The writer-director James Gray's last movie, We Own the Night, had the most visually stunning car chase scene in some thirty years, and that's an achievement that a lot of moviemakers would be happy to retire on. But though Gray knows his way around an action scene, his first three features are all stories about men involved in crime that can't be easily shoehorned as genre movies. His latest, Two Lovers (which Nick Schager reviewed earlier this week), might at first glance seem to be a change of pace, because the violence is all emotional. But on a deeper level, the movie, in which Gray returns to the Brighton Beach area of his feature debut Little Odessa and reunites with the star of The Yards and We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix, is of a piece with his earlier work, all family dramas about people in extreme situations torn apart by mixed feelings and divided loyalties.
How did you come around to wanting to tell this story?
It was really a combination of three different things that sort of inspired the movie. I was at a party with Gwynneth Paltrow, and she said to me, "Y'know, I'm quitting acting, and I'm just gonna raise my kids." And I said, "That's terrible, because you have a real gift, and now you're not going to use it." And she said, "Well, what do you care? We were never gonna work together, you make movies about guys who shoot guns off all the time." Which sucked.
And it wasn't how you saw yourself?
Well, I kinda did, but at the same time, you don't want people thinking that's all you can do.
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