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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The work of Director James Gray is being recognized with a curated collection by the Criterion Channel. It's titled James Gray's New York. Gray was born and raised in New York, Queens to be exact. The lineup features the director's films based right here in the city, and featuring some of the best actors of a generation in their early years, like Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron, plus vets like James Caan and Ellen Burstyn.

The list includes his debut feature, Little Odessa, which was released in 1994, the director's cut of The Yards from 2000, We Own the Night from 2007, Two Lovers released a year later in 2008, and The Immigrant released in 2013. The Criterion Channel calls Gray, perhaps American Cinema's last great classicist. Joining me now to discuss his career and his retrospective is James Gray. Nice to meet you.

James Gray: Hello. Nice to sort of meet you. Does this count as meeting?

Alison Stewart: E-meet you. Zoom meet you. Since we're talking about New York, when you think about your time growing up in New York, what's a moment or a time that comes back to you often that you think about often about New York City?

James Gray: Well, maybe this says a lot more about me than it should, but to be candid, it's not a particularly happy memory, but it does count. It would be John Lennon's killing, because my memory of New York, it's a bit complicated. My relationship with the city is both loving but also filled with memories of fears that I had. It's funny because I've tried to explain to my children, whom I've taken through Central Park about 86,000 times, what it was like in 1978 or whatever. I say, "Well, there was a large dust bowl with a lot of garbage and lots of crime, and the subways were covered with graffiti and they're not anymore."

At the same time, there was a tremendous vitality that I recall, but Lennon's killing, the reason why that cemented so clearly in my memory was because it felt like a real sea change culturally. It's something that I picked up on as an 11-year-old. It was very traumatizing, obviously traumatizing for the world, but also for me in particular. I just remember the huge crowds outside the Dakota and going to see them with my brother. We had to go see them and be with them. That's, weirdly, the one that sticks out most to me when I'm asked.

Alison Stewart: It also reminds me of-- because I remember that and I remember it's one of those moments of monoculture for people of a certain age.

James Gray: Yes. In some sense, an emphasis on the niche aspect has removed a collective. I suppose that's not totally true. My daughter is, for example, a huge fan of Taylor Swift. That's a big cultural thing. Certainly, for me, it was very much The Beatles. Even though I was born later than their heyday, it still was a unifying thing culturally. I suppose that sort of thing is getting rarer and rarer.

Alison Stewart: What made you decide to go to film school at USC?

James Gray: The story is quite banal in its way. I remember seeing Apocalypse Now in the theater. I really much cherish when I was born, so much of life is timing. I saw Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull in the theaters, and they were formative experiences for me. I decided very early on, really by the age of 12, to become a movie director. It's funny because I have three children and I keep trying to tell them that it's great that they have no idea what they want to do with their lives when they're 15 or 16 or 18, that they should go to college and just study whatever they want and just learn about the world. Here I was, I was 12 years old and I was completely obsessed with movies. That was my path, really, from my very earliest memories. I just got the bug, as they say.

Alison Stewart: Is it true that you-- [crosstalk] Oh, yes. Go ahead.

James Gray: To answer your question, I remember very specifically something was Apocalypse Now at the Ziegfeld Theater. The Ziegfeld Theater don't exist anymore, but the Ziegfeld Theater was the biggest screen in New York, and it was the place to see a film. It was right off 6th Avenue in Midtown. I remember seeing that movie there, Apocalypse Now there, and it's one of those things that just changes your life.

Alison Stewart: That must have been loud.

James Gray: It was loud, but I'll never forget the picture played without any credits. They gave you this folder with the credits, and you had a jungle sound effect overture. You have to realize this is August of 1979, and my exposure to motion pictures up to that time was basically Star Wars and before that, Jaws. I don't say that [unintelligible 00:05:38] particularly about Jaws, I think is a great movie, but my feelings about cinema were not about like Martin Sheen going through the jungle and Marlon Brando talking about moral and ethical conundrum. That was a very new thing. It was a shock to the system. It changed my life, changed the course of my life.

Alison Stewart: As a young filmmaker, did you have a sense of what kind of films you wanted to make?

James Gray: You don't think of it in those terms, do you, certainly then, but now I know exactly what it was. Now when we look back at it, there was a period which we called the New Hollywood, which was movies that really became very different kinds of pictures, starting around 1967. Some people say it ended in 1980 with Raging Bull, but I actually think it ended probably a little earlier than that.

Probably lasted from 1967 to '75. I got the drippings of it, so to speak, which is that period that begins with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and goes through The French Connection, The Godfather, Robert Altman's picture, Stanley Kubrick's greatest works, all that stuff. That was really the kinds of pictures that changed me. Of course, through them, I started to discover European Asian African cinema.

The thing that's important also to discuss when we talk about New York and movies is that New York City at the time had this fantastic network of revival houses. I used to look in the back of the the Times and you would see what was playing at these revival houses. I would mark up which ones I wanted to go to. There was the Thalia Theater uptown, I think it was on 96th and Broadway, and downtown they had the Theater 80 and the Thalia [unintelligible 00:07:23] the Bleecker Street Cinema. I just went to these all the time, and they were very weird double features because sometimes it would be the prints they could get.

I remember there was a revival house right off Times Square called the Hollywood Twin, which is now a Big Apple tourist site. At the time, it was this guy ran the theater. It started out as a porn theater. Actually, there scenes in Taxi Driver, which are filmed there, but later it became a revival house, and it was whatever prints they could get. You'd be have a double feature. It would be like Bringing Up Baby and Dr. No, two movies that should never be together ever, but that was a great education.

Alison Stewart: You got me on that one. My guest is James Gray, the Criterion Channel's new collection is James Gray's New York. Let's talk about some of the films. Little Odessa, it's organized crime in Brighton Beach. You've got two brothers, Reuben, this younger brother who lives at home. The mom is dying. Joshua, the older brother who's estranged from the family. He's a hitman. I think the first shot is him shooting somebody. That's the first thing we see in the film. What did you want to explore about Brighton Beach? What did you want to explore about organized crime and the way it affects families?

James Gray: It's funny, you tend to forget these things. I was very young when I did that. I was 23 years old. You're asking me essentially to remember my younger self and remember my younger self without the usual disgust. I can tell you that at the time, I was very interested in a classical approach to storytelling. One of the things that I feel it distinguishes me to the degree that I think about this at all would be that I got a classical education in high school.

At the time, I hated it. I hated learning Latin and reading Homer translated into the English. I thought that was boring and stiff and all of that. Now I see, with the benefit of hindsight, that it wore off on me. I remember trying to do a very almost a Greek tragedy of this family and express personal things, which is another thing that the new Hollywood, I think bequeathed to me, which was this idea of the personal story. I tried to put it in the context of this genre film. I did hang out in Brighton Beach a lot as a teenager because, to be candid, it was the place where you could get a large picture of vodka and no questions asked. I spent a lot of time there as a teenager and got to know some people there. I found Brighton Beach to be this very mythic, beautiful, sort of melancholic place that attached me to my roots as a Russian. That moved me very much.

I was really trying to combine the personal with a Greek tragic story if this makes sense. I know this sounds horribly pretentious because I am pretentious, but to me, you aim for the stars, and sometimes you can hit Dresden. Is the name of that famous autobiography by Wernher von Braun. It's like, that's what you try to do, and then sometimes you fail, but at least you're trying.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from Little Odessa. In this scene, Reuben is encountering his brother Joshua, who has been missing, and Reuben finds out that he's back in town even though he's not supposed to know. Reuben is played by Eddie Furlong and Josh the Hitman is played by Tim Roth. Let's listen.

Speaker 3: A good day growing.

Speaker 4: Mom's going to die. She's got a brain tumor.

Speaker 3: Does pop still work at the stand?

Speaker 4: Yes.

Speaker 3: Be under the boardwalk near Nathan's tomorrow after school.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 3: Come here. How'd you know I was here? I won't do anything. Just tell me.

Speaker 4: Sasha Ronald told me.

Speaker 3: Nobody can know I'm here. Not your friends, not any of other relatives. Nobody. Don't discuss it with Sasha or anybody else.

Speaker 4: Okay.

Speaker 3: Okay? See you tomorrow.

Alison Stewart: It's so great in that scene because his brothers, they clearly have love for each other, but the older brother's knocking his bike over, smacking him upside the head. That relationship between the two of them. They're also eating Nathan's and throwing it over the-- They're just openly littering. When you're thinking about making movies in New York, when you think about details that you want to include, what are some of the ones that come to mind? The eating, the Nathan's, and throwing it made me laugh.

James Gray: I've always viewed these things as whole movies to try to put yourself in it as much as you can. The devil is in the details. It's interesting. If I listen to two recordings of Mahler's Fifth Symphony or whatever they can be very different recordings. It's the same notes, it's the same orchestration, but the conductor brings to it a level of detail that distinguishes one from the other. I always thought of it as my job to try to fill the movie with as much specificity as I could.

My brother and I used to go to Nathan's and we would eat those French fries with those little red plastic forks. Sad to say, we would throw the wrappers into that abandoned, old, broken-down rollercoaster, which doesn't exist anymore, by the way. It's now a baseball stadium. The whole point is that these details are what distinguish something as special or not, to me.

Again, not to sound like a broken record, but this was something that the new Hollywood always spoke to. The idea that, for example, what made The Godfather so special was that wedding sequence in the beginning of the movie where Francis Coppola got all those great details, the throwing of the sandwiches and the way that the people look or address to the moment where James Caan smashes the guy's camera and then throws money at him. These kinds of behavioral details as well.

I just tried to remember as much as I could, my relationship with my brother, what we did, where we went, how we acted when we were together and tried to convey it in the movies as much as I could.

Alison Stewart: My guest, James Gray, the Criterion Channel's new collection is James Gray's New York. Joaquin Phoenix appears in several of these films, We Own the Night and Two Lovers. Mark Wahlberg is in a couple of the films. What does it offer you as a director and a screenwriter to work with the same actors repeatedly?

James Gray: It's a great, great joy. If I could, I would just keep working with those guys. What happens is that life interferes and then everybody winds up doing other things and schedules don't match up anymore. I certainly talk to those guys a lot, still to this day. I want to make another picture. Joaquin and I have talked about it. What it does is it allows you the freedom to explore and to trust each other, because I know that I can trust them to give me everything that they have and they can trust me that hopefully that I won't make them look silly. Acting is a very vulnerable thing.

One of the things about having an iPhone which has excellent quality is everybody thinks they can act now. You just hold the iPhone up and like, "Here I am, I'm making a face," and everybody thinks that's great. Acting is a very, very rare and beautiful talent when done well. Part of the coin of the realm there is the willingness to be vulnerable, to be embarrassing, and to show the least comfortable parts of oneself. When the actor feels comfortable with the director, it leads to great work. I've always felt excited that these actors had trust in me and were willing to do things for me. I think that that's the environment that it allows for if you've worked with somebody multiple times. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: I want to play a clip from Two Lovers. Joaquin Phoenix plays the lead, Leonard and Leonard's parents own dry cleaners. When we first meet him, he has jumped off a bridge, he's attempted to take his life. This is when he arrives back home and his parents realize what has happened. This is from Two Lovers.

Speaker 5: Hello. I was beginning to think you weren't going to make it. We're having guests for dinner tonight. What happened?

Speaker 6: Why?

Speaker 5: Y'all wet.

Speaker 6: I fell into the bay. It's cold. Mom, come on. Stop. I'm fine.

Speaker 5: You fell into the bay.

Speaker 6: It's not going to happen again. Don't worry.

Speaker 5: Leonard?

Speaker 6: It was an accident. Can I change, please?

Speaker 7: Ruben.

Speaker 6: Mom, I'm fine. I'm fine.

Speaker 7: What's the matter?

Speaker 5: I think he tried again. He said he fell in the bay.

Speaker 7: [knocks] Leonard?

Speaker 5: He forgot his medication this morning.

Speaker 7: Leonard, listen, the man who wants to buy our business is coming over tonight with his family.

Speaker 5: Oh, let's cancel that.

Speaker 7: No, they're almost here. Look, he still has this bipolar problem. He just has to talk to the police. It would be nice if you join us, okay? Because we want you to join us.

Speaker 6: Okay.

Alison Stewart: That's from Two Lovers. When you're working on a script, because you're a screenwriter as well, do you think about the themes you want to tell or is it the story you want to tell? Because you tackle some big issues. You tackle class, and race, and sexism, and how humans use one another?

James Gray: That's a great question. I wish I could tell you that I sat down and went like this, "The themes I want to explore--" No, that's not the way it works. What happens is that I start out really-- maybe it works for some people. For me, I write down ideas of scenes that come to me on little index cards, and I put them on bulletin boards. To my wife's chagrin, they wind up all over the house and it's a little bit madness.

Then when I have about 50 or 60 of these cards, I realize that that's enough for a story. Then what happens is, as you write it, the themes begin to become clear to you. Not that it's unconscious, but a lot of it actually thematically is. You talked about this idea of class, which is something that is clearly in the films, but when I started, it never was that way. It just seemed to me to be the obvious thread that distinguishes us from each other in this culture that we've created.

It's part of the stories because I think it's an important part of who we are. I didn't set out to do it. Maybe this is a problem, actually, as you get older. I've not thought about this before, maybe the issue is you become too conscious of it as you get older and the work starts to calcify and you need to let the instinct and the unconscious do a lot of work for you. It's funny, a lot of times you're not even writing and you're doing most of your work. You'll be in the shower or you're vacuuming or doing the dishes, and all of a sudden you've solved a screenplay or story problem. That's your unconscious doing the work. I think this is important.

Alison Stewart: The Criterion Channel's new collection is James Gray's New York. James Gray, thanks for being with us.

James Gray: Oh, thank you. Lovely to be here.

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