James Gray has worked with Joaquin Phoenix on two movies before Two Lovers, but even he seemed unprepared for what his lead actor has become as he moves into his rap career. Despite the obvious circus going on with Casey Affleck documentary and the big beard and all, Gray was still able to talk to us about his new movie, and getting the performances he did out of Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw.

We've been here for 30 minutes, and nobody's talked about your movie. Joaquin's got this thing going on. Are you at all conflicted by what else is going on?
No, I don't really care. I care if they get in the way, literally, of me having to do my job. In the interest of openness, I will tell you that one must take a long view when one makes films. In a way, it's a marathon and not a sprint. Whether the film lasts-- which is not to say that this sort of thing is useless. Judgements of the movie, or whether people talk about the movie for what it is, that stuff can only be measured 10, 20, 30 years down the road. I'm a student of films in general, and many of my heroes have sort of become friends of mine. Francis Coppola is very willing to remind me of the initial reaction to Apocalypse Now. You kind of have to have tunnel vision, and kind of block out the silliness. This is totally unexpected, and it is silly. But I have no control over it.

Well it's also a testament to your working relationship, that you're able to get this work out of him if he is so idiosyncratic.
Well he's a brilliant guy, and sometimes very brilliant people with wonderful talents have a lot of resentment and self-loathing for that talent. If you look at what happened to Marlon Brando. At a certain point you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing.

Why have you worked with Joaquin so many times?
it's a matter of personal taste. Aside from this new project of his, we are very much simpatico. We have the same tastes in art, and I get along with him very well. I think he's really great. I think he's one of the few actors around today in the ENglish language who is able to express a real internal complexity, really non-verbally, because he's a very thinking actor. That's a refreshing and beautiful thing for a filmmaker, because really that's what you're trying to do ultimately. I'm a huge fan of movies, and I loved the era of Brandon and Montgomery Clift, and to me he's the closest thing we've got to a young Montgomery Clift.

In this movie Joaquin's character seems more angry at himself, and more internal, than he has in other movies, where he might have seen more threatening. Why did you decide to make that shift with your lead character? I know this sounds like a dodge, but it's not. When you sit down to write something, at least when I do, you don't consciously think "this time, I'm going to try this." The only decision I made early on, on that level, was that I didn't want to include crime genre elements or murder. That's the only calculation I made. I thought very clearly about making a serious film about the subject of desire and love. I suppose that that very subject change requires a change in personality or the lead character. The state of being in love is so inherently preposterous. It usually lends itself to romantic comedy. I think we've all been there.

This seems like your most personal film to date. How autobiographical is this?
This movie is the least autobiographical of the four. It's so funny, because i can't tell you how many people have come to me and said "Ah, you're leaving the genre thing, you're finally doing something autobiographical." No, those movies were the autobiographical ones. That was my dad's life in The Yards, and he told me every single story that wound up in that movie. I tried to forget autobiographical, and focus on personal.

How much of this film is a commentary on Jewish notions of family, antiquity, inbreeding, stuff like that?
Because of the genetic testing and stuff like that? That is one thing that's autobiographical, now that you mentioned it. I had gotten my wife knocked up-- on purpose-- but then we had to go to this genetic counselor. 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. And the genetic counselor started telling me about couples who came in who both carried the gene for Tay-Sachs Disease. I said, well, what does that mean for the couple? And the genetic counselor said, well, some relationships don't make it at all. I thought as back story for heartbreak [in a movie] it might be interesting.

[A very convoluted series of questions leads Gray to talk about how Gwyneth Paltrow got involved in the film]
I love Gwyneth. I've known her socially for many years, and she was like, we should work together, but you only make movies with guys with guns, which I took as a little bit of a dare. And Joaquin and I thought we might actually hate her-- we both liked her socially, but we worried when she got there that we wouldn't like her. She's very precise-- she does two or three takes, she knows all her lines, and that's what she does. Joaquin and I will do 15, 20, 30 different takes where we improvise all over the place. And what I found was that she was actually quite willing to improvise, and quite free, but also very disciplined. I noticed that he sort of had to up his game, and get more disciplined. She has, for me, some of the best improvisational stuff in the movie.

This film has a very specific Jewish perspective. Do you think people who understand that perspective react differently than people who don't? The only place the picture has opened is France, so far. And it did unbelievably well, and that has a very small Jewish population. It's possible it was literally every single Jewish person in the entire country, but I don't think so.

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