The following is an article written by Jordan
Mintzer, originally published in the French Magazine So Film (#91,
May-June 2022); as far as is known he was the only journalist allowed behind
the scenes of the Armageddon Time set, and this piece comes from that
experience. (It was written before the film’s Cannes premiere, so he hadn’t seen it yet.) I struck up an email conversation with Jordan after sharing my book on
James Gray with him, and he was kind enough to not only share this article with
me (the original, “longer and better” English version he wrote) but also to give
me permission to publish it here on my blog, as it has never been published
online or in English yet. The reason I reached out to Jordan in the first place
is that he is my progenitor in the field of James Gray scholarship, having
published the first and to date only book of interviews with Gray and his
collaborators, Conversations with James Gray (2012). He is also the
author of Conversations with Darius Khondji (2018) and the newly
released Conversations with Dean Tavoularis (2022), which is available
from Synecdoche here. (The photo above comes courtesy of Jordan, and the rest come from those that accompanied the French
publication of the article.)
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.
