It felt like James Gray was nearly everywhere this weekend at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.
He introduced an outdoor screening of Paper Tiger, written and directed by him and starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, and received the Career Leopard honor from the Swiss festival. And he discussed the role and power of cinema during a press conference. He even made time to meet for reporter roundtable interviews, one of which The Hollywood Reporter participated in.
Among other things, Gray quipped about how his wife and kids really provide no fodder for stories. “My wife is fantastic. My children are great,” he said. “I love them, and that’s not very good for drama. It’s like a sitcom or something [where someone says:] Who left the vacuum cleaner out? I tripped [over] it.”
But growing up, his family was, of course, a key influence, and that is why Paper Tiger is autographically inspired. “The formative thing in my life, so far, was my brother and I, my mother and father, a very close family unit — screwed up, very troubled, unable to express love a lot of the time,” Gray shared. “But there was love in the house, as screwed up as it was. And within a span of two months, I went off to college, my brother moved out, my father got into legal trouble, and my mother died of glioblastoma, brain cancer, like Scarlett [Johansson] has in the movie. And so that family unit, which was the love that I knew, came apart.”
