The King of
Queens
By Jordan Mintzer
True story: When I was a teenager, I worked after school and on the weekends at a bakery in the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, where I grew up. It was located nearby the Kew-Forest School, an elite private institution founded in 1918 that, having been a public school student myself, I only knew because of its stately red Neoclassical facade, which stood out amid all the surrounding middle-class apartment houses.
The year was 1992 and I was already a major film buff back then, chatting about this or that new movie with customers in the bakery as they bought coffee and bagels. One afternoon, a kid a few years older than me walked in and, when he heard I was into film, asked me if I knew James Gray. “No,” I said. “Who’s that?” “He went to Kew-Forest,” the kid said, “and he knows more about movies than anyone. He knows every Coppola and Friedkin film by heart!” The kid bought some bagels and left, but not before he told me: “James is out in L.A. now and he’s going to direct his first feature...” It would take Gray two more years to make Little Odessa, which came out in 1994, but he was already something of a local legend. Suffice to say that I never forgot his name.
Fast forward to thirty years later. James Gray has since directed seven movies, ranging from a trio of New York crime dramas (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night) to a pair of intimate melodramas (Two Lovers, The Immigrant) to an epic adventure drama (The Lost City of Z) to a $90 million sci-fi drama starring Brad Pitt (Ad Astra). He’s premiered four of his films in competition in Cannes, won a Silver Lion in Venice when he was only twenty-five, and is part of a generation of American auteurs, including David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson, who came up in the 1990s and are now some of Hollywood’s most lauded and iconoclastic filmmakers.
For his eighth feature, Armageddon Time—the title comes from a 1979 song by The Clash that was released as a B-side on the “London Calling” single—Gray has decided to return to Queens to direct his most personal movie yet. The film is something like The 400 Blows meets Amarcord, with the action set in 1980, the year of Ronald Reagan’s election. Parts of the story take place at the very Kew-Forest School where the director first became known, at least to a few kids around the neighborhood.
But here’s the twist: The Kew-Forest School not only includes James Gray as an alumnus, but another infamous Queens native by the name of… Donald Trump. The billionaire mogul/reality TV star and 45th President of the United States was born two decades before Gray and is not directly the subject of his movie, although the Trump family and its legacy loom over events in the film the same way Reagan does. (Another true story: Donald Trump was kicked out of Kew-Forest when he was thirteen years old for punching a music teacher in the face. Afterwards his father sent him to the New York Military Academy, where one the other students was… Francis Ford Coppola.)
The subject of Armageddon Time is something deeper and more intimate for Gray, whose eleven-year-old surrogate in the film, Paul Graff, is played by newcomer and fellow redhead Michael Banks Repeta. It’s a coming-of-age story as only he could make it, one with moments of boisterous Jewish family humor—a first for the director, who in person can be much funnier than his movies—but also a heartbreaking look at what it’s like to grow up and experience loss for the first time. The loss of friends, loved ones and, most of all, one’s own innocence at a moment when America made its turbo-charged shift to neoliberalism as Reagan took power in 1981, opening a social and economic divide that would widen, and eventually explode, with the election of Trump in 2016.
“The movie’s called Armageddon Time, not Everybody’s Going to Be Happy Time,” Gray told me on Zoom one morning from Los Angeles, where he has lived ever since attending USC film school there in the late-1980s. “The world was a pretty dark place back then, and it reflects on us now, because class matters big time—as does race.”
Indeed, and without giving too much of the plot away before the movie makes its world premiere in Cannes, the story revolves around young Paul and his friendship with a black student, Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), and what happens when they both get kicked out of their public school for smoking a joint in the bathroom.
For Paul, whose bickering if supportive parents, played by Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway, and mensch of a grandfather, played by Anthony Hopkins, are looking out for his best, the answer is the Kew-Forest School, where he enters a world of WASPs that’s ruled by Donald Trump’s father Fred, who presides over the school’s board of directors. For Johnny, who lives alone with his grandmother, it’s another story.
The events in the film are inspired by Gray’s own experiences, and after using a range of genres to explore themes that are dear to him, especially class issues and the strained, often destructive relations between fathers and sons, in his other movies, this is the first time he’s decided to turn the camera directly on himself. “Quite simply, my views have changed a little bit over the years,” he explained. “I’ve become so uninterested, I mean unbelievably uninterested, in genre. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love genre movies, but as a means of expression—and others were able to do it brilliantly—I think I’m less able to get directly at my feelings through genre than I would have hoped.”
Armageddon Time is also the first time Gray has cast children in the lead roles—Edward Furlong was already fifteen and a major movie star, following the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, when he made Little Odessa—and he found the experience to be different from what he was used to. “You have to kind of forget the playbook,” Gray said. “When you work with seasoned actors, they can give you something different each time. I found that with kids you have to give them more line readings and tell them how you want them to say something. You have to try to reach them in a way so that you get exactly what you want, which may not always be more than what you want.”
When I spent a few days shadowing the director on set in October of last year, I saw evidence of this as he talked Repeta and Webb through a dialogue scene that he was trying to get in one long, lateral tracking shot. The sequence was shot in front of P.S. 173Q out in in Flushing, Queens—the actual public school Gray attended, and was kicked out of, as a kid. As the setting was 1980, and not 2021, the student body, which is now predominantly Asian, was replaced by dozens of white and Black extras, all of them decked out in period attire and hair styles (bellbottoms, afros, lots of suede and denim) as they ran through the scene with Gray’s assistant director and co-producer, Doug Torres.
An hour or so earlier, the camera department had laid out thirty-five meters of track on the sidewalk, and the real students of P.S. 173Q, along with a bunch of gawking neighbors, began to gather across the street to watch what was happening. One young girl, accompanied by her mom, pointed to Gray as he stepped onto set to begin rehearsals with the cast. “The guy with the hat is the director!” she yelled out, excited that a film was being shot at her school, even if she had no idea who Gray really was.
Moviemaking, though, whether it’s on a Queens street or a soundstage at Paramount—where most of Gray’s last opus, Ad Astra, was shot—can be tedious, repetitive and, if you have no real reason for being there, frankly a bore to witness. Once the director walked Repeta and Webb through the shot, he realized they did not have the latest pages of the script, which he had rewritten a few weeks earlier. The kids now had to memorize several dozen new lines, which Gray went over with them, until they were able to do the scene in an uninterrupted two-and-half-minute shot. All of this went on as airplanes began to land every other minute at nearby LaGuardia airport, causing a roar that ruined several takes. Soon enough, the crowd across the street began to thin out to only a few stragglers, while Gray kept working through the scene until he got it right.
“We did twenty-seven takes,” he reminded me afterwards from L.A. “There was the issue with the dialogue, and the planes overhead. Every single take was botched except for the last one, so I got one good take. Which, by the way, is all you need.”
The controlled chaos of shooting out in Queens was on fine display a day earlier when the crew, consisting of roughly a hundred people, rolled up in Flushing Meadows Park nearby the ruins of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It was a windy and overcast day, winter already encroaching on fall, and I decided to walk to the set from the apartment where I grew up, and where my mom still lives, located only a few kilometers away.
Before getting anywhere near the camera, which has been set up across from the ghostly towers of the Fair’s original New York State pavilion, I had to submit to a Covid test at a temporary facility in the production’s base camp. This was actually the third test I had taken after going to a testing center out in Brooklyn to be pre-tested several days beforehand, then waiting a few more days to be cleared. There was an entire team on Armageddon Time dedicated to enforcing the U.S. film industry’s pandemic safety protocols, resulting in a shoot that remained Covid-free but also saw its budget—estimated at $16 million—hit by hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional costs.
While getting my nose swabbed, I recognized the cinematographer Darius Khondji sitting nearby, getting swabbed as well. Once the tests were done, the two of us walked to set together. Khondji, who was shooting his third James Gray film after The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z, filled me in on their latest collaboration, including the fact that this would be the first movie the two shot together digitally, on the Alexa 65.
Gray, an adamant film enthusiast who originally wanted to shoot Armageddon Time on 16mm, had vowed in the past to never go digital, but a few factors changed his mind this time around. One were the tests that Khondji ran during pre-production, revealing how well the Alexa 65 could mimic the look of celluloid. Even more decisive were the possibilities the digital camera and its sizeable chip allowed for creating new shots in post-production, such as close-ups of the actors, which could save everyone time on set. With only thirty-two days allotted for shooting—a limited schedule for a 130-page script that would ultimately result in a two-hour-long feature—switching to digital was a way to get it all in the can, or into the hard drive, without exceeding an already tight budget.
Another decisive factor was the working method that Khondji had developed on the feature he had shot just beforehand using the Alexa 65, Alejandro Iñarritu’s upcoming Mexican film, Bardo. For that movie, the cinematographer had brought along a New York-based DIT (Digital Imaging Technician) named Gabe Kolodny, who built a “portable lab on set,” as Khondji described it, where the digital footage could be graded and manipulated in real time. Instead of waiting for the end of the edit to color correct the feature, which is how things are traditionally done, the movie could be pre-graded as it was being shot, allowing Khondji and Gray to tweak the images while they made them.
I spent lots of time on set inside the darkened DIT tent, which was decked out with so many monitors, keyboards, dials and controls that it looked like some sort of remote CIA operations center. On a piece of paper glued below one of the monitors, Kolodny had scribbled down a few key words from Gray that would serve as guidelines for the film’s imagery: “Visual distance, but no emotional distance; Time that is gone; A ghost; Unreachable; A relic.” When scenes were shot, Khondji would join us inside the tent and radio back instructions to his camera operator, Julian Delacruz, and first assistant camera, Eric Swanek, who would then make adjustments on set, adding filters or perfecting movement.
Like many crew members, Swanek has been a loyal part of Gray’s team since We Own the Night back in 2007, and each time the director shoots in New York it’s somewhat of a family reunion. And yet the local film industry has experienced a seismic shift over the past two decades, with television production now far surpassing that of movies. Many technicians on the crew were working on Armageddon Time in between jobs on two of the biggest shows now made in New York, Showtime’s Billions and HBO’s Succession. The budget of the last season of the latter was said to reach up to $100 million, making Gray’s movie a small art-house affair, and more like a labor of love, for many involved.
The day in Flushing Meadows started off calmly enough, with Gray rehearsing a long dialogue scene between Repeta and Anthony Hopkins, who everyone called “Tony” on set. There was hardly anyone in the park except for a few joggers or cyclists, and Gray talked Repeta through his lines as the 83-year-old Hopkins benevolently looked on, cracking jokes to the makeup team in his familiar Welsh accent. (Gray was able to work the accent into Hopkins’ character, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, by explaining how, like the director’s own grandfather, he had lived in England prior to arriving at Ellis Island.)
By the time they were ready for the first take, something strange began to happen. As I stood nearby Gray, who had headphones on and was glued to his monitor, I noticed several men darting in and out from behind the trees in the background, just out of the camera’s range. At first I thought they were passersby curious about a movie shoot. But then I noticed they all had cameras with extra-long zoom lenses. In fact, some of them had two or three such cameras strapped around their necks.
It’s unclear how the paparazzi managed to find us all the way out in Queens, a good hour’s drive from Manhattan. (A crew member told me they may have a source in the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment who tips them off.) Now there were at least a half-dozen of them snapping hundreds of photos of Hopkins, and they all seemed to follow the lead of one man: New York paparazzo Steve Sands, who’s so legendary in his field, and so hated by celebrities and film crews, that the main character in Tom Dicillo’s 2006 comedy Delirious, played by Steve Buscemi, was apparently based on him.
If you look Sands up online, which I did while on set, you will see lots of pictures of him being manhandled or beaten up by either cops or security guards, his body hitting the pavement at odd angles. The photographer is decidedly familiar with his free speech rights under the First Amendment, which grant Constitutional protection for photos taken in a public place, and he is known to file lawsuits against anyone who dares lay a hand on him. Because Gray and his crew were shooting that day in a public park, all they could do was tolerate Sands and the rest of the paparazzi’s constant, infuriating presence.
At first the photographers kept their distance, but as the day went on they got closer and closer, eventually going right up to Hopkins after Gray yelled “cut” so they could snap close-ups from a few feet away. When Anne Hathaway arrived on set later in the afternoon for her scene, all hell started to break lose. The star’s bodyguard and a few production assistants did their best to keep the paparazzi back, but they broke free, swerving in between cast and crew to get shots of the Oscar-winning actress. People started shouting and the photographers got more frantic, threatening crew members and sometimes each other. The competition for exclusive on-set photos, which would be sold that night to The New York Post or The Daily Mail, was brutal and unforgiving.
Gray, well familiar with this ordeal from his many New York productions, looked on with a mix of detachment and disgust. At some point Sands was yelling “First Amendment!” at one of the PAs, and Gray to me turned and said: “I’d love to see someone kick the shit out of him, I really would.” He added: “You can quote me on that.”
The director was getting a little nervous because they were beginning to lose daylight and still hadn’t shot Hathaway’s sequence, where she would roll into the park with Repeta in a vintage Plymouth Belvedere—the same car Gray’s parents drove when he was a child. The picture vehicle was finally wheeled in with a camera installed in the back, and there was only time for a few technical rehearsals before Khondji pushed everyone to get moving before the sun went down and the day was officially over.
Film shoots are odd beasts: crew members can sit around for hours with nothing to do—although phones have probably made the whole thing less monotonous—and then suddenly there’s a flurry of activity and you only have minutes to pop off a major shot. That’s why the level of technical expertise needs to be so high, and that’s why movie productions are sometimes compared to wars, as Coppola famously said about Apocalypse Now and Vietnam. You need to be ready to move into battle, and move fast.
In this case, everything came together at the last second for a shot—“one of the most beautiful in the film,” per Khondji—of Hathaway seen through the windshield of the Plymouth. The paparazzi were finally pushed back and the crew quieted down as they got ready to roll. But just before Gray called “action,” Hathaway signaled something was wrong, and the assistant director went rushing over to her. They talked for a few seconds and then the assistant turned and came over… to me. I was standing by a tree facing the scene from about twenty meters away, and Hathaway told him I was directly in her eye-line, ruining her concentration. So they got rid of me as well, and got what they needed.
When I reminded Gray about that day a few months later, after the production had wrapped, he waived away my idea that Armageddon Time had been a particularly chaotic shoot. “I don’t want you to pull from that experience the entire narrative that it was always chaos, because it’s not true. That was the case for that day, or day-and-a-half, but it was not typical. Typically we were in a house in New Jersey for two-and-a-half weeks, and I could hunker down with the actors and really get what I wanted.”
Although Gray’s eight feature will be his quintessential Queens movie, the majority of it, beyond the days that I was on set, plus a couple more, was actually shot in New Jersey both for budget reasons and for the locations it offered—including a school that could stand in for Kew-Forest, which refused to be involved in the production.
When Gray originally went back to scout his old neighborhood of Flushing, he realized the place had changed far too much to turn back the clock to 1980. The racial demographic had not only shifted, from Jewish, Irish, Italian and Black to Asian and Orthodox Jewish, but many of the original homes had been knocked down and replaced by new structures, including a slew of dacha-style McMansions covered in marble. The director found a substitute for his neighborhood in the middle-class New Jersey town of Bayonne—“the land that time forgot,” as he put it—and shot most of his film there.
Switching states, switching to digital, shooting a period piece in only 32 days—or 35 days if you add two reduced-unit days and one day at the Guggenheim Museum… It seemed like a lot of concessions for a filmmaker to make, especially one whose previous movie was a sci-fi blockbuster released by Disney that had cost five times as much. I was reminded of what the director said during a location scout that took place in the morning of one of the shooting days, when he and key crew members walked around a Jewish cemetery in Queens, searching for the right spot to stage a pivotal funeral sequence.
As Gray wandered amid the tombstones accompanied by Khondji, who used a special app on his iPhone as a viewfinder, the rest of the crew—producers, production designer, visual effects supervisor, location manager—as well as the manager of the cemetery, weighed in on what could and couldn’t be done. One angle looked perfect to Gray, but you could see the Manhattan skyline in the distance and it would cost too much to transform it back to 1980 using CGI. Another angle, with a graffiti-filled wall in the background, looked great as well, but under copyright laws they would need to get clearances from the original graffiti artists, which was virtually impossible.
“At a certain point, I guess we have to embrace the limitations,” Gray told the others when he finally found the shot he wanted, in what seemed to me like a process of elimination. I mentioned this quote when we spoke again later, and he said: “I don’t think limitations are bad, necessarily. I mean, certain limitations are obviously beyond bad—where they’re putting you in a box and you can’t do anything. But to some degree you need limitations, because part of being a director is the act of curating, of choosing what is necessary.” He went on: “Think of it this way: you have a canvas, and you’ve stretched it, and it’s five feet by four feet. That’s the structure you’ve been given.”
The canvas of Armageddon Time is stretched somewhere between Flushing and Bayonne, between James Gray’s childhood, the reign of the Trump family and the start of the Reagan years, between the film you dream of making and what the film gods ultimately allow you to make. It will surely be the director’s most introspective and sociological work, in an oeuvre already obsessed with the constraints that class places upon us, especially in a big, competitive, racially diverse, make-it-or-break-it city like New York. Perhaps most of all, it will be about the kinds of sacrifices it takes for someone like Gray to get from Queens to Hollywood and all the way back to Queens again.
When I asked him what it was like to shoot, at least for a few days, in the very streets he grew up in—nearby the neighborhood theatres where he watched films by Coppola and Friedkin so many times that he learned them by heart—he told me: “I felt privileged to be able to do it, but it was not emotional while we were working. And then when I saw the dailies later on, it was very powerful. That’s when it hit me and I thought: God, that’s incredible. I’m seeing this kid and he’s literally walking on my block.”
Armageddon Time will premiere
in competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival.
