This story about “Armageddon Time” first appeared in the Race Begins issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
You can count James Gray among recent directors looking to their past for inspiration. In the director’s “Armageddon Time,” audiences are transported to 1980 Queens, where Gray’s manager Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) struggles to find his place in an era of cultural unrest as Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign serves like magnifying glass for issues of race, class and privilege that are still very relevant today.
While Paul is essentially the same age Gray was at the time, lives in the same town, and attends the same school, what sets “Armageddon Time” apart from some of its adjacent memoirs is Gray’s refusal to dye it pink. their memories. . Absent of undeserved nostalgia, the film paints an unforgiving vision of the past and its young and often unlikable lead character.
“The kid is an idiot,” Gray said matter-of-factly during an interview alongside actor Jeremy Strong, who has a breakout role as Irving Graff, Paul’s father. “I was a punk. I was hateful as s-. I was a total a—– sometimes.”
Acting out his own faulty behavior as a child without sanding down the rough edges is indicative of Gray’s full spirit regarding the project. “The point of looking back is not to commemorate something that is always so positive,” Gray said. “Beauty is not necessarily pretty. You are looking for something beautiful, but beauty is complex, beauty has vulnerability. We are flawed people, flawed individuals.”
Strong added: “James’ movies in general are pretty unflinching and don’t sanitize the subject matter. I think this also does a pretty bold ethical and moral inventory of these characters, and through that, of ourselves collectively as a society.”
Gray’s journey to revisit his past has been a long time coming. “I came out of two movies in a row that were very difficult for very different reasons,” he said. “In the first one (‘The Lost City of Z’ from 2016), I went to three different countries, two different continents, including the Amazon jungle. I am very proud of the film, but it was a huge and physically exhausting undertaking. And then I went to outer space (2019’s ‘Ad Astra’), which had its own challenges of a very different nature. After a while with all the logistical nonsense you have to deal with, I wanted to try and rediscover what I really loved about film in the first place.”
In short, Gray wanted to go home. In a literal sense, that meant traveling to Queens with his three children, who had cajoled him into showing them where he grew up and were ultimately surprised by how modest the filmmaker’s childhood home looked. “Many of the people (in the neighborhood) at the time were already dead and there was no evidence that we would have been there,” Gray said. “I wanted to commemorate them somehow, I guess.”
Some of that responsibility fell inevitably on Strong and his portrayal of Gray’s own father for all intents and purposes. “The character (Irving) is described in the text as a Jewish Stanley Kowalski with a Ph.D.,” Strong said. “And I remember reading that and thinking, ‘Wow, how do you do that?’” But the actor, renowned for his painstaking process and dedication to his craft, had his own methods of obtaining the information he needed.
“I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve never heard of the Proust Questionnaire before, even after reading Proust,” Gray said of the famously innocuous but revealing set of questions, which include color, flower and favorite authors, and what you appreciate. more on your friends. However, at Strong’s urging, the principal took the questionnaire with Strong’s father and videotaped it.
These questions provide a wonderful composite view of a person’s worldview, and that was invaluable,” Strong said. “It wasn’t until I had that that I felt like I’d earned the right to go into his set and internalize it as much as possible, free enough to really improvise within character.”
Finding out who Irving was proved vital to Strong, particularly for a scene in which Paul’s bad behavior sparks Irving’s anger that turns physical. The exchange unfolds with such precision that the audience is forced into a state of suspended animation, caught between the horror of child abuse and the trickle of understanding for a man taken too far.
“You have to relate to these things without judgment,” Strong said. “You have to connect viscerally with them so that you can embody that person, in this case, a man who is like a steam boiler, with the pressurizing forces that are on him, but who is not equipped with the necessary tools to deal with them. . with them.
“I think, fundamentally, it is an expression of love. I think there is a desire to educate, toughen and prepare your children for a cruel world in which they need to survive. Now, I might have my own feelings about how that manifests in his behavior, as we all do, but I can understand where it’s coming from.”
Part of that sense of understanding seems to come from the set itself. Strong was inspired by the level of care and detail channeled into the recreation of Gray’s childhood home, overseen by the director with cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Happy Massee.
“James’s royal family photo album was on the coffee table,” Strong said. “So, in between cuts, I’d sit there with Annie (Anne Hathaway, who plays Irving’s wife) and we’d go through the photos. There was something profound about that because of how personal the film is and how personal the experience of making it was and the way we felt we were allowed into the inner sanctum of James’ inner life and childhood. I remember (James) talking about it as a ghost story.”
Gray agreed. With aging, he reports, he has become more aware of the fleeting beauty of life. “But there’s also a deep melancholy,” he said. “And that started to affect me more and more, especially (because) my father died of COVID while he was editing the film. It was a very strangely disconnected death because I couldn’t go see him, since he was isolated. We did FaceTime and he died.
“Suddenly there was very little evidence that it ever existed because when I got back to New York, my brother had cleaned out the apartment. I thought of all these people and places we knew so well: they’re here for a brief moment and that’s it. So yeah, I saw it a lot like a ghost story.”
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
