The director’s latest film draws on family history, crime and illness to tell a deeply personal story set in 1980s Queens.
Since his 1994 debut Little Odessa, James Gray has repeatedly explored the lives of working- and middle-class families in New York’s outer boroughs, blending autobiographical elements with crime, family drama and genre filmmaking.
His latest film, Paper Tiger, continues that tradition. Set in Queens in 1986, the film follows a middle-class family whose seemingly stable life begins to unravel when crime and serious illness enter their world.
Miles Teller plays an unemployed engineer who is persuaded by his ex-cop brother, played by Adam Driver, to enter a business involving Russian immigrants in Gowanus. Scarlett Johansson plays his wife, whose efforts to keep the family together are complicated when she is diagnosed with a serious illness.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is set to open the New York Film Festival before its theatrical release in November.
From Armageddon Time to Paper Tiger
Gray initially conceived Paper Tiger as a more direct follow-up to his 2022 film Armageddon Time, with Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway expected to reprise their roles as fictional versions of his parents.
Scheduling conflicts eventually forced him to reconsider the project. Gray also decided to approach the new film differently, including a return to shooting on film rather than digitally.
He said the experience of making Armageddon Time reinforced his belief in the particular intensity created when actors know a camera is rolling on film.
For Gray, the difference is not simply technical. He believes actors respond differently when each take carries a greater sense of consequence.
“I do think it is still a more beautiful recording mechanism,” he said.
The change in cast also allowed Gray to explore the story from a different perspective. Rather than portraying the father as an aggressive or intimidating figure, he wanted Teller’s character to be fundamentally well-intentioned.
The father brings his children into the business partly out of concern that they are becoming disconnected from hard work and responsibility. What begins as an act of love, however, ultimately contributes to the destruction of the family.
A story rooted in personal experience
As with much of Gray’s work, the boundary between fiction and autobiography is deliberately blurred.
The character played by Driver is based partly on Gray’s father’s brother, as well as other people from his past. Gray described him as a fundamentally noble man who refuses to make the moral compromises necessary to succeed in a corrupt environment.
That idea of moral complexity is central to the director’s approach. Gray said he is interested in characters who struggle internally rather than simply fitting into conventional categories of hero and villain.
He pointed to films such as John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane as examples of cinema that allows characters to remain fundamentally unknowable.
For Gray, audiences do not necessarily need every question about a character to be answered.
“The person is ultimately unknowable,” he said, describing what he sees as one of the essential qualities of great cinema.
Gowanus as a physical and moral landscape
The polluted Gowanus Canal plays an important role in Paper Tiger, functioning not only as a setting but also as a metaphor for the moral world into which the family is drawn.
Gray originally considered shooting in Gowanus but found that the modern landscape was too different from what it looked like in 1986. The production instead filmed elsewhere and digitally recreated the canal as it appeared at the time.
The director sees a connection between the physical pollution of the area and the corruption that gradually enters the family’s life.
That connection also reflects Gray’s own family history. He recalled growing up in Queens near airports and frequently smelling jet fuel in the air. His mother later became seriously ill, and although Gray acknowledged that he does not know what caused her illness, the memory influenced the film.
“I saw her illness as being in the film a physical manifestation of the dumping of oil,” he said, linking the imagery of pollution to the uncertainty surrounding his mother’s illness.
Crime, illness and the unpredictability of fate
Crime is another deeply personal element for Gray. He has previously said that his father had legal problems and was convicted of a felony, meaning that the criminal world depicted in his films is not simply a genre device.
In Paper Tiger, crime and illness arrive almost simultaneously, disrupting a family that believes it has control over its future.
Gray described the film as more operatic than Armageddon Time, combining the emotional weight of family drama with Hitchcockian elements, including a home invasion and scenes of violence and suspense.
At the centre of the story is the idea that life can change without warning.
Gray recalled the suddenness of his own mother’s illness as a defining experience: one day, a family’s concerns can be entirely ordinary, and the next, an unforeseen event can fundamentally alter everything.
“That’s how it comes, from out of the blue,” he said.
Finding simplicity in later work
Looking back over his career, Gray sees a gradual movement away from overt stylistic flourishes toward a more restrained form of filmmaking.
His early films, including Little Odessa, were highly stylized, while more recent works such as Armageddon Time and Paper Tiger rely more heavily on realism and naturalism.
Gray said this evolution was not necessarily conscious, but that he has become increasingly interested in what can be expressed simply.
“Simplicity is extremely difficult to achieve,” he said, describing his goal as stripping away superficial elements to reach something more direct and honest.
He cited Alfred Hitchcock’s later career as an example of how filmmakers can continue developing well into their later years. Hitchcock was in his late 50s and early 60s when he made Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds.
For Gray, the lesson is that technical restraint does not necessarily mean reduced complexity.
Nature beneath New York
The film’s final sequences also return to one of Gray’s recurring ideas: the tension between New York’s heavily constructed urban environment and the natural world that persists beneath it.
A sequence involving Driver’s character in tall grass was partly inspired by a recurring nightmare Gray had after getting lost in similar vegetation with his brother.
The director wanted the scene to strip away the familiar elements of everyday life and return the character to something more primordial.
That idea, he suggested, also exists throughout his films. Beneath the buildings, roads and infrastructure of New York is an older landscape that existed long before the modern city.
Gray pointed to a small privately owned island near Rikers Island that remains relatively close to the terrain of Manhattan before urban development. Unlike the carefully designed landscape of Central Park, the island offers a glimpse of what the region may once have looked like.
For a filmmaker whose work has so often examined family, crime, ambition and memory through the streets of New York, that contrast remains central: the city may constantly change, but the human conflicts beneath its surface remain.
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