‘Armageddon Time’: James Gray & Anthony Katagas On The Importance Of Cinema & Recreating 1980s Queens – Crew Call Podcast
deadline.comHow to convince a studio that your own personal story is worthy of a big screen treatment? When James Gray was pitching Focus Features on Armageddon Time about his Reagan-era childhood, the filmmaker tells us that it was “in the micro, the specifics of my own little story; I was hoping it would say something about where we were and where we are.” “It wasn’t only race, it was class and race and anti-Semitism and many things going into the stew,” says Gray about what he covered in his autobiopic, topics remain in the headlines today.
The Anne Hathaway-Anthony Hopkins-Jeremy Strong feature debuted at Cannes last May where it clocked 75% certified fresh with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
While Gray didn’t ride herd on his actors in recreating his memories, thus giving them the freedom and bandwidth to find their own approach to their characters, he was “expressively irritating to the art department on this film in a way that I wasn’t on others” when it came to building out his past.
Gray relied on thousands of slides and instamatic photographs of his father’s as well as his brother’s knowledge of their youth.
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