Exclusive First Look: Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson in 'Paper Tiger,' One of Only Two American Films in Competition in Cannes

James Gray's tense family drama, which will premiere May 16, started out as a sequel but is now “a whole new movie.”

For example, a few years back he said in an interview that he wanted to make “the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie.

” But along the way to making Ad Astra , his goals changed and the film morphed into something else, more of a space fable, if you will. When audiences finally saw it in 2019, some were up in arms that it wasn’t what he had originally promised. The same thing could happen now.

After his 2022 movie Armageddon Time came out, Gray started talking about how he wanted to do a sequel to the family drama that was based on his own childhood. It would star the same actors as his father and mother and focus on when his mother discovered she was sick. But, again, as it goes with moviemaking, Gray’s plans changed.

As he began to write the script, he decided he’d already done the deeply autobiographical film with Armageddon Time, which was set in the early 1980s in Queens, and follows a young boy grappling prejudice. That movie was so personal—he even filmed at his elementary school and other locations from his childhood—that Gray previously told me: “If someone says, ‘I hated that movie,’ it means they hate part of me.

” For his next movie, he decided to once again take inspiration from events in his own life, but this time he created an original story.

“It was like something coalesced in me to try and reveal this family later in a different mode, maybe slightly more operatic, slightly more rooted in melodrama, Hitchcockian, suspense, drama—a little more heightened,” Gray tells Vanity Fair in an exclusive interview ahead of the release of Paper Tiger, which will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16. When Strong and Hathaway had to leave the follow-up because of scheduling conflicts with other films, Gray cast Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller in their stead.

“They fit a slightly more operatic idea of the movie and were able to allow me to think about it, not as a continuation of Armageddon Time, but as a whole new movie,” he says. “And that was actually very liberating. ” Paper Tiger is a tense family drama set in the late ’80s in New York, following two brothers who are chasing the American dream.

But when they find themselves in a dangerous world of corruption and violence after becoming involved with some threatening Russian characters, their bond begins to fall apart. It may not have been the movie Gray had in mind, but it was the movie he was destined to make. He says, “One of the things I’ve learned is that there are movie gods, and you can’t always dictate what they’re telling you and you can’t always control the subject.

” Like Gray’s 1994 feature debut Little Odessa and his 2007 crime drama We Own the Night, Paper Tiger also centers on the bond of brothers.

“I’m very close to my brother now. We speak almost every day, but he used to beat the shit out of me when I was a kid,” says Gray.

“So there was that complexity. These blood connections, they mean a lot to me. ” Teller and Adam Driver play brothers who are close, but live very different lives. Teller’s Irwin is a family man who makes ends meet, while Driver’s Gary is a bachelor who wears fine suits and has money.

Both deliver tense, dramatic performances, but Teller, known for Top Gun: Maverick and his more comedic work, gets to show off a different side of himself.

“When I met him, he had a tough-guy exterior, but he couldn’t hide the softness, the vulnerability,” says Gray. Teller and Johansson at first asked Gray about his own parents, hoping to mine details for their characters . But this time Gray told them to knock it off.

“I said, ‘Guys, I do not want you imitating my parents. This is becoming its own thing,’” he says. The film shot for 31 days last summer, and Gray says it was the most physically challenging shoot of his career.

“And I did a movie in the Amazon jungle,” quips Gray. “But this was 98 degrees, 90% humidity, on asphalt, every fucking day. ” Though the shoot was short and the heat was hot, Gray says being surrounded by talented, dedicated actors made the rest of it pretty easy.

He also adds that Johansson , Teller , and Driver , all deeply understood the type of family they were trying to capture. He also hired many New York actors to play the supporting and background roles.

“They have a thing. I think it’s probably because they’re more attracted to stage first. They have such a depth of craft to do the anti-influencer movie,” he says. Paper Tiger, which Neon will distribute theatrically in the fall, will be Gray’s sixth film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival.

You would think he’d feel at home at the festival by this point, but that’s not the case.

“In total candor, Cannes is not easy for filmmakers,” he says. “You go there and you dress in this tuxedo and I’m not comfortable being in front of the camera. You don’t know what the reaction’s going to be when the credits come, so you’re nervous the whole time.

” He adds that it’s “not a place generally that’s hospitable to American cinema,” pointing out that American filmmakers in the past couple decades have only won the Palme d’Or when the president of the jury was also an American. .

This year, Gray and Ira Sachs are the only American directors with films in the competition. But that’s also exactly the reason Gray keeps coming back.

“It’s the citadel of European art cinema. And so we are the Visigoths going in there,” he says.

“But I think it’s important for Americans to stay in the hunt there because we have to say, ‘We are on your level. We can play here too. ’”

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