The New Yorker - 16.09.2019

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THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019 37


Jewish family, in what he calls the Ar-
chie Bunker part of Queens. His mother
taught at Queens College, his father at
the New York Institute of Technology.
His elementary school had classes with
combined grades, owing, he says, to low
funding. He found other ways of occu-
pying himself. “He was always drawing
on these piles of scrap paper, all day
long, mostly superheroes,” his older
brother, Edward, an intensive-care phy-
sician, says. “It was almost fanatical.”
His parents eventually arranged for him
to have art lessons.
“It’s a very important part of his iden-
tity that he had this kind of lonely, weird,
fish-out-of-water New York childhood,”
says Gwyneth Paltrow, who played the
lead in “Two Lovers” after years of
friendship with Gray. When Gray was
in junior high, his parents moved him
to the private Kew-Forest School, in
the more affluent Forest Hills neigh-
borhood. Donald Trump was an alum-
nus, and Fred Trump was on the board
of trustees. His mother used to drive
him around to ogle the big houses. Gray
was an indifferent student who cheated
on tests, and the new surroundings fed
an inferiority complex. Still, he says, the


school changed his life. Its motto was
“Ad summum”: To the highest.
“He was so much a personality—I’m
not sure I had ever met anyone like
him,” Christopher Spelman, who taught
Latin at Kew-Forest before going on
to a career as a film composer, says. With
the support of Spelman and the school’s
French teacher, Gray helped start a film
club with the mission of going into
Manhattan and watching movies at re-
vival houses; afterward, the club would
process to La Bonne Soupe, or some
other teen-ager-friendly spot, and talk
the movies through. Gray funded his
excursions by stealing money from his
mother’s purse, a transgression for which
he says he still has no regrets.
In the autumn of 1981, Gray went to
a double bill at the Carnegie Hall Cin-
ema: “Dr. Strangelove” and “Apocalypse
Now.” “New movies back then were
‘Jaws,’ ‘Superman,’ and ‘King Kong’ with
Jessica Lange,” he explained. “Then you
see ‘Apocalypse Now’ and it was, like,
What the fuck was that?” Over the next
few years, Gray saw everything he could.
(He continues the habit: every night,
after his wife and children are in bed,
he steals past a lavender patch behind

his home to a guesthouse, and watches
a film.) “He was always ambitious for
himself as a director, even in the sev-
enth grade,” Spelman says. When Gray
revealed his burgeoning ambition to his
family, the response was not what he
had hoped.
“What? You’ll never make it!” Gray
recalls his father saying. His mother:
“James, look where we are. We have no
connections. We’re in Queens!” His older
brother understood the dream but did
not share his hope. “You might as well
be an astronaut,” he said.
The year that Gray was making his
college thesis film, his father and his fa-
ther’s business partner were indicted on
fifty-six counts of fraudulent activity
committed through their electronics
company, Envort-Gray, which supplied
the M.T.A. They were charged with
bribing a Metro-North employee and
billing for undelivered parts; the year
when Gray started working on “Little
Odessa,” his father pleaded guilty to
three counts and paid a fine. “In a very
short time, my father had his legal trou-
bles, my brother went to college, my
mother died, and I went off to Califor-
nia,” Gray says. “Almost overnight, the
family unit was destroyed.”
The experience hardened him. But
it was also during this period that he
developed a rigorous, exultant command
of craft. Gray has a reputation among
actors for being unable to stop laugh-
ing when a take is going exceptionally
well. “I remember being one time, like,
‘James, what the fuck? I’m baring my
soul here, and you’re giggling,’ ” Paltrow
says. “He just gets so excited about the
art of it.” In “Little Odessa,” the can-
cer-afflicted mother, played by Vanessa
Redgrave, collapses on the kitchen
floor—a moment that draws on Gray’s
mother’s illness. To the surprise of peo-
ple present, Gray laughed all through
the scene as it was shot.

O


n Tuesday, Pitt came on set in a
spacesuit, and he and Gray went
over the next hours’ material. Pitt, who
has been a producer on Gray’s two most
recent movies, described receiving “very
vulnerable e-mails” from Gray every
morning, exploring the director’s private
hopes and fears and relating them to the
scenes of the day. “It’s the most difficult
film I’ve ever worked on, because the

THE MAN WHO OWNED ME


It was a man I’m sure of it.
Though I never saw him
I felt him rise, climbing up
Through me until I bent
To a devotion not my own.
I felt him in my belly, low
In my hips. I carried him
Like I carried my own children.
I have no idea if he was old
Or young, what his face
Would have been had he flesh.
He did in me whatever an ember does
Burning slowly until all of a piece
What it feeds on falls to ash.
Sometimes I miss what he taught me
To see, the hunger it gave me.
I think he must wait now just
Beside my body, believing I’ll
One day fall back to my knees.
If he had hands, they would be
The kind of hands I open for.

—Tracy K. Smith
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