James Gray Calls Cinema 'Closest Thing To A Dream' At Locarno
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- James Gray received an honorary award at the Locarno Film Festival ahead of Paper Tiger's Swiss premiere on the 8,000-capacity Piazza Grande, with the festival running through August 15.
- Gray described cinema as 'the most beautiful art form' and 'the closest thing we have to a dream,' comparing it to the 1.5 to 2 hours of REM sleep humans get per night.
- Gray argued cinema evolved faster than any other art form, citing Fritz Lang's M arriving roughly a year and a half after the first full-length sound film in 1928, against centuries between Lascaux cave paintings and 15th-century perspective.
- Gray described Paper Tiger — starring Adam Driver and Miles Teller, with Scarlett Johansson — as a New York-set story of two brothers whose pursuit of the American Dream puts them on the wrong side of the Russian mafia.
- Gray said of his directing method, 'I have no acting talent. I'm not a good director of actors,' explaining he lets actors dictate their own movements and always shoots the rehearsal because 'messiness is always interesting.'
- Locarno also programmed two Gray retrospectives — We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008) — alongside a Monday masterclass following the Paper Tiger screening.
Why it matters: A director whose films depend on Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson publicly calling himself 'not a good director of actors' is a striking self-assessment that reframes his ensemble-driven approach: he succeeds by giving actors freedom rather than imposing a Hitchcock-style representational method. The Locarno honor — capped by a Piazza Grande screening for 8,000 and a dedicated masterclass — signals sustained European institutional validation of a filmmaker who works outside the franchise system.
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