James Gray Quotes
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The ending shot of 'Queen Christina' with Greta Garbo is amazing. She's at the head of the ship, and she's been through so much, and the camera gets so close to her face. That really sticks out for me.
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The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow.
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I don't envy the job of people who have to watch five movies a day - that's insane.
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At a certain point, you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing.
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The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.
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It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.
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The state of being in love is so inherently preposterous. It usually lends itself to romantic comedy. I think we've all been there.
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Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.
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When I was younger, I felt it essential to see every movie ever made. Now I feel as though I've got to read every book, see every art show, watch every play and opera and concert and so on. It does not end, and of course there is truth in the old cliche that the more one knows, the more one realizes one knows nothing at all.
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It's hard to run away from who you are, and when your taste is formed is a very important thing.
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I was going to Studio 54 when I was 12 years old. It's true. It's crazy.
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The actor always must be in the scene, not above the scene. To communicate any larger ideas is my problem; it's how the narrative is constructed and directed that hopefully does it.
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What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.
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It's difficult because Manhattan is so fantastic, and it's 9 miles away, and all these cool rich people live there and have great lives, and you live in a semi-attached row house in Queens.
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My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.
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I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.
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Film is better than digital in every way. It has better contrast ratio, better blacks, and better color reproduction. It's a more organic image, which is more the way your eyes see.
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The closer you can get to being personal, the better the work is, or the more interesting the work is.
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The sad truth for American actors is that they really have no control whatsoever over the material that they get, or can do, particularly actresses. And if you're over 40 and you're an actress, forget it.
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There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
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If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.
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My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.
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When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.
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It's the demand of all demands to do a car chase that's unique because there are so many... really since the beginning of film, even in the silent era, 'The Keystone Cops.'