James Gray
James Gray

If everybody loves you, you must be doing something wrong. It means there's no button being pushed... The only way that everybody loves you is toward the end of your career.

James Gray
James Gray

My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.

James Gray
James Gray

At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.

James Gray
James Gray

I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.

James Gray
James Gray

Really, what I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore: Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.

James Gray
James Gray

If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.

James Gray
James Gray

I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics.

James Gray
James Gray

Time can be very good or very cruel to films.

James Gray
James Gray

The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.

James Gray
James Gray

At a certain point, you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing.

James Gray
James Gray

To the extent that independent means you're willing to attempt to put your own ideas, personality, and commitment to the material on screen, then of course I hope I'm independent until the day I die.

James Gray
James Gray

When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.

James Gray
James Gray

My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.

James Gray
James Gray

The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow.

James Gray
James Gray

My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.

James Gray
James Gray

William Atherton has a very different acting style to Bonnie Bedelia; she has a very different style than Bruce Willis.

James Gray
James Gray

Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.

James Gray
James Gray

I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

James Gray
James Gray

Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.

James Gray
James Gray

I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works.