Why James Gray wanted to shoot his childhood memories âlike itâs a ghost storyâ

Director James Grayâs most recent films have taken viewers into the Amazon (âThe Lost City of Zâ) and across the solar system (âAd Astraâ). With the 1980-set family drama âArmageddon Time,â Gray moves the action back not just to his native Flushing, Queens, but within spitting distance of the house where he grew up.
âWe didnât shoot in my old house because the woman wouldnât let us,â Gray says, âbut we just moved 90 feet south. Iâm not exaggerating.â
Speaking via Zoom from his Los Angeles home, framed by a vintage poster of Luchino Viscontiâs âThe Leopard,â the 53-year-old filmmaker says that he was obsessed with the re-creation of childhood detail.
âThe environment had to be as close to my memory as I could make it. So we got the same plates that we had as a kid, with a green floral pattern. And the chandelier was the same as the one in my dining room. The wallpaper is very, very close.â
But the purpose wasnât a documentary verisimilitude. Instead, Gray says, he told cinematographer Darius Khondji to âshoot this like itâs a ghost story.â
As a result, in âArmageddon Time,â the actors are almost never filmed in their key light. As Gray says: âIn the house, the light will come in from the other room, or thereâll be a lamp, but the actors are a little bit away from the lamp. The whole point is that these people are only temporary inhabitants in a very real physical space.â

The autobiographical coming-of-age story follows a precocious, unruly sixth-grader named Paul (Banks Repeta), who bonds with a similarly willful orphaned Black classmate named Johnny (Jaylin Webb). When the two friends get into trouble, Paul is sent to a ritzy private school, where a major benefactor is the father of the future President Trump, while Johnny is left to his own devices.
In Grayâs dramatization of his own middle-class, secular Jewish family, we bear witness to the complexities of assimilation â this is a liberal-minded family that sneers when President Reagan appears on TV, but is also given to displays of casual prejudice.
The rich supporting cast that rounds out Paulâs family includes Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong as his mother and father, and Anthony Hopkins as his beloved grandfather.
Paulâs home is a zone of relative comfort, but its inhabitants are riven by class-consciousness. âItâs a semi-attached row house in Queens, and [the father] drives a Plymouth station wagon. Theyâre not poor, but theyâre looking at [other] big houses with tremendous envy. In my neighborhood, if somebody drove a Cadillac, the whole block started to quiver.â
Gray has a deep empathy for his parentsâ compromises, even when they led to violence and exclusion. âI donât resent my parents,â he says. âThey did the best they could. There was probably a side to them that didnât fill me up with the moral and ethical foundation that is probably needed in the world. And they lashed out in ways that expressed their ineptitude in handling a child who was trying to break on through to the other side. So, there are no easy answers about it.â
Grayâs reflection on his parentsâ tough choices extends, in âArmageddon Time,â to a thoroughgoing critique of American capitalism, with guest appearances by both Reagan and members of the Trump family. In Grayâs opinion, âsomething ended in 1980,â and weâre still feeling the reverberations of that paradigm shift today.
âIn American life, the metric is sort of broken,â Gray says. âIntegrity cannot yet be monetized by the system, and thereâs no way to understand a person with an ethical foundation in anything other than capitalist terms. It doesnât mean anything to live an ethical life in the United States right now.â
Though Gray demurs from the âclassicistâ tag that has been attached to his filmmaking, âArmageddon Timeâ is a familiar-seeming story, but its telling is marked by emotional complexity and richness of detail.
âI have a great love for narrative, clearly told, because I feel that that is where ambiguity can actually really emerge,â Gray says. âThat you make something with such clarity that it canât be vague, and yet it can still have multiple meanings. To me thatâs the richest place to play.â
In âArmageddon Time,â Gray courts ambiguity by limiting the story to Paulâs perspective. In the film, a somewhat selfish kid is able to widen his aperture of empathy, but only so far. Though Johnny is a three-dimensional character, the film does not incorporate his point of view.
Gray frames this choice as a deliberate limitation. âYou actually want a limited point of view,â he says, âbecause thatâs the way that we can understand the way another person might see the world, which leads to a greater compassion. If I had tried to include Johnnyâs point of view, it wouldâve been an asinine act of hubris on my part.
âYou cannot make a work about everybody and everything all the time, and you shouldnât,â he continues. âThe point of art is the extension of our sympathies ⊠that we look into another consciousness. That is what makes it beautiful. That is why we do it.â
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