The Big Picture · Interview
April 13, 2017/ 34 min/ Sean Fennessy
Sean Fennessy talks with James Gray about The Lost City of Z, four months shooting in the jungle with actual black caimans, and why filmmaking is basically building the pyramids.
17 films across 1 segment.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
In conversation
Gray's adaptation of David Grann's book about explorer Percy Fawcett. He says he was drawn to the project not by the Amazon setting but by a single passage about Fawcett's alcoholic, ruinous father, the lack Fawcett spent his life trying to outrun. Shot over four months in Colombia and Peru after the actual Fawcett route in Brazil's Pantanal turned out to be cleared for soybean farming.
One of the earlier Gray films Sean cites in the intro; part of the New York run Gray says this movie was his first break from.
Sean brings up its mixed reception as an example of the ups and downs Gray's films have gone through before Z.
Gray's go-to for the most expensive movie ever made adjusted for inflation, and for Joseph Mankiewicz's 10,000 real extras, a shot he says would just be CGI now.
Herzog's jungle production Sean brings up as a cautionary parallel; Gray says he thought about it a lot on his own shoot.
Named alongside Fitzcarraldo and Apocalypse Now as the canon of agonizing jungle productions.
Coppola's shoot is Gray's comparison point for his own: four months versus, he says, roughly 270 days for Coppola.
The documentary about the Fitzcarraldo shoot; Gray calls it both very funny and mortifying, since people died making that film.
Gray's example of a film Hitchcock himself considered a failure on release that's since been voted the greatest ever made.
Gray's reference for adapting a book down to its essential thread, and for a personal film that somehow also became a massive commercial hit.
The postmodern, self-aware approach to adapting a nonfiction book that Gray says he deliberately avoided repeating with Z.
Cited, with It's a Wonderful Life, as a financial flop that television let audiences rediscover.
Gray's example of a Fellini film dismissed in Italy that took America to properly recognize.
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV The SopranosBreaking Bad
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