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Gray and Charlie Hunnam on set. Photo: Aidan Monaghan
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The Lost City of Z is a significant departure for James Gray, whose films are usually resigned to small, insular milieus in New York. Adapted from the book of the same name by David Grann, the film tells the true true story of Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), the British explorer who set out to find evidence of an ancient city in the heart of the Amazon jungle, only to mysteriously disappear without a trace. Rejected by high society, Fawcett seeks the Amazonian civilization as a means of rebellion against his own, which seems to reject the possibility that any other sort of advanced society could have come before it. Over the course of decades, Fawcett ventures into the jungle multiple times, becoming increasingly obsessed by his quest for transcendence. Gray’s film finds both beauty and vanity in this consuming ambition; while his wife Nina (Sienna Miller) is hardly a passive character, making her wish to journey with Percy known, he leaves her and their three children behind without much hesitation.
Questions of familial ties and their binding hold on fate are hallmark themes for Gray, but here is a reverse trajectory in which a character actively escapes his family to discover his destiny. While it bears superficial similarities, The Lost City of Z is not in the tradition of jungle-fever-dream films, and is a deliberate subversion of the typical adventurer narrative. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji shoot the jungle not with the rawness of those films but rather with alluring sublimity, characterized by the amber hues they developed in The Immigrant. As Fawcett moves closer to his goal, his motivations transform, and while the mysteries of what await him in Z hold a power that Gray finds as fascinating as Fawcett does, ambiguities of its cost emerge in equal measure with its potential triumph.
I spoke with James Gray in New York ahead of a screening of the film at theMetrograph, playing alongside a retrospective of his work.
Warning: this interview contains explicit discussion of the film’s ending.
This interview will not include any questions about shooting on film.
[Laughs.]
This is your first project where it didn’t originate with you—the material was brought to you by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B. What was the process like, finding ‘your’ movie within something else?
You find your way into the material through a different process. When you originate the material yourself—like on this upcoming sci-fi film I’m doing,Ad Astra—you are approaching narrative from the inside out, you translate your emotional response or impressions, and you’re going to give them to the world. When someone brings you something, you have to go through from the outside in and internalize it, and you have to see if there’s something about it that moves you personally. I became obsessed with it. But it’s very different from the other films for that reason, and probably feels different. I was overtaken, but there is the prospect of the weight of history that isn’t there when it’s coming from your intimate impressions, you’re not dealing with how another person dealt with the externalities of his world. It would be the reason why some would say it’s the best thing I’ve done, and some would say it’s the worst. It has to do with…
…this inversion.
Yeah. I don’t have a philosophical position on it. I don’t think one way is better than the other. In the end I wound up in the same place, consumed with what it was about. It’s like using two methods to arrive at the same place—but it may feel different, that I can’t speak to.
In the past you’ve drawn from Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare; it’s the opposite because you’re taking the themes from something as you interpret it and finding a new story through which to express those themes and what you feel about them, whereas this is taking a story and adapting it to your themes.
That’s completely true, but I didn’t feel like it was jerrybuilt. It wasn’t work to do that; the story reflected what I think about hierarchy, the upper class looking down at him, the way he puts his wife in this box of gender, the indigenous people are looked down upon by Western Europe and white people, and there’s slave-owners and slaveholders and slaves themselves—the idea of focusing on and dissecting class, ethnicity, and gender. That is not new for me.
Specifically, it very much complements the concerns in The Immigrant.
That is in that book, it’s talked about directly. In essence there are other things in the book I could have focused on that are outside of that. It’s a difficult subject matter in a way—especially as Americans, we can’t stand talking about class.
Certainly it’s absent from contemporary cinema.
Almost not at all. I’m not entirely certain why but I think it has to do with the fact that it’s very bad for corporations to talk about.
It was erased from media. Look at how sitcoms have changed. The average income of the sitcom family skyrocketed. And in movies too.
I have talked about this exact fact with Elvis Mitchell at LACMA. This one small factoid in Harper’s, it said the average family of four in 1952 earned fifty thousand a year adjusted for inflation, and the average in 2010 is two-hundred-forty thousand. They’ve sold a lie.
One of many reasons your films have been out of step with your contemporaries is your interest in working-class characters when it’s not in vogue.
That’s a sadness. That’s most people’s struggle. There are ways of illuminating cultural and societal forces by looking at rich people. We need both and we don’t get both.
In spite of the material coming from elsewhere and the reverse process involved, it’s about an ambitious man trying to realize a vision who has a wife and three children at home. On paper, it looks like your most personal film.
Two boys and a girl, no less. I didn’t think of it consciously and then I was working on a scene in particular where Tom Holland is trying to convince Sienna Miller that he should be able to go with his father to the jungle, and he’s saying, ‘Please, please,’ and I said I’m going to have the two other kids interrupt the scene in the most awkward way possible. I was drawing on what my kids do all the time. The scene was finished and my wife was on set and said, ‘that’s just like our house’—and then Sienna recently confessed to me that she was playing my wife in the movie, which is weird. And of course making a film is an obsession and you go away for a year….
Literally to the jungle.
You leave your family and it becomes the same goddamn thing.
You made a series of tragedies…
[Hysterical laughter.]
…and The Immigrant was the first to divert from that with a story of redemption. But here with Z you have two things at once: tragedy, which revolves around Nina, and transcendence, with Percy. I’m curious as to how you see these two things, and how you reconcile them. It’s a concept I struggled with, to be frank.
It’s bizarre, it’s a lot. I love that you’re candid. I’m not exactly certain.
It’s important that the final note of the film, the last shot, is all about her tragedy. And yet there is this transcendence.
We’ve talked about this before in the past, my obsession with the Shakespearean histories having the ideal combination of the sweet and the sour. In Henry IV, Part II which we’ve discussed before, in the end of that story it’s very complex and haunting because Prince Hal becomes Henry the King, and he has transcended his hoodlum days and at the ceremony is Falstaff, his good friend with whom he has really fucked around and been a loser with, and Falstaff comes up to him and says, ‘Now that you’re king we can really party,’ and the king famously says, ‘I know thee not, old man.’ It becomes Henry IV’s anointment and Falstaff’s catastrophe. That’s life. I have experienced very little unfettered triumph. There are moments, such as when my children are born, but even that comes with new fears and anxieties. In a sense the better you can communicate that life is both at once, the more powerful over time something becomes. One strives for something where the threads are there because it lasts in way that is very palpable. The idea of a tragedy is powerful in literature and theater, but in cinema it doesn’t work, certainly not commercially, and less so critically. Why is that? I think it has to do with how movies are so close to us.
We’re inside them.
We’re so inside them. It’s us: If a dream ends badly, you’re like, ‘goddamn it!’
Because they’re avenues to catharsis.
Yes, exactly; I read a portion of a book, I put it down, it’s over stretches, you’re on top of it, there’s a bit more distance than with a movie. It’s a difference in the form I was slow to acknowledge.
Well there is duality, from The Yards onward, where it’s two things at once, all the endings have bittersweet qualities even if they lean one way or another. In We Own the Night Eva Mendes’ character is the tragedy and Joaquin Phoenix is anointed—but you’re condemning his anointment in that instance, and the tragedy is seen as a consequence of his anointment. In The Immigrant, it’s literally in the last shot, characters going in two different directions, one escapes and one doesn’t, but at the same time his doom is his redemption. So in those cases there’s harmony to the duality whereas here Percy gets his transcendence and Nina the tragedy. There are two endings this time rather than one with duality. Along those lines it’s interesting that final shot rhymes with the last shot of The Immigrant, but the woman is alone in the frame, the right side of it being empty.
That’s correct. I mean, I didn’t think about him not being in the frame, I couldn’t do exactly the same shot. I was trying to validate her experience as well as theirs because I felt that it was not acceptable to deny a character’s humanity, and if I had left her, if it didn’t end with her, I would leave the audience with an open question about a major character in the movie. I did look at an ending of the movie with them just being carried off, and it wasn’t good. They go off and that’s it? What about Nina?
The Immigrant is partly a female story, but it is a female story bound to a man who enables her escape. But with Z the woman is alone.
There is a level of that being conscious; [Marion] Cotillard isn’t entirely dependent on Phoenix in the movie, in some ways she asks for it, it’s kind of the most co-dependent fucked-up relationship of all time. In Z, I’m trying to leave an ending which was as inclusive of the woman’s experience as I possibly could be. So many movies have this character where the woman says, ‘Why don’t you stay home with the family?’ and I wanted to do the opposite. She says, ‘I need to come with you.’ As a consequence, I had to end on her, she is the one that we will forget about.
She’s not in the history books.
He is—he’s transcended, disappeared forever, who knows what happened to him. The legend of Percy Fawcett.
It’s subversive then to undermine this with the film’s last gesture.
You have to take risks. That was intended. How do you take the classical form and do something with it? The last twenty minutes, something starts to break down in the film.
As important as the last shot is the crosscutting to Nina and the children at home in bed as Percy and Jack pass by the train station with people cheering on their adventure.
I stole that from Fellini’s I Vitelloni. When you steal something and the context changes, the meaning changes. I felt I could rip it off safely. The message was not only that there was a cruel passage of time; it felt dual—maybe Percy was thinking of them, but maybe he wasn’t and it’s the movie’s comment.
It’s either subjective or objective but it’s not certain which.
Yes, it’s forcing both upon you and leaving it open and it’s why the last chunk of the movie begins to feel strange. We jump around time, there’s the flashback, and time gets screwed up, I wanted to formally indicate this breakdown. The transcendence comes along with a move away from the traditional form of narrative. It’s something I’m trying to explore more in the next film.
Talking to you before you shot the film, you referenced infamous films shot in the jungle like Apocalypse Now, Aguirre, but it’s interesting to now see that you’ve in fact filmed the jungle in a completely different way on an aesthetic level. There are nods to those films, but it’s very different.
For The Immigrant, Darius Khondji and I looked at Vilmos Zigmond and The Godfather Part II to see what worked. We stopped looking at movies for this. We looked at painters. I wanted a different emotional key, not a heart-of-darkness thing, so how do you approach that? The obsession with glory and rank falls away as he gets older, and it becomes about his connection with his son, and shifts into something higher. This isn’t a Person Going Crazy in the Jungle movie. The idea that a civilized man goes into the jungle and reacts with insanity is a racist idea. Confrontation with the primitive prompting craziness in the white man.
Which is why the character of Murray does lose it in the jungle. He is weak, he is racist. He can’t accept the indigenous on their terms. Whereas Percy finds truth.
Precisely. We looked at Henri Rousseau a lot, and Claude Monet, Corot, Turner, Constable, Gainsborough.
Any literature? Poetry?
Yes, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. A great book calledThe Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, where he quotes war poetry. Weirdly that was helpful for me for the whole movie. There’s such a mournful and transcendent quality to that poetry. It was such a massive anguish that put its foot on the whole world for a four-year period and then the rest of time. It shaped everything. It’s still present. So much of Europe’s and America’s position. I read Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That too. I wanted to impart some of that. And the music, Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, and Stravinsky. This idea of that period when the world is quite similar to today, that dislocation is beginning where the orientation of the great powers is beginning to slip. It’s not just about beauty, it has to do with infusing the cinematographer’s work and your work with the most historical information and the approach that those artists in that day took. Rosenberg’s poetry is a window into that era and how Europeans viewed the world. It hopefully comes through in the actors, in the look of the film. I lied, there was one film I looked at, which was The Leopard, for the ball at the beginning.
My favorite line is Robert Pattinson saying, ‘the jungle is hell but one kinda likes it.’
That’s a real quote! That whole speech in that scene is almost verbatim.
A friend likened The Immigrant to Orphans of the Storm and Z to The Black Watch.
I haven’t seen The Black Watch but I re-watched Fort Apache—it’s mind-blowingly genius. Perfect classical cinema, that shit is on fire, it’s tearing it down! Henry Fonda is a complete shithead, a moron. And he treats Cochise like shit—that ending, sorry, my god.
Last time we spoke you expressed frustration about having to work with a different cinematographer on each project. What has it been like collaborating with Darius Khondji again?
Darius is a great artist. Not a lot of people in the world like him. I think that I had a lot more trust in him on this second film, and a greater willingness to listen to his ideas which I think only helped me. I think he learned to trust me more. The relationship in the first film required more of a dialogue about where the camera would be, what lens to use, but this time I chose the composition and lens specifically on each shot, and he would weigh in much more heavily on the light. The division of duties became clearer. I love him very much, he’s very intuitive and has a fantastic eye and knows exactly how to allow light to affect performance and mood. The thing is he’s not going to be doing the next one because its demands are entirely different. I do have some frustration, and I love him to death—on the other hand I think you have to leap into the deep end of the pool and force yourself into another direction when you know the demands are different and much weirder. I wanted someone who could deal more handily with the difficult and intractable world of visual effects, which this one will be heavy on.
Could you talk more about Ad Astra and your ambitions with it?
It’s a very different kind of movie technically than what I’ve worked on, but I’m not going to try and lose the things that I like in movies, what moves me: the relationship between humans; the difficulty we have in expressing emotions; the confrontation with our mortality; and what it means to be alone. It’s about a space journey to Neptune and back, but it’s going to be treated with the most realistic possible manner that I can muster, and I have huge hopes for it—but it is frightening in that it’s like nothing I’ve done.
The same could be said of The Lost City of Z. Your work has become unpredictable.
I don’t know what the point would be in making another movie about a guy in his apartment in Brooklyn. I’m sure there will be people who will resist it and see it as the worst thing I’ve done. I don’t see another way. People would resent me for doing the same thing over and over too. You can’t win. The only thing you can do is make things as personal as you can and keep pursuing that idea. It reflects my own current position: I don’t live in New York City and haven’t consistently for a few years now. It’s not part of my current experience, so I have to try and stretch and explore my own fears in an intimate way. I start in July and I’m filled with terror.
HUSHTRUTH....... 