At 26, Who Knows What a Break Is?

Maximilian Schell drags on his cigarette and releases curls of smoke into the dim foyer of a Brighton Beach apartment. He is trying to understand what first-time director James Gray wants during a tense scene in “Little Odessa.”

“Just let the action do the work,” Gray is telling the seasoned Austrian-born actor, who is best known for his Academy Award-winning role as a defense attorney in 1961’s “Judgment at Nuremberg.”

The scene they are shooting today--Schell discovers his son (Edward Furlong) hasn’t been to school in two months--is not going well: A door doesn’t slam shut properly, the cramped apartment is too small for all the crew members, and Schell is ruining the visual continuity with excessive sweating.

Gray rests his arm intimately on Schell’s back between takes. “It’s scary, but use the action. Really.” Schell is trying to absorb the directions along with the cigarette smoke. He nods, considering Gray’s words and stamps out the cigarette on the apartment floor. Gray seats himself on an apple crate (there are no director chairs in this operation), and they begin the scene again.

When Schell ad-libs a line (as he will do often throughout the six-week shoot), Gray erupts into giggles that make his slouched shoulders rise and fall.

Gray and his non-union crew of 60 battled harsh weather last winter in this Russian Jewish community that provides the backdrop for “Little Odessa.” Gray’s stylishly dark and detached drama about the homecoming of a 23-year-old hit man for the Russian mob opened Friday.

Gray’s contemporaries might chalk up the young director’s success to luck. After all, this USC grad beat the odds, snagging an agent, producer and even financing for his first feature film only a year and a half out of film school.

With one tap of producer Paul Webster’s magic wand, Gray’s future was looking up. Together, they persuaded Live Entertainment to finance their high-profile, low-budget film, starring Schell, Furlong, Vanessa Redgrave, Tim Roth and Moira Kelly.

But don’t ask Gray, 26, about his big break.

“It’s insulting. I don’t even know what that means--getting a break,” he says during lunch between morning and afternoon shoots. His scruffy red beard adds a few years to his age, as does the dead-serious tone he assumes when discussing this particular topic.

“What it says is you got to do whatever you’re doing by virtue of being in the right place at the right time,” he says. “You make a movie because someone likes you. Is that getting a break? I don’t know.”

While Elizabeth Daley, dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television, estimates that 75% of all graduates are working in some aspect of the industry, she concedes that Gray’s situation is rare.

“That every student will be making his own feature film right out of school is unrealistic,” she says, noting exceptions such as John Singleton, who wrote and directed “Boyz N the Hood” or Helen Childress, who left USC to write “Reality Bites.” “Alumni just say keep on working, don’t ever think anything is beneath you.”

Gray didn’t subscribe to that way of thinking, and perhaps his cocky attitude had something to do with his speedy success.

“If I knew then what I know now about how this business works,” says Gray, sounding jaded, “I would never have done this movie. I went to William Morris and Creative Artists. I was incredibly arrogant. I was like, ‘Wanna sign me?’ Total moron. I thought, ‘I’m gonna be making a movie in six months.’ ”

He was close. Jeremy Zimmer, an agent at United Talent Agency, signed Gray after a classmate of Gray’s, an agent trainee with UTA, recommended that he see Gray’s tony student short “Cowboys and Angels” at a USC-sponsored graduate screening.

“I don’t tend to take on student filmmakers,” Zimmer says. “But James’ movie had a sense of realism that reminded me of several of my favorite directors from the ‘70s.”

After the two hit it off in a meeting, Zimmer decided to take a risk on Gray, the first student filmmaker he’d signed in years.

“I respected his passion--and his attitude,” Zimmer says. “He had a sense of humor about what he was doing. A healthy, defined neurosis, I’ll call it. It was an unusual gamble, but I thought it was a worthy one.”

When producer Webster (“Romeo Is Bleeding”) saw “Cowboys and Angels,” about a detective who finds himself attracted to the woman he’s tracking, he knew Gray was the one.

“It had honesty and visual power that seemed to be lacking in everything else I saw,” says Webster, who has viewed hundreds of student shorts.

Gray’s short, which included a controversial nude scene that a professor tried to make Gray cut, stood out because of its slick look.

“It was actually kind of cheesy, but all the actors really underplayed it,” Gray says of that movie’s charm. “And it had great Bo Diddley music, for which I take no credit--at least it didn’t have that wah-wah soundtrack from a Casio thing.”

One month after graduation, Gray was scanning potential scripts Webster and Zimmer sent him. “I’d read the first four words of the script, and I’d throw it in the corner. After about four months of it, I decided I better start writing something.” And with a familiar cockiness, Gray adds, “If you want to make greatness, you’ve got to generate it yourself.”

His first attempt, “Mecca,” about the ‘70s disco boom, required a huge budget, which Webster couldn’t provide Gray on his first movie. But the six months he spent writing that script were not in vain. Universal optioned the screenplay for about $130,000. That sale came along just in time to save Gray from a job selling popcorn at a movie theater’s concession stand, he says.

“Little Odessa,” his second screenplay, took Gray seven months to write. It was small and personal enough to take to production companies. Brighton Beach provided Gray with a colorful setting for the grim, often coldly violent tale. He cast local Russian-born residents as extras for authenticity. Gray knew this Brooklyn neighborhood almost as well as his family’s home in Queens. After Gray perfected the script, Webster set out to find the financing. Indie producer Nick Wechsler (“The Player”) was recruited for the task, which was made easier when Roth, whose agent is also with UTA, signed onto the film. Though there was no money in sight, Roth was drawn to the lead character, Joshua, a hardened hit man with a soft spot for his dying mother (he had no idea Redgrave would later take that part).

“If you read a good script, you want to get involved,” says Roth, who has worked with many first-time directors, including Quentin Tarantino on “Reservoir Dogs.” “It’s hit or miss. But you can generally judge how a director will be the first time you meet them. James is tasteful. He’s a wild man--he’s crazy--but he is incredibly enthusiastic and has a great deal of technical knowledge.” Kelly grabbed the chance to work opposite Roth as his love interest. Then Furlong (“Terminator 2”) jumped aboard in the meaty role of Reuben, Roth’s younger brother who is drawn into the deadly plot. Suddenly, the movie had enough star-power to carry its unknown factor--the director.

The producers convinced Live Entertainment to give them between $2 million and $3 million. That sum, far below the median studio budget of $20 million, meant the finances would be tricky. In fact, all the actors, except Redgrave (who worked two days for a flat fee of $25,000), agreed to a “back-end deal.” They worked for $1,853.50 per week--scale plus 10% (for the agents), with a profit-sharing deal, should the movie in fact make a profit. “That way all the money is up on the screen, and you can actually make your film,” Roth says.

Webster says he’s happy to have received the money he did, since all he had to show investors was a 12-minute student movie. “That makes everybody nervous,” he says.

Everybody, that is, except the director himself. Gray says he had no trepidation about directing the experienced cast or New-York based crew. “Again, I don’t mean to sound arrogant,” he says. “But I haven’t seen an American movie in a long time that’s great. Maybe I’ll stink. But maybe if I do one interesting thing in this movie, then it’ll be as good as anything else made today.”

But Gray’s inexperience did prove problematic at times. His giggling, for example held up production now and then. “When I like things, I giggle,” he admits. “It’s kind of a pathetic little habit I have. I ruined the tape the other day by laughing when the actor did something I loved. The sound man came over and slapped my hand.”

But despite a few slapped hands, Gray’s sense of humor may have been the key to this tough shoot. “It’s a very depressing story--not a lot of laughs,” Roth says. “If you spend most of your time on the set between shots fooling around, you’re not as likely to jump off a building. James understood that.”