- Writer/director James Gray made his first film Little Odessa (1994) at the age of twenty-five. The film, which starred Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell, received critical acclaim and was the winner of the Venice Film Festival's prestigious Silver Lion Award in 1994.
Miramax Films released James Gray's second feature, The Yards (2000) starring Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Faye Dunaway, Ellen Burstyn, Charlize Theron and James Caan in fall of 2000. The film was selected for official competition at the 2000 Cannes International Film Festival. Prior to "The Yards" and "Little Odessa", Gray attended film school at the University of Southern California. It was there that his student film Cowboys and Angels was first seen by producer Paul Webster, who encouraged Gray to write his first feature script.
As a child growing up in Queens, New York, Gray aspired to be a painter. However, when introduced in his early teenage years to the works of various filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Gray's interests expanded to the art of filmmaking. The Yards returned Gray to Queens where the story takes place.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jonathon
- SpouseAlexandra Dickson Gray(May 21, 2005 - present) (3 children)
- ChildrenChild
- Frequently casts Joaquin Phoenix.
- His films are always shot on 35 mm film.
- His films are often set in New York City.
- His films often feature party scenes where strings of words are hung on the wall. ("Welcome home," "Happy new year.")
- Films often center around complicated father/son relationships.
- Used to be friends with Isabelle Huppert, who introduced him to his idol, Claude Chabrol. Their relationship changed by the time Gray found himself at odds with Huppert while serving as a member of the 2009 Cannes film festival jury, which she presided. After this experience, he described the actress as a 'fascist bitch'.
- Considers The Immigrant (2013) as the best film of his career and Marion Cotillard as the best actor he ever worked with.
- He directed 4 movies that were screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival: The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008) and The Immigrant (2013). None of these movies received a single award from the jury.
- Four of his five films were nominated for Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, he was nominated for the first time with his second film, The Yards (2000). His following films, We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008) and The Immigrant (2013) were all nominated for the Palme d'Or.
- Some of his favorite films are Rocco and His Brothers (1960), The 400 Blows (1959), Singin' in the Rain (1952), Tokyo Story (1953), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), La Strada (1954), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Raging Bull (1980).
- I'm just not willing to give up on myself. If I'm going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.
- The idea that if your film takes place in 1988 it should only have music from 1988 shows a totally limited sense of history and how history is an accumulation of details. Is all your furniture from 2007?
- Apparently I'm the dramatic version of Jerry Lewis. Someone wrote that I'm the object of Gallic fetish.
- My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast. You grow up a goofy-looking idiotic kid in a fairly working-class neighborhood that's very close to a very rich center of the universe, then I guess you feel like the outsider and that becomes a preoccupation.
- 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. What I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore - Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and adored.
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