James Gray Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Netflix has landed feature rights to Seesaw Monster — a 2019 book by Kotaro Isaka, whose novel Maria Beetle was recently adapted into the David Leitch actioner Bullet Train for Sony, starring Brad Pitt. 

Seattle International Film Festival has revealed its lineup for the 50th edition, which takes place May 9–19 at venues across Seattle and followed by a week of select virtual screenings on the SIFF Channel May 20–27. The program includes 261 films representing 84 countries and regions, including 92 features, 47 documentaries, five archival features, two special tributes, two secret screenings and 115 short films. The festival will open with Josh Margolin’s action comedy “Thelma” from Magnolia Pictures, which will screen at the Paramount Theatre during SIFF’s opening night on May 9.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts has announced that Miky Lee will deliver the 20024 Commencement address.

EXCLUSIVE: After taking on Sigmund Freud in Sony Pictures Classics’ Freud’s Last Session, Academy Award winner has been set to star in Eyes in the Trees, a reimagining of the classic H.G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, from director Timothy Woodward Jr.

A teenager has launched a cheeky protest over the state of his town's roads - by fishing in the huge potholes. And now Ben Thornbury hopes the council 'bites' and fills them in.

In a world where streaming services are a dime a dozen and mega-corporations are vying for your money with promises of expansive libraries of films and TV shows, it can all be overwhelming. How can you possibly know which of the new streaming releases are any good? And what about if you want to find a specific classic? Well, that’s where a service like Galerie comes in.

Editor’s note: This interview was originally published on May 16 during the Cannes Film Festival. It is being rerun now to coincide with the film’s domestic release and interviews were carried out prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Vanessa Redgrave To Be Feted At European Film Awards

Naman Ramachandran British actor Vanessa Redgrave will receive the European Lifetime Achievement award for her outstanding body of work at the European Film Awards. Hailing from an illustrious family of actors, Redgrave’s first lead in “Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment” (1966), by Karel Reisz, won her best actress at Cannes and scored BAFTA and Oscar nominations.

EXCLUSIVE: Actress Liv Tyler has signed with CAA.

Creative Artists Agency on Wednesday announced the elevation of five to agent, along with the promotion of another to an executive role.

EXCLUSIVE: Two-time Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins has signed with UTA.

At 80, Martin Scorsese has finally made a Western, and it packs a wallop. The much anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon had its world premiere on Saturday night at the Cannes Film Festival, an epic set in the Osage Nation of Oklahoma largely in the early 1920s and telling a harrowing and highly complex tale that still resonates today, but seems incredible that it ever could have happened.

EXCLUSIVE: In 2016, the hottest book in Hollywood hadn’t even been published yet. Circulating in galley proofs, it was the latest non-fiction work from author David Grann, whose 2009 book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon had recently been filmed by James Gray and produced by Plan B. His new book was another mouthful — Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI — and it proved just as tasty.

Last October, news broke that James Gray‘s follow-up to “Armageddon Time” would be a biopic about John F. Kennedy‘s time in World War II.

EXCLUSIVE: James Gray and Focus Features are reuniting as Gray has come on to direct Ezekiel Moss for the studio from a script by Keith Bunin. Likely Story is producing the film. Bunin recently delivered a draft that blew the studio and Gray away with the director recently committing to it. Gray and Bunin will now team to develop the full the story as they get ready for the pre-production process.

Last October, news broke that James Gray‘s follow-up to “Armageddon Time” would be a biopic about John F. Kennedy‘s time in World War II.

Robert Pattinson’s production company Icki Eneo Arlo and LA-based independent production company Spacemaker Productions have joined the filmmaking team for Sebastian Silva’s outrageous black comedy Rotting In The Sun, starring Silva and comedian Jordan Firstman.

Based on the director’s childhood, James Gray’s Armageddon Time tells the story of 12-year-old Paul (newcomer Banks Repeta), and how his Jewish family reacts to his friendship with a Black student, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), in early ’80s New York. Both boys share a love of space flight, and their pre-teen dreams take their imaginations light years away from their mundane lives. But the backdrop is a moment of tension, as Ronald Reagan, seeking the Republican Party’s nomination for president, stirs up civil unrest in the country. Paul’s father, Irving, played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong, despises Reagan’s dog-whistle provocations and screams at his image when he appears on television. But, he wonders, being from a vulnerable minority himself, is it wise for him to allow his son’s friendship to continue?

CAA has promoted eight trainees from its training program, CAA Elevate, to Agent. Those moving up at the agency are Pili Allen, Tara Anderson, Nicole Brookman, Ben Gelfand, Erica Drache Martelli, Jonathan Rodrigues, Lucas Ryan and Michael Taber.

How to convince a studio that your own personal story is worthy of a big screen treatment?

BEST PICTURE1. “Tár” (61 points)2. “Aftersun” (49 points)3.

The National Society of Film Critics has named Tár as Best Picture in the group’s 57th annual vote Saturday. The results were announced on Twitter.

Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will factor in this year’s movie awards races.

While theaters are still recovering from the pandemic directly impacting attendance and box office outcomes, there are still really great movies struggling to find audiences outside of streaming and VOD options when they are released in theaters. Some smaller to mid-range pictures, mainly horror, have done better than expected in the shadow of the $100-200 million-dollar budgeted blockbusters that seemingly come out round-year now.

Avatar: The Way of Water‘s mega-publicized opening has brought movies back into the conversation, but movie-makers seem to have been lost in the mist. James Cameron’s persona is ablaze across the media but, by contrast, the very personal work of Sam Mendes, James Gray and even Steven Spielberg has done a fade-out in recent weeks.

Call it the COVID effect: 2022 has been a year of directors returning to their past and reinterrogating it. Alongside prominent works of autofiction like James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” or Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” there’s a less conventional but no less revelatory work that also emerged this year: Mark Pellington’s “Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit.” Note the semantics of the title.

Every director brings a piece of themselves to their work, but this Oscar season has seen films becoming ever more personal. And it’s up to the cinematographer to work with their director to bring those stories to life. 

It seems somehow surprising that Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and lauded veteran cinematographer Darius Khondji had never worked together before collaborating on Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. But when they finally did come together on what would become Mexico’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, there was an instant melding of the minds and a true feeling of kinship, with each telling me they felt as if they’d discovered a brother they’d never met.

It’s awards season again, and there are some filmmakers who always get brought up around this time when they have a new film. One of those names is James Gray, who is making the rounds to promote his new drama, “Armageddon Time.” And over the course of a few different interviews, the filmmaker has been dropping a some interesting nuggets of info.

Best Feature“Aftersun”“The Cathedral”“Dos Estaciones”“Everything Everywhere All at Once”“Tár”Best Documentary Feature“All That Breathes” * WINNER“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” “I Didn’t See You There”“The Territory”“What We Leave Behind”Best International Feature: “Athena”“The Banshees of Inisherin”“Corsage”“Decision to Leave”“Happening” *WINNER“Saint Omer”Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director AwardCharlotte Wells for “Aftersun” Owen Kline for “Funny Pages” Elegance Bratton for “The Inspection” Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic for “Murina” Beth de Araújo for “Soft & Quiet” Jane Schoenbrun for “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair “Best Screenplay: “After Yang,” Kogonada“Armageddon Time,” James Gray“Catherine Called Birdy,” Lena Dunham“Tár,” Todd Field *WINNER“Women Talking,” Sarah Polley, based upon the book by Miriam ToewsOutstanding Lead PerformanceCate Blanchett in “Tár” Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”Dale Dickey in “A Love Song”Colin Farrell in “After Yang” Brendan Fraser in “The Whale” Paul Mescal in “Aftersun”Thandiwe Newton in “God’s Country” Aubrey Plaza in “Emily the Criminal” Taylor Russell in “Bones and All “Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All At Once” Outstanding Supporting PerformanceJessie Buckley in “Women Talking” Raúl Castillo in “The Inspection” Hong Chau in “The Whale” Brian Tyree Henry in “Causeway” Nina Hoss in “Tár” Noémie Merlant in “Tár” Ke Huy Quan in “Everything Everywhere All At Once”Mark Rylance in “Bones and All “Gabrielle Union in “The Inspection” Ben Whishaw in “Women Talking”Breakthrough Performer: Anna Cobb in “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”Frankie Corio in “Aftersun”Anna Diop in “Nanny” Gracija Filipovic in “Murina” *WINNERKalie Reis in “Catch the Fair One”Breakthrough Series –

Armageddon Time director James Gray’s got a tip for aspiring filmmakers: If you want to look good as a director, work with gifted actors, like Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong.

Three rite-of-passage movies are vying for attention this week at a moment when the rewards of maturity seem to be offering more gratification than the agonies of youth.

Veteran studio executives Peter Kujawski and Jason Cassidy will receive an Industry Tribute at the 32nd annual Gotham Awards ceremony, taking place live and in person at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Monday, November 28.

Director James Gray gave us an ambitious sci-fi film with the Brad Pitt-led “Ad Astra, “making his off-world version of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel “Heart of Darkness.” The novel helped previously influence Francis Ford Coppola’s nightmare-esque vision of the Vietnam War film “Apocalypse Now,” and Gray seemed to borrow ideas from the book and the film.

Filmmaker James Gray has arguably been trying to avoid himself and his past these last few years, perhaps in order to create something new. A filmmaker who has spent much of his time exploring America and his roots in New York, with humanistic, moral, and family stories about class within the genre of crime (“Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” “We Own The Night”), in the last few years of his filmmaking career, Gray has seemingly gone as far away from New York as possible, into the jungles of the amazon for “The Lost City Of Z” (2014) and into the far reaches of outer space for “Ad Astra” (2019).  And while those films have expanded the palette of his preoccupation, “Ada Astra” in particular tackling ideas of American exceptionalism and its myths, perhaps both films—still centered on class, family, fatherhood and more— demonstrated, as far as he travels, the filmmaker cannot escape himself or his human obsessions and concerns.