He wanted us to find the essence of what he had written. James doesn’t want the film to be autobiographical, in the sense of a one-to-one portrait. And of course, I pried and pried and tried to interrogate him as much as I could about his father-got a tape-recorder in his hand. We went to a lot of significant places for him. We visited the neighborhood and I asked him to take me to the Panorama at the Queens Museum, which I knew he’d been to a lot as a child with his grandfather. You did a kind of tour of Queens with James, right, to learn about his and his father’s world? I didn’t want to hold anything back from what I believed was the cruelty of some of those moments. And yet I knew that James wanted to be unflinching about everything. At the end of the day, I went and got Annie and I said, “Let’s bring James upstairs and give him a hug right now.” We’ve been through ritual, which drama is-we’re enacting abuse and cruelty that was inflicted on this child, and I know that was a difficult day for him, to be in a way retraumatized by it. There’s a scene in the bathroom, of course, where we see him particularly violent. There’s a different way of thinking of what’s appropriate in terms of child-rearing, so a lot of it is a misguided love expression. It’s their fallibility that makes them compelling to me, to figure out just viscerally what it’s like to be in that particular rock-and-hard-place that they’re in. I’m really interested in characters that are deeply flawed and deeply fallible. It’s something many people can relate to. There’s something about that that really touches me. There’s nothing malevolent about this character if anything, there’s something ineffectual about him, uncomprehending. He is trying to be a father in the best way that he’s equipped to be, but he’s ill-equipped. This man in a way is drowning in his life. I always think that, as an actor, you have to find a way to get inside and empathize with a character’s struggle. A lot of James’s work is about the relationship between fathers and sons, but this one most directly and acutely. It comes with a great responsibility for me. Vanity Fair: Have you been to Telluride before? And he’ll turn more serious, candid, and prepared as he talks about his past year, including going viral for a New Yorker profile that he tells me felt like “a profound betrayal of trust.” He’ll smile thinking about one scene that went especially well. He’ll close his eyes for a few minutes as he gets lost in a memory. He and I have just come from the festival’s annual filmmaker brunch, where Strong took in some stunning mountain views, and also a few breaths as he let his brief break from the Succession set settle in.Īs we get to talking about his complex new film, despite the altitude and the rushing perhaps taking a little bit out of us, Strong proves immediately passionate, focused, playful in conversation. Strong is in town for the North American premiere of his new film, Armageddon Time, the semi-autobiographical portrait from James Gray in which Strong brilliantly plays a wounded, angry, but loving version of the filmmaker’s father. That much becomes clear as we settle in for a long conversation at the Madeline Hotel in Mountain Village, a few gondola stops away from the town of Telluride.
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