The Harvard Crimson: You directed your first picture, Little Odessa, when you were pretty young.

James Gray: Yes, I was 26, and I just turned 31. And I have a very depressing experience on this, because I considered myself not so old. I went to a dinner party and the daughter of one of the people at the dinner party came up to me and asked me how old I was and I said "Well, how old do you think?" And she said 42. I was like, oh my God. And not only that, listen to this. Detour magazine calls up my agent and says, we want to do a big story on James Gray for our young Hollywood under 30 issue. And my agent said, "He's 31." And they said, "Oh. Do you have any other clients who are under 30?" I don't really care about this thing from Detour, but it's like now that I'm 31 I'm establishment, you know? Over 30 and you keel over. It's really bad, it's why movies really suck, actually. They're aimed at people who are idiots, they're aimed at young people who are idiots, they're aimed at young people who have no interests, really, in anything.

THC: You grew up in New York, but you went to film school out at University of Southern California. How did you like it?

JG: I grew up in New York and was living in Queens until I was 18, and then went to University of Southern Crappola [USC] film school. It's a wonderful program, but it's much less my taste than I would have appreciated. I remember freshman orientation when they went around the room and said, what is it that you're into, what movies do you love, why are you here? I remember they went around the room and it was like, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Wars, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Wars, Eight and a Half, Jaws, Star Wars, Star Wars. I was like the artsy-fartsy guy, I was the weirdo. I loved it, it set me up very well because I wound up making a thesis film which enabled me to make the films I do now. So from a professional standpoint it was really good. But in fact it was just bad, it was kind of almost a trade school kind and not really the sort of artsy-fartsy thing I was hoping for.

THC: In Little Odessa, you worked with Vanessa Redgrave and in this one, you directed Faye Dunaway, both of whom have reputations for being divas. How was it to work with them?

JG: I have had nothing but great relationships with actors. I've never had an actor that I've had a horrible time with. I don't know why. Well, in Redgrave's case, I don't see her so much as a diva as someone is just as close to genius as anyone I've ever known. I mean, you hear that all the time, it's like genius, genius, genius, they call everyone a genius, right? Like, he's a genius of sanitary engineering, everyone's a genius. But it would be very difficult to dispute Vanessa Redgrave's acting prowess, I mean, she's unbelievable. And to me, the same is true with Faye. Faye was brutal to the makeup and hair people, but I don't get exposed to that. You have to understand that I don't ever sit with the actors in makeup or hair or costume. I miss the horrible part.

I tend to be very arrogant in one respect, which I think is an important thing, ashamedly enough. I tend to be arrogant in asserting what I believe to be the good things they're doing in the scene, and to be very, very assertive about what I think sucks. And it's something I've never been afraid of, so if Vanessa Redgrave was doing something I didn't like, I wasn't afraid to tell her. And amazingly enough actors kind of crave that. If you tell them that you don't like something, they're okay with that, because then they feel like, okay, the guy or woman who's directing me at least is paying attention. So I've had nothing but great relationships with the actors.

Dunaway is difficult to work with, not because of the diva thing, but because she always wants to do more, she always wants to be more explosive, more dynamic, more dramatic. And my case is the opposite. I like actors to do less. And I wanted a performance from her that was completely restrained. I put her in these terrible glasses, dyed her hair sort of dark brown and I sort of wanted her to fit into the movie's tapestry. And I think she was at first very resistant to that. I think, actually, her performance was wonderful.

THC: Mark Wahlberg's performance was also very understated-was that your doing?

JG: He's also very good. We actually talked about that a lot, the style of performance that he gives in the movie. This is a totally sophomoric approach to creating a character, to characterization-it is one of the high school staples of this country to read Kafka's Metamorphosis. But I gave him the Metemorphisis to read for that character because I had wanted him to be almost this sort of Gregor Samsesque character. In fact I designed the set of his apartment, with that really long hallway to his room, straight from that story. And maybe this doesn't really come across but the reason I did that is I had wanted to do a movie about someone who was sort of lost in his own dimwittedness, in a way, tragically undereducated. If you look at the way American society is moving, at the top of the sandwich they're interested in dot-coms, and they're getting better educated all the time, and they will be able to be major participants in the coming explosion of wealth creation. And then there's the sort of bottom 50 percent who are woefully undereducated. I wanted to make a movie sympathetic to the situation of someone who is ill-equiped for that part of the world. Wahlberg and I had discussed this at length.

The idea was to consistently present even more than a story, even more than a movie about particular characters, almost like a worldview, almost like a kind of overarching, I don't want to say vision, that sounds so pretentious, but almost like a vision of what late 20th-century industrial American life is like. Because it's such a dying part of the economy-that part of New York is almost no longer. So I had wanted to give it almost a requiem feel about it, for lack of a better way of putting it.