As auteurs go, filmmaker James Gray is a curious one. He was best known for a series of gritty drama efforts starring Joaquin Phoenix with films like “The Yards,” “The Immigrant,” “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers” across the early 2000s to the mid 2010s.
Things changed with 2016’s acclaimed explorer drama “The Lost City of Z” starring Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson and Tom Holland, which made several top films of the year lists.
In 2019 he had his biggest commercial play to date with the Brad Pitt-led sci-fi thriller “Ad Astra”. Arguably his boldest and certainly his biggest to date, the film reimagined Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” as a story spanning the solar system and dealing with some serious daddy issues.
Upon its release, the film was mostly embraced by critics but scored a mixed reaction with audiences. Out promoting his new film “Armageddon Time,” Gray calls the film one of the low moments in his career but not for the reasons you might expect.
Talking about the film during a masterclass at the recent Lumiere Film Festival (via The Playlist, he revealed the film released in theatres was not his cut and he was seemingly kicked out of the editing room at some point after he had completed filming:
“Creatively, it became a very torturous experience. The film was taken from me, ultimately: it’s not my cut of the movie, and I find it a very painful experience to have people tell me things they hated about the movie that I had nothing to do with. I was so deeply upset, I had lost all my enthusiasm for making films. And I said, ‘If I’m going to do it again, if it’s going to be bad, it might as well be my bad.'”
Thus we have yet to see his true director’s cut of the film. The reasons for Gray’s removal are unclear, but what is certain is he doesn’t look back at the experience fondly. The film ultimately grossed $135 million worldwide off a $100 million budget.
Today the filmmaker is much more fond of his new work that is a deeply personal, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale. Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong star in “Armageddon Time” which hits select cinemas next Friday ahead of a nationwide release on November 4th.
