James Gray is a grandmaster of conversational tangents. Should you meet up with the veteran filmmaker behind Little Odessa, Ad Astra, Armageddon Time, and a number of other movies that run the gamut from epic to scrappy for, say, an old-fashioned coffee klatch, you’ll find yourself wonderfully dizzy from all the detours. If your goal is to interview Gray about a film, however, we wish you the best of luck in staying on topic.
We have no sooner sat down in the back of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes to talk about Paper Tiger, his latest tale of crime and the city that had premiered at the film festival a few days prior, before an off-handed remark about a vintage jacket leads us deep into the weeds. A partial inventory of subjects passionately discussed would include: the dodgy origin story of Hollywood, Ed Sullivan, Raging Bull, YouTube, David Lynch (complete with an absolutely dead-on impersonation of the late filmmaker; Gray is great mimic), Jaco Pastorius, that time Casablanca director Michael Curtiz allegedly killed several people on a film set, the existential pain of a bad cup of coffee, the Beatles’ early demos for Decca Records, and why Ringo Starr is still vastly underrated as a drummer (“They’re not called the Guitar-als, they’re not called the Bass-als, they’re called the fucking Beatles!”).
