James Gray Quotes

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

What I do have to get across is the truth of the moment within the given scene. It's my job, as a director and screenwriter, to create the environment in which all those moments will come together eventually.

Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.

I've learned that you can never predict what will happen to a film. You can never predict if people will love it, if they'll hate it. It's an act of ego if you're hoping for everyone to love the film and tell you how great you are.

I don't think my parents told me enough how the world doesn't really care about me. I think it's important to tell children that the world doesn't really care about you. You have to fight to be heard.

I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

The state of being in love is so inherently preposterous. It usually lends itself to romantic comedy. I think we've all been there.

Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.

When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.

My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.

Film is better than digital in every way. It has better contrast ratio, better blacks, and better color reproduction. It's a more organic image, which is more the way your eyes see.

There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.

The system is not really particularly amenable to filmmakers who write and direct their own work. It's much more about the studio already having a property that has a marketable concept and then hiring the director on board.

The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.

The audience cares what the movie looks like, not about the sleepless night you had worrying about the thing getting developed.

My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.

I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.

I'm not a website guy, although I'm not a Luddite, either. I have looked at a computer, but I don't go to PopSugar and Goop and all that.

The conventional wisdom is that people come to the United States, and immigration is so great, and they say, 'America, what a great country.' And a lot of that is true.

Really, what I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore: Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.

I have no athletic skills whatsoever. I'm just literally incompetent.

I had written 'Two Lovers' before we started shooting 'We Own the Night.'

The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.

I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.

I had thrived in Miss Popham's class because she was in charge of her own curriculum. She had a wonderful idea and freedom to teach as she wished. I still think hers is the best way to organize a literature class in high school if the goal is to encourage wide reading and the love of books. My own best teaching in high school reflected my attempts to replicate the spirit of that 1943 class

I start with a mood or an idea that comes from a personal place emotionally, and the narrative concepts come much later.

As ugly an admission as this is, I met my wife at a party, and if I had been to the same party and she were dressed in different clothes, I might never have talked to her. She might have projected something that I found distasteful, even if she otherwise looked exactly the same - a beautiful woman to me.

I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.

The word 'operatic' is often misused to mean over the top, where someone is over-emoting. And that does a terrible disservice because 'operatic' to me means a commitment and a belief to the emotion of the moment that is sincere.

The idea that the family is this locus of support but can also hold you back and keep you down makes for good drama.

I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics.

I've been a Yankees fan for a long time. When I was a kid in the mid-'70s, the Yankees were really great. They had Reggie Jackson in '77. I was 8 years old at the time. He hit three home runs to win the World Series in game six against the Dodgers, and I was just hooked.

What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.

All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe, and it can't leave you, and there's always that longing.

To the extent that independent means you're willing to attempt to put your own ideas, personality, and commitment to the material on screen, then of course I hope I'm independent until the day I die.

I feel like it's a real shame that my generation doesn't make an appearance at the opera.

It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.

'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.

When I was younger, I felt it essential to see every movie ever made. Now I feel as though I've got to read every book, see every art show, watch every play and opera and concert and so on. It does not end, and of course there is truth in the old cliche that the more one knows, the more one realizes one knows nothing at all.

I would love it if my films made a lot of money, and may I say that 'The Yards' is the only one that's lost money.

The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

I remember as a little kid, I would always feel comfortable if the light in the crack of my parents' door was on at night. When it went off, that meant they were asleep. Then that terror and the fear of being by myself started to creep in.

The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow.

At a certain point, you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing.

I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy.

There's never really been a tradition of making films about Jewish themes or using Judaism as a constant.

The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.

Most people don't watch a movie four or five times; they watch it once.

The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.

Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.

It's much easier to make a movie with kind of stylistic pyrotechnics because you can hide behind that if there's a gap in the story.

I suppose I'm always trying to break down the wall between my characters and myself. I'm trying to make the film as expressive and personal as I can, even if I can't explain, for example, how important it is for me to be Jewish.

Anyone who starts badmouthing Latino immigrants is not only a racist but ignorant. You need to refer them to what was written about the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, any group you want.

The sad truth for American actors is that they really have no control whatsoever over the material that they get, or can do, particularly actresses. And if you're over 40 and you're an actress, forget it.

I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.

'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.

My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

I have no interest whatsoever in pursuing acting or becoming a mogul. I love writing and directing; I see those two jobs as the most critical in the making of a film.

I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works.

Unfortunately for critics and audiences alike, I have made several films, and some films with really terrific actors. And I say this at my own peril, but Marion Cotillard is the best actor I've ever worked with.

I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.

The decision about digital or film is going to be made for us. I think the answer is that film is gonna be gone, although I think it'll make a comeback; it'll be like vinyl records or something.

If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.

If everybody loves you, you must be doing something wrong. It means there's no button being pushed ... The only way that everybody loves you is toward the end of your career.

You should just write the movie based on people you actually know and then just see who wants to play it. Cast the net.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.