An interview with actor Jeremy Strong gives us the best indicator so far of what James Gray’s upcoming “Armageddon Time” will be about [via EW]
“Yes, I'm working on a film with the great director James Gray (Ad Astra, The Yards) who `I think is one of the great living filmmakers. It's a very personal intimate film about his childhood in Queens in the 1980s and a time in this child's life when all of the kinds of formative things happen. It's set against the backdrop of the election of Ronald Reagan and the whole thing is a prefiguration in a way of where we're at in this moment and the sort of hellscape that we find ourselves in as a country. It's a kind of an origin story both of an artist and America, where it is now.”
“Armageddon Time” comes after Gray’s long-delayed “Ad Astra” finally hit theaters two Septembers ago (to positive reviews). This new project will bring Gray back to New York. If you remember, Gray’s first 5 movies ( “Little Odessa,” “The Yards,” “We Own the Night,” “Two Lovers,” and “The Immigrant”) were all set in the Big Apple.
Gray will write and direct “Armageddon Time,” which stars Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and Anthony Hopkins in “an autobiographical drama about growing up in mid-1980s Queens, New York.” More intriguingly it seems as though Donald Trump and his late father Fred will be one of the characters involved in the story. We all know who Donald is, but his less-famous father Fred was a Queens-based real estate developer who mentored Donald into the eventual real estate mogul that he would become.
The film started filming two weeks ago in the Bronx, New Jersey and Manhattan. Cannes has, obviously, reserved a spot for the film to be part of their official competition in 2022. The French adore Gray.
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.