When he walks in Flushing, Queens, New York, the neighborhood where he grew up, James Gray sometimes hears an acquaintance, a classmate, a friend of his parents, shout: “Hey Jimmy! “ That’s what everyone called him a baby in this one village popular which, although close to Manhattan, is actually a whole other world. “Queens don’t have much to offer”, he acknowledges. But this place, the director cannot forget it. At 53, in these streets that he knows by heart, he is sometimes called ” Gentleman “but it always will be “Jimmy”.
This is where he shot, in October 2021, Armageddon time (in theaters on November 9). This eighth film – his sixth set in New York – is the story of a year in the life of a boy from Queens. Between several cartoons, we follow him at school and in the family, in a search for identity that is none other than that of James Gray himself. Like the hero of the film, he finished elementary school in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House. It featured actors Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway with her parents in mind and evokes her maternal grandfather through the character played by Anthony Hopkins.
Queens, its anchorage point
He who is, without a doubt, one of the most gifted directors of his generation, who lives in Los Angeles, travels constantly and has shot some of the most outstanding actors (Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix …), knows he is there. , in Queens, which its community is, its anchor point. Here, the immigrants, their children, their grandchildren, mostly Jews who fled Central and Eastern Europe to escape the pogroms, all dreamed of America.
Here, somewhere between the ’70s and’ 80s, families like yours have lived, loved, at times torn apart and consumed. Mothers brooded and adored their children. The fathers had a disordered ambition in them. Successfully, sometimes. In vain, often. “We did our bestobserves James Gray, about his family. But that’s not always enough. “
Everything in these sad streets reminds him of his childhood. His middle-class family, his father, who sold spare parts for the New York subway. “He wanted to become a rich man and he never succeeded. “ He summons his loving mother, who died of a brain tumor. He remembers his agony in the early 90s.
In Little Odessa (1994), his first film, the character of the mother dies in front of the camera. Impossible to forget the screams of Vanessa Redgrave in this sensational film. It’s hard to believe those same screams aren’t echoing in James Gray’s head yet. Flushing brings him back to those howls. Here he experienced the drama, but also the boredom, the feeling of being away from everything, the desire to clear out, to go where the action takes place.
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