James Gray continued his festival tour with Paper Tiger this weekend setting down in the Locarno Film Festival to receive an honorary award ahead of the film’s Swiss premiere on its landmark Piazza Grande.
Meeting the press ahead of the screening on Sunday evening, Gray gave an insight into his vision for cinema and how that in turn shapes his filmmaking.
“To me, movies are the most beautiful art form because it’s the closest thing we have to a dream… ? Your REM sleep is one and a half to two hours per night, if you’re lucky,” he said.
He pointed to how quickly cinema had evolved as artform relative to fine art or music.
“The first full-length sound film is I think 1928. Between 1920 and 1933, you have in the first five years of the art form… as we know it now, you have an ocean of masterpieces. M is what? a year and a half after the first full length sound film,” he said referring to Fritz Lang’s Berlin-set mystery thriller.
“What does that tell you? What’s the gap between the cave paintings of Lascaux and perspective in 1482 or whatever it is?… In music, it takes a thousand years for the scale to develop the way it does. Why cinema so quickly?
“Because when you look at Bosch’s cryptics or when you hear Des Nibelungen by Wagner, you see artists trying to get past that art form. They’re trying to get to cinema. So what does that mean? It’s like a dream.”
“My view of cinema is, I understand that there is a commercial context in which we all have to work. I understand that it is for, I like to say, an audience, not the audience, but but for me, what makes it beautiful is that it is the clearest window into somebody else’s consciousness, somebody else’s dream.”
He added that this meant he had to oscillate between being “very narcissistic” to get his films off the ground and being “vulnerable” on set.
“I try to show you a version of my own dream, my intimacy,” he said.
Gray returns to his old home stomping ground of New York for Paper Tiger, starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller, with support from Scarlett Johansson, as two brothers whose pursuit of the American Dream puts them on the wrong side of the Russian mafia.
In answer to a question on how he works with actors, Gray suggested his approach was to leave his cast space to build their performances, contrasting it to the old school representational acting method of the likes of Alfred Hitchcock.
“When I go to the set, I let the actor always tell me what they want to do. I have in mind exactly the way I want to shoot. But I have the actor tell me what they want to do, what’s comfortable to them,” he said. “Then I try to make sure that my original idea of what needs to be communicated in the story is in line with how they’re moving in the scene. I want to make sure they’re comfortable. That’s the first thing,” he said.
“The second thing is I want to make sure they’re listening to the other actors. I always shoot the rehearsal because messiness is always interesting. I’m either using take one or take 25 is usually, and I just try to make sure that they are totally comfortable to be excellent. I have no acting talent. I’m not a good director of actors. It is all about how good they are and letting them have the freedom to be themselves in the scene and to listen to each other. That is the key and the core to acting.”
Alongside showing Paper Tiger to a 8,000 capacity crowd on Locarno’s Piazza Grande, Gray will also give a masterclass on Monday, while the festival has also shown two classic titles from his filmography: We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008).
The Locarno Film Festival runs to August 15.
