‘Paper Tiger’ At Cannes: James Gray & Producers on Making of the Movie

On today’s Crew Call straight from Cannes, we chat with director James Gray who returns to the Croisette with his sixth feature, the in-competition, Paper Tiger.

Also on today’s episodes are his producers Oscar-winner Anthony Katagas and Oscar nominee Rodrigo Teixeira who talk about mounting the filmmaker’s penchant for period fare in a scrappy independent feature world. Paper Tiger, which was a last minute add to Cannes’ in-competition, and also an eleventh-hour acquisition by NEON before the fest began, counts 25 executive producers. Pre-sales for the movie, which shot last summer, were in swing a year ago at Cannes as Deadline first reported.

Gray’s latest about a two New York City brothers, one a get-rich-quick ex-cop and another a dutiful hardworking engineer family man, respectively played by Adam Driver and Miles Teller, isn’t a mere exercise in the 1980s crime milieu, rather a very personal family story for the director. The brothers in the film get into a partnership largely unbeknown to them with the Russian mob as they set up business in NYC’s polluted Gowanus Canal. Gray says that “Ninety percent” of the movie is true, down to a scene where Gray and his young brother are facing gunpoint with a mobster in a car. Driver’s character is a composite of his uncle and his father’s business partner. The director tells us how he finally came to grips to brave the story. Scarlett Johansson plays the cancer-stricken wife of Teller’s character.

We also ask Gray to share his thoughts on the upcoming Paramount-Warner Bros merger: “Generally speaking, and just in pure market terms, the fewer people who buy stuff, the less competition there is. And so how is that a good thing? Common sense tells you, less competition is the basic laws of economics. Having said that, if they’re making 30 movies and they have different divisions…Then then they’re making a ton of movies.”