How to convince a studio that your own personal story is worthy of a big screen treatment?
When James Gray was pitching Focus Features on Armageddon Time about his Reagan-era childhood, the filmmaker tells us that it was “in the micro, the specifics of my own little story; I was hoping it would say something about where we were and where we are.”
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“It wasn’t only race, it was class and race and anti-Semitism and many things going into the stew,” says Gray about what he covered in his autobiopic, topics remain in the headlines today.
The Anne Hathaway-Anthony Hopkins-Jeremy Strong feature debuted at Cannes last May where it clocked 75% certified fresh with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
While Gray didn’t ride herd on his actors in recreating his memories, thus giving them the freedom and bandwidth to find their own approach to their characters, he was “expressively irritating to the art department on this film in a way that I wasn’t on others” when it came to building out his past.
Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in ‘Armageddon Time’
Focus Features/Everett Collection
Gray relied on thousands of slides and instamatic photographs of his father’s as well as his brother’s knowledge of their youth. The production shot 90 feet from Gray’s original home in Fresh Meadows in Queens. As he tells us here, his original home wasn’t available — but a similar 1946 house down the block which belonged to a high school friend was. And it had a similar layout. “It wasn’t a creative compromise,” Gray tells us.
Both Gray and his longtime producer Anthony Katagas also talk about the importance of making movies for the big screen, and the current marketplace between event films and smaller titles.
“When you make only one kind of thing, it’s not going to be good news in the long term” says Gray about the supply of pics to the cinema.
Here’s our latest conversation with the duo on Crew Call:
