R. Kurt Osenlund, April 2014

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

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A Master, a Muse, and the Mythic American Dream

With their new film The Immigrant now in limited release, director James Gray

and star Marion Cotillard share their unique, yet linked, experiences of living in America.

THE IMMIGRANT, a quiet, yet commanding, drama about the complex facets of the American Dream, struck different chords for its director, cinephile favorite James Gray, and its lead actress, French superstar Marion Cotillard. Set in 1920s New York, the film assesses the hardships endured by Ewa (Cotillard), a Polish woman who arrives at Ellis Island after escaping her war-ravaged homeland, and who’s greeted by having her ill sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), stripped from her and quarantined indefinitely. Pursuing stateside relatives who prove impossible to reach, Ewa has no choice but to accept the helping hand of Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), a Jazz Age pimp and burlesque impresario, who saves Ewa, but soon humiliates her too.

For Gray, though The Immigrant is his first period piece, it’s also one more New York story among many. The filmmaker, a born-and-bred New Yorker to his bones, has never made a movie set or produced outside of the confines of the city. That said, he hasn’t limited himself either. His breakout feature, Little Odessa, which he released at age 25, was a Brooklyn flick about the Russian mafia, while his last film, Two Lovers, depicted a beautifully intimate love triangle, again with Phoenix in a starring role. In between, Gray has made more populist crime fare, like The Yards and We Own the Night, but with The Immigrant, he seems determined to explore a more seminal, but no more forgiving, era of the place he calls home.

“It’s tough, New York life,” Gray says. “It always has been. The toughest aspect of New York, I think, is that functioning is very difficult. New York is a crazy experiment, where they basically took an island, which is about 26 miles long and I think three miles wide, and packed a zillion people into it, and built concrete jungles to the sky. And functioning in New York is its own form of heroism. Unless you’re so rich that you have chauffeurs and chefs and all that, but that’s not the way practically anybody lives.”

For Cotillard, who boasts one of the best post-Oscar track records of any working actor (she won Best Actress for 2007’s luminous La Vie en Rose, and has since teamed with Christopher Nolan, Woody Allen, Michael Mann, and the Dardenne brothers), The Immigrant is, in quite a substantial way, a project that evokes her own cultural shift. She may now be part of Hollywood’s elite, but it wasn’t that long ago that Cotillard was, like Ewa, a perfect stranger in a strange land, her goals of making it in U.S. cinema tied to the baggage of language barriers and feelings of alienation. Cotillard’s first big film on American shores was Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003). Recounting her experience on the production, the actress remembers feeling like a teenager, even though she was

nearing her mid-20s.

“Sometimes I didn’t understand what people were saying,” Cotillard says. “When you’re in another country, with another culture, with a language that you don’t speak that well, part of your personality changes, in a way. It’s like you go back to kind of a childhood state. You don’t feel as strong as you could feel in your own language, in the way you express yourself, because you don’t know all the words. I really felt like I could express myself on any subject in French, but there, I was lost. I couldn’t express myself as a grown-up. And it’s a weird feeling because you know that the way people see you is not exactly the way you are.”

Both Cotillard and Gray are speaking to me at New York’s Trump SoHo hotel, and the views out the windows vary. One is of the short stretch that leads up to Midtown, and another is of the Hudson, and New Jersey just beyond—a framed snapshot of how New York, as Gray observed, is a small, “experimental” island that’s so close, yet so far away, from the world that surrounds it. One of Gray’s greatest triumphs with The Immigrant is that he wades through the concept of the American Dream with curiosity, as opposed to cynicism, which would have surely been the easier route (even F. Scott Fitzgerald, for all his mastery, presents a harsher view of the nation than Gray and his co-writer Ric Menello do). Ewa is never entirely without agency, and her refusal to relinquish it is what helps Cotillard deliver another fervent performance, but she is urged into prostitution, exposed to violence, and demeaned by a man who, evidently, like so many others inhabiting the country, was once an immigrant himself.

And yet, Gray never closes the door on possibility. He doesn’t glamorize the American Dream, but he doesn’t snuff it out either. He introduces the character of Emil (Jeremy Renner), better known as Orlando the Magician, who performs at various city venues, including Ellis Island, and has a rocky relationship with Bruno, his cousin. Through Emil—who, as one of my colleagues shrewdly observed, performs impossible tricks with no explanation or questions as to how they work—The Immigrant gives Ewa a symbolic source of wonder to grasp, something that still represents her hampered dreams, and something that can keep her hopeful as she strives to get Magda out of quarantine.

“The American Dream is both the truth and a lie,” Gray says. “For [people like Ewa] it was something that was there, and that was present, but they missed the old country a lot. It represented a real emotional pull for them. That was their world, and they got pulled away from it. That had to hurt. Now, they’re in a new place, New York, where their heads are not going to get chopped off by Cossacks, but it’s not all roses. For me, the problem with the presentation of the American Dream is it’s always either one of two things. One is that there’s no possibility that the American Dream is true—it’s bullshit, garbage. The other is that the American dream is  fantastic, and you’re gonna get out there and make a zillion dollars the second you get here. Which is truly bullshit—mostly, unless you win the lottery. So, if that’s the case, what is an interesting depiction of the American Dream? I think the answer is it’s both—it’s true and it’s a fiction.”

Gray’s perspective seems undeniable, but then again, take a look at Cotillard. If the American Dream, as it’s sold, does exist, then it surely seems as though this international bombshell is living it. In addition to starring in some of the few respected blockbusters Hollywood’s recently churned out (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises), the 38-year-old actress has also continued to offer awards-caliber work in art house films like Rust and Bone, which saw her play a whale trainer who sparks up a romance after losing both her legs. As if channeling Ewa herself, Cotillard spills her mixed feelings on what it meant to come to America, and whether or not that was even a reality at all.

“I never thought I’d do American movies,” Cotillard says. “I never thought I would have the amazing experience of exploring different worlds and cultures. Well, actually, the thing is, I didn’t think that I would do that, but I didn’t think that I wouldn’t do it. You know what I mean? I had no boundaries. I didn’t think that I would do movies in America, but I didn’t think it was not possible. I just didn’t think about it. Maybe, if I had put up boundaries like that, it would not have happened. By not putting up boundaries, you don’t have to cross them because they’re not there. I didn’t really imagine anything. I just knew I wanted amazing journeys.”

As much as Gray is a New York filmmaker, and Marion Cotillard is a foreign actress who’s come to dominate Hollywood (if nothing else—and there’s a lot of else—she’s now proved efficient in at least four languages), the collaborators have more common links to this material than meets the eye. Long before Cotillard made her way to Tinseltown, and Gray opted to add a lush epic to his ouevre of urban dramas, Gray’s grandparents, a pair of Russian Jewish immigrants, also arrived at Ellis Island in the ‘20s. And, indeed, their detailed experiences directly inspired Gray’s latest achievement, from the uncertainty of how to eat a banana properly to stories of unfavorable voyage conditions, which, according to the director, were lifted verbatim for the movie.

“Personal is not the same as autobiographical,” Gray says. “Autobiographical means it adheres to the facts of your life, and a ton of this stuff is taken directly from my grandparents. But the film is personal in that, what you wonder about is what you can feel...it’s not just the mood of the film, it’s what the film, thematically, is trying to express, and how closely and how intimately you feel what the film is trying to express. The last two films I’ve made, this one and Two Lovers, are my favorite films so far, because they’re getting closer to the cinematic expression I want to communicate to the viewer. I wanted to try and say to myself and to others that, no matter what you do in life, there is the possibility of redemption. And forgiveness. And hope. And that nobody is garbage—nobody is beneath us.”

R. Kurt Osenlund is the managing editor of OUT Magazine.