James Gray
James Gray
art artists believe melodrama situations stories stunning
Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
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When I was younger, I felt it essential to see every movie ever made. Now I feel as though I've got to read every book, see every art show, watch every play and opera and concert and so on. It does not end, and of course there is truth in the old cliche that the more one knows, the more one realizes one knows nothing at all.
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I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
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The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.
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What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.
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Wait, this could really happen to me. There's no one watching out for us.
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There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.
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Really, what I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore: Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.
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I think to be a movie critic is troubling from one major respect. If you are forced to watch ten movies a week, it's really only something you can do for a few years. After a while, it's a bit too much.
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I think true economic class unhappiness comes from when across the street someone has a new Cadillac and you can't get that.
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I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.
left mainstream movies
I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.
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Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.
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My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.