Shades of Gray: Two Lovers Director on Ford and Fellini, Phoenix and Paltrow

Kevin Scanlon

James Gray

Kevin Scanlon

Going gray: The anti-Tarantino?

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• James Gray
• John Ford
• Joaquin Phoenix
• Crime and Gangster Films
• Movie Stars

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And with that, Gray starts talking about other people’s movies again — specifically those of John Ford. Two Christmases ago, Gray’s wife gifted him with the 24-film Ford at Fox DVD collection, and the first one he put on was the 1946 classic My Darling Clementine. By the time he arrived at the famous scene in which Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp walks Doc Holiday’s titular erstwhile sweetheart to a dance at the construction site of Tombstone’s very first church, Gray was in tears. “They’re building the church — it’s like the most moving thing ever,” he says. “Why is that so moving?” One reason, he thinks, might be that Ford, like the historian and essayist Paul Fussell (of whom Gray is also a great admirer), was a World War II vet who witnessed things firsthand that most men hope never to see.

“I think Ford was maybe a little tougher than we are,” he says, “and that pathos, that melancholy, that sense of loss is so remarkable. If I ever make a movie that has one nine-hundredth the longing, the kind of profound emotional commitment that Henry Fonda walking to church has, I’ll be a happy guy.”