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Concept
James Gray (director)
Summary
James Gray (born April 14, 1969) is an American film director and screenwriter. Since his feature debut Little Odessa in 1994, he has made seven other features including We Own the Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), The Immigrant (2013), The Lost City of Z (2016), Ad Astra (2019), and Armageddon Time (2022). Five of his films have competed for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Gray was born in New York City and grew up in the neighborhood of Flushing. He is of Russian Jewish descent, with grandparents from Ostropol, Western Ukraine, which at that time was a part of the USSR. The original family name was "Grayevsky" or "Greyzerstein." His father was once an electronics contractor. Gray attended the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, where his student film, Cowboys and Angels, helped him get an agent and the attention of producer Paul Webster, who encouraged him to write a script which he could produce.
In 1994, at age 25, Gray made his first feature film Little Odessa, starring Tim Roth as a hit man confronted by his younger brother upon returning to his hometown, "Little Odessa," a section of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. The film won the Silver Lion at the 51st Venice International Film Festival.
In 1998, Gray began shooting his second film, The Yards, a crime drama set in the commuter rail yards in New York City. The film was released theatrically by Miramax two years later on October 12, 2000.
In March 2006, Gray began production on his third film, We Own the Night, which he had been wanting to shoot since the early 2000s. Set in 1988, it stars Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg as two brothers, one a nightclub manager with ties to the mob, and the former a police detective who wages an all-out war on drugs. The film screened in competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival in May, receiving widely divergent reviews from international critics, and was released theatrically in the U.S. in October.
After that film's success, Gray was given creative freedom for Two Lovers which was loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "White Nights".
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