James Gray (“Armageddon Time”): ‘Americans are proud of our greed’

James Gray leads, together with a handful of contemporary directors (such as Richard Linklater with ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Childhood’ or Paul Thomas Anderson with ‘Licorice Pizza’), the American generation that has decided to look back more (in recent times in particular) to build stories, be they autobiographical love letters or reliable portraits of a particular decade. ‘Armageddon Time’, his new film, is a mixture of both, as it X-rays the American society of Ronald Reagan and at the same time goes back to a childhood that is as familiar as it is convulsive. We were able to talk about all this (childhood, political news, cinema) with the American director himself in an interview with eCartelera.

eCartelera: The coming of age of the child who faces his family to study what he wants and not what is forced upon him is the cornerstone of ‘Armageddon Time’, but it emerges as a universal message understood by all. Why is this kind of story more tangible in the United States? Because of the mentality of the company? Traditionally?

James Grey: It’s difficult to answer this question because I don’t know how they react in other countries. i’m american. I can only try to reflect the world as I see it. America tends to believe strongly in capitalism and its virtues in an exaggerated way. What I see in you Europeans, and it’s a stereotype but I like it because it’s fun, is that you care about money but, in the end, you’re more evolved and you belong to older cultures. You are ashamed to worry about money. We Americans pride ourselves on our greed and always say, “Come on, let’s make a deal, a deal.” You Europeans recognize how vulgar it is (laughs).

EC: Watching the film I thought that the American dream is similar to religion in the way it lies and keeps ordinary people. Is the American dream real? Or is it a fantasy?

jg: The American dream is a fantasy, but it’s a necessary fantasy. All civilizations have lies that they tell themselves to move forward, to perpetuate themselves.. I think this is part of the glue that unites cultures. What we see now is because that myth has remained unfulfilled for so many people for so long that anger is created, undefined anger, but anger, and usually directed in the wrong place. The evidence is that social mobility has become increasingly limited.

EC: There is a current trend of directors who tell their lives in the form of a biopic. There is Paolo Sorrentino with ‘It was the hand of God’, Kenneth Branagh with ‘Belfast’ or Steven Spielberg himself with his subsequent ‘The Fabelmans’. Is it a catharsis for you to write these kinds of stories?

jg: At all. What I try to convey in the film is that as the child grows, the less answers he receives, the less opportunity for relief he feels. The world reveals itself only in more complex layers. I feel more and more stupid as I get older, I understand the world less and less. During the quarantine, I was with my little son in the backyard when he saw a praying mantis in the garden. He stared at it for a long time and told me how bright green that mantis was. I realized that my very young son had more wisdom than me in the real world because he was able to look at it without complications or neuroses. The teenage experience involves starting to accumulate multiple meanings to things that perhaps only exist in that person’s head. You reach a stage in life where you realize that history is made up of contradictions, struggles, discussions, solutions, victories, defeats, pandemics, climate change, horrible human beings -usually men-…it all fits into the same drawer.

The moment of defeat

EC: One of the things I liked most about the film is that Paul Graff’s (Michael Banks Repeta) shot, the moment his life starts to fall apart, is also the moment his life really begins. Life doesn’t really begin until your first failure, right?

jg: Life is always full of defeats. You are five years old and your mother tells you that you can’t have that candy, it’s your defeat. Life is relative, right? If you don’t get a piece of chocolate at five, it’s the end of the world, so I think we’ve always faced defeat. Capturing him on film was very important in underlining the idea that he ultimately benefits from his own failure. Horrible thought right? Essentially you can find yourself in a situation where you get out of a form of privilege, and you recognize it as a moral or ethical catastrophe to gain your advantage. That’s why I’m very much against—among other reasons—what I think is a grotesque oversimplification of white guilt, because the child ultimately benefits even if she sees the emptiness in him.

EC: Your filmography is made up of different stages. You have the neo-noir of “The other face of crime” and “The night is ours”; you have that longing for the adventurous spirit of human being with ‘Z, The Lost City’ and ‘Ad Astra: To the stars’. You have now opted for an intimate and personal project.

jg: The fact of choosing is not really present. You feel like you have to at some point. I guess coming to a certain point in your life and realizing there are more days behind you than ahead of you, it forces you to reevaluate. where are you from and what happened. I guess that’s when I realized that. I had a sense of loss, in the country, in my own life… and I wanted to bring that sense of loss to life. Maybe like in a ghost story, in the sense of bringing back people I’ve lost. A little selfish, but I guess all art is a little selfish.

‘Armageddon Time’ hits theaters on November 18th.