RS: There certainly are very definite continuities through all your films, on a thematic as well as (more obvious) stylistic level. A particularly striking aspect of your work is the way you depict romantic relations between men and women. Your men—actually, this position is mainly occupied by Joaquin Phoenix in all of the last three films—approach the women they love with this tender and desperate urgency, as if these women represent everything they are and can be in the world, and when they lose those women they lose the world as well. Where does your interest in these kind of feelings, and these kind of men, come from?
JG: Well, I said the films are autobiographical, and they are. I’m not the characters that Joaquin has played in my last three films, but there are of course enormous aspects of my own personality and my own life in there. I’ve had those feelings of fixation and worship in my own life. I wasn’t an outcast or anything when I was a teenager—I was more the class clown—but I didn’t exactly hit with the ladies, either. And when you’re vulnerable like that, the person who you fix yourself on seems like everything to you. We don’t love people, we love the image we make of them—we make them the perfection that we don’t have in our own lives. And when they don’t live up to that image, or when they take themselves away from us, well, that’s it: we’ve lost everything. We haven’t, of course, but we feel that way even if we know it’s not true intellectually.
An Interview with James Gray | Reverse Shot
Posted 1 year ago
