James Gray Transforms Personal Loss Into a Hitchcockian Drama

James Gray discusses Paper Tiger, his 1986-set drama inspired by his family history, in which Miles Teller plays a blue-collar father who partners with Russian importers while Scarlett Johansson's character battles brain cancer; Adam Driver is his ex-cop brother. Debuting at Cannes and opening the New York Film Festival ahead of a fall release, the film blends private tragedy with gritty melodrama, Hitchcockian flourishes, and Gray's aim for honest, non-flashy cinema. He explains returning to film stock, casting decisions shaped by schedules, and how personal memory—his parents and his mother's illness—shapes the work, with the polluted Gowanus setting serving as a metaphor for moral rot and a defense of ordinary nobility in cinema.