James Gray

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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.
- James Gray
Collection: Amazing
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There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.
- James Gray
Collection: Romantic
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My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.
- James Gray
Collection: Positive
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Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.
- James Gray
Collection: Romantic
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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.
- James Gray
Collection: Romantic
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If everybody loves you, you must be doing something wrong. It means there's no button being pushed... The only way that everybody loves you is toward the end of your career.
- James Gray
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Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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.'
- James Gray
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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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'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.
- James Gray
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The closer you can get to being personal, the better the work is, or the more interesting the work is.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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
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I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.
- 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
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I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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There's never really been a tradition of making films about Jewish themes or using Judaism as a constant.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.
- James Gray
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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
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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.
- James Gray
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I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics.
- James Gray
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William Atherton has a very different acting style to Bonnie Bedelia; she has a very different style than Bruce Willis.
- James Gray
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The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow.
- James Gray
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Most people don't watch a movie four or five times; they watch it once.
- James Gray
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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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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.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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.
- 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
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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.
- James Gray
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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
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At least in America, the narrative is I'm a Cannes favorite. But, in fact, I've had my best experience in Venice, both with the audience and the jury.
- James Gray
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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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I feel like it's a real shame that my generation doesn't make an appearance at the opera.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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I am an Ashkenazi Jew, and there are a whole host of genetic disorders that only Ashkenazi Jews have. I don't know if you know this, but 16 or 17 disorders that we carry the gene for.
- James Gray
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I had written 'Two Lovers' before we started shooting 'We Own the Night.'
- James Gray
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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.
- James Gray
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I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy.
- James Gray
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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
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When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.
- James Gray