But, again, as it goes with moviemaking, Gray’s plans changed. As he began to write the script, he decided he’d already done the deeply autobiographical film with Armageddon Time, which was set in the early 1980s in Queens, and follows a young boy grappling prejudice. That movie was so personal—he even filmed at his elementary school and other locations from his childhood—that Gray previously told me: “If someone says, ‘I hated that movie,’ it means they hate part of me.”
For his next movie, he decided to once again take inspiration from events in his own life, but this time he created an original story. “It was like something coalesced in me to try and reveal this family later in a different mode, maybe slightly more operatic, slightly more rooted in melodrama, Hitchcockian, suspense, drama—a little more heightened,” Gray tells Vanity Fair in an exclusive interview ahead of the release of Paper Tiger, which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16.
When Strong and Hathaway had to leave the follow-up because of scheduling conflicts with other films, Gray cast Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller in their stead. “They fit a slightly more operatic idea of the movie and were able to allow me to think about it, not as a continuation of Armageddon Time, but as a whole new movie,” he says. “And that was actually very liberating.”
Paper Tiger is a tense family drama set in the late ’80s in New York, following two brothers who are chasing the American dream. But when they find themselves in a dangerous world of corruption and violence after becoming involved with some threatening Russian characters, their bond begins to fall apart. It may not have been the movie Gray had in mind, but it was the movie he was destined to make. He says, “One of the things I’ve learned is that there are movie gods, and you can’t always dictate what they’re telling you and you can’t always control the subject.”
Even if it’s not exactly autobiographical anymore, Gray’s personal history is woven into the fabric of this film. The family lives in New York, where Gray grew up. And the movie still explores elements of Gray’s childhood, like his mother’s health issues and his father’s legal troubles. “That family unit that was so tight in a matter of weeks was blown to smithereens,” says Gray. “I really think when I look back on it now, both this and Armageddon Time, and really the other films I’ve made that are among the more autobiographical, are me trying to grapple with that sense of loss.”