James Gray Quotes
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I had written 'Two Lovers' before we started shooting 'We Own the Night.'
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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.
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Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.
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I've been a Yankees fan for a long time. When I was a kid in the mid-'70s, the Yankees were really great. They had Reggie Jackson in '77. I was 8 years old at the time. He hit three home runs to win the World Series in game six against the Dodgers, and I was just hooked.
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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.
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To the extent that independent means you're willing to attempt to put your own ideas, personality, and commitment to the material on screen, then of course I hope I'm independent until the day I die.
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The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.
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I've learned that you can never predict what will happen to a film. You can never predict if people will love it, if they'll hate it. It's an act of ego if you're hoping for everyone to love the film and tell you how great you are.
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The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.
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Really, what I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore: Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.
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For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.
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Most people don't watch a movie four or five times; they watch it once.
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There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.
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All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe, and it can't leave you, and there's always that longing.
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The idea that the family is this locus of support but can also hold you back and keep you down makes for good drama.
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I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.
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I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.
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I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.
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It's much easier to make a movie with kind of stylistic pyrotechnics because you can hide behind that if there's a gap in the story.
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Unfortunately for critics and audiences alike, I have made several films, and some films with really terrific actors. And I say this at my own peril, but Marion Cotillard is the best actor I've ever worked with.
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I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.
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Baseball is the greatest thing in the world.
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If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.
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I remember as a little kid, I would always feel comfortable if the light in the crack of my parents' door was on at night. When it went off, that meant they were asleep. Then that terror and the fear of being by myself started to creep in.