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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.
James Gray -
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.
James Gray
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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.
James Gray -
Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.
James Gray -
My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.
James Gray -
The closer you can get to being personal, the better the work is, or the more interesting the work is.
James Gray -
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.
James Gray -
What I do have to get across is the truth of the moment within the given scene. It's my job, as a director and screenwriter, to create the environment in which all those moments will come together eventually.
James Gray
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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.
James Gray -
At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.
James Gray -
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.
James Gray -
When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.
James Gray -
The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.
James Gray -
My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.
James Gray
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I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.
James Gray -
'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.
James Gray -
I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works.
James Gray -
The conventional wisdom is that people come to the United States, and immigration is so great, and they say, 'America, what a great country.' And a lot of that is true.
James Gray -
Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.
James Gray -
The word 'operatic' is often misused to mean over the top, where someone is over-emoting. And that does a terrible disservice because 'operatic' to me means a commitment and a belief to the emotion of the moment that is sincere.
James Gray
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Anyone who starts badmouthing Latino immigrants is not only a racist but ignorant. You need to refer them to what was written about the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, any group you want.
James Gray -
I suppose I'm always trying to break down the wall between my characters and myself. I'm trying to make the film as expressive and personal as I can, even if I can't explain, for example, how important it is for me to be Jewish.
James Gray -
I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
James Gray -
I'm just not willing to give up on myself. If I'm going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.
James Gray