“Armageddon Time”: James Gray and Anthony Katagas on the importance of film and the re-creation of 1980s queens – Crew Call Podcast

How do you convince a studio that your own personal story is worthy of the big screen?

When James Gray hosted Focus Features Armageddon time Of his Reagan-era childhood, the filmmaker tells us that “on the microphone it was the details of my own little story; I hoped it would say something about where we were and where we are.”

“It wasn’t just race, it was class and race and anti-Semitism and a lot of things that went into the stew,” Gray says of what he covered in his autobiography, topics that remain in the headlines to this day.

The Anne Hathaway-Anthony Hopkins-Jeremy Strong film premiered at Cannes last May, where it received a 75% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics.

While Gray did not pursue his actors to retrieve his memories and give them the freedom and space to find their own approach to their characters, he was “expressly annoying to the art department of this film in a way that I don’t with others was not.. when it comes to building on his past.

Gray drew on thousands of slides and Instagram photos of his father and brother’s knowledge of their childhood. The production was filmed 100 feet from Gray’s original home in Fresh Meadows in Queens. As he tells us here, his original house wasn’t available — but a similar 1946 house down the street owned by a high school friend was. And it had a similar layout. “It wasn’t a creative compromise,” says Gray.

Both Gray and his longtime producer Anthony Katagas also discuss the importance of making films for the big screen and the current market between event films and smaller titles.

“If you just do something like that, it’s not good news in the long run,” says Gray about the picture deliveries to the cinema.

Here’s our final conversation with the duo on Crew Call: