Ultimately, this project came to be about (and I now feel has to be about) James Gray the person rather than James Gray the filmmaker or just James Gray’s films. Not just necessarily because of his inherent connection to the films under discussion (the two are of course inseparable), but because in looking at the total arc of his career, he—rather than the films—becomes the main character. We follow his narrative as a man and an artist and grow with him in our own stead. In the end it becomes a study of a human being, and this study becomes an act of love, and this act of love becomes the essential part in not just writing about one specific filmmaker but in watching any films of any filmmaker whatsoever. So in making films that humbly yet earnestly share with us such things—empathy, compassion, love—James Gray is essentially teaching us, through his films, how to love him. It becomes the ultimate act of selfless selfishness; an elaborate and very human expression of “love your neighbor as yourself.” And so love flows: from Gray to me and from me to Gray and, hopefully, with this additional creative act of writing, from me to you and you back to Gray....