Film Courage: John, why do you love character-driven films?
John Gray, Writer, Director, Producer: I think it goes back to when I was a kid
and I would watch movies in theaters or sometimes even things I saw on television
and I would get so involved with these characters and I grew up in Brooklyn kind of a working-class
neighborhood so any opportunity that I had to be transported out of that into a different
world with people I didn't know anything about I was always very interested in that but the most
important thing for me I think that inspired me most was those moments in the theater where I
would sit there and recognize something in a character that I recognized from myself
and I realized I'm not alone and that to me was the single most powerful thing
that bonded me to storytelling and to movies and very early on I thought to myself I would love
to make someone feel that way I would love to tell a story that someone sits there and
goes oh wow that's me that's my family I'm okay there's nothing wrong with me I'm not a misfit
there's somebody else so that's really why I love it so much and I've always tried to
everything I do I try to make sure it's informed with interesting characters and and and some depth
and and an arc of somewhere to go do you remember those first few movies that you saw wherever you
were in New York I do I'm embarrassed to admit it but the first movie I saw my mother took me to
at the Loew's Oriental Theatre in Brooklyn and it was called Madame X Joan Crawford
and as I remember the plot she had to give up her baby when she was a young woman and then years
later she gets accused of murder and she finds this lawyer to defend her and it's her son and it
was so fraught with emotion if I saw it today it was probably too much emotion I don't know maybe
too sentimental but I was so I was probably like eight or nine when I saw that film and first just
being in a movie theater I was so wow this is like so transported as already the curtains opened and
I just felt the hair my neck go up and and I was very very emotionally affected by that movie and
on the bus going back to our apartment in Brooklyn I started to cry and I said to my mother because
at the end I guess she never revealed herself to her son and so the secret remained and and
I began don't ever leave me so yeah I think that that was one of the first movies I saw that really
made me feel very powerfully attracted to this idea of telling stories that's a great story
yeah and I saw another movie on tv this was if you remember the old hallmark hall of fame
before that whole brand was kind of deluded by the hallmark channel but the hallmark hall of
fame was like the prestige television in the 50’s and 60’s and all the way up to fairly recently
and there was a tv production of Arthur Miller's The Price with George C. Scott and Barry Sullivan
and it was about these two brothers who came to their father's house their father just passed away
and they had to split up the stuff and there was a interesting character who was there too I guess
he was like a I don't know if he's a pawn broker but he was somebody who was going to sell and buy
this stuff and it was a great I think George C. Scott was a brother who'd become a cop and the
other brother it was a more white-collar guy and one had left and one states the care of the father
so all these great injury fight your family dynamics and again I was very young when I saw
that film I couldn't have been much more than 11 or so I guess but I was again just so struck by
the the truth that I saw in these relationships and and the the raw emotion and the way the actors
performed it I was just so completely taken away by it and I have to say just then going
ahead many years I was thrilled when I got to direct my first hallmark hall of fame
and I was telling when they hired me I said you have no idea the history I have with your show
how it was one of the things that inspired me to to be a director or be a writer director
and tell stories what does it mean to understand your characters well I think as a writer for me
it comes first from writing characters that you recognize there might be combinations of people
either personally or people you imagine and oftentimes for me I think most writers there are
aspects of yourself that you put into character so I really feel like that that is the most important
thing in storytelling is the character and it's one of the things I always tell students who are
starting out in film because so many young people starting out and I was one of them many many years
ago but I felt and a lot of the young people feel very enamored with the with the technology
it's all about the lenses and what can be done in the digital effects in it and the characters
get lost and so I always try to emphasize to students how important it is to be observant
of the world around you to try to understand the people you see like I'm just I live in New York so
I'm a great student of behavior just to go on the subway and sit there and watch people
it's fascinating I never get bored if I have to meet somebody on a street corner and they're late
it's fine because it's just a show going on everywhere I look and I think it's really
important to attune yourself to that and also your ear for dialogue to listen to the way people
speak how they express themselves what are they really saying what's the subtext what's going
on underneath what they're saying and so I feel like those are things that I urge students to
expose themselves to not only in in real life but also in literature and theater and music not just
watch movies all the time because then you're just really making movies that are influenced
by other movies going back to something like the my heroes in the old Hollywood days the John Ford
and John Huston and Orson Welles all these fabulous storytellers Preston Sturges
and all of their work was so full of quirky interesting real characters
and those those filmmakers all had really rich interesting lives before they ever became
filmmakers and even John Huston who obviously came from film royalty his father was Walter Huston
but even he had left Hollywood and he was a boxer he was a newspaper reporter he was
homeless for a great deal of time so when he came back to make his movies he brought with it
this depth of knowledge about life and people and so that's what I really feel is so important
for people to and because know the the technology of it it's it's fantastic but as a director your
job is simply to know what the story you want to tell is and how you want to see it and it's really
somebody else's job to now execute that which doesn't mean that you you give up any control
but when I was first starting out I was lucky enough to kind of tweak to that
early on so instead of trying to figure out oh no how would this shot work how can I possibly see
this guy come from here and then go over there all in the same shot I would just sit down with the dp
the director of photography and say here's what I want to see I take this guy out of the thing
and we follow him in here and then we bring him up here how do we do that and then they'll find a way
so then after 35 years you you get to know how you have to ask anymore you get to do it but I do
think that's something I always tell students is that don't be so intimidated by the technology or
so enamored of it that you're frozen in the other areas that are so important about storytelling
because if you surround yourself with really talented people
you get a great assistant director you get a great camera person fantastic sound crew
a script supervisor who's really smart those people will help you they'll guide you through
as long as you let them you're respectful and you let them know that you need their help but your
job is to focus on your vision and what you want to see and then they'll help you figure
out how to actually see it I love too what you said about like public transportation I grew up
taking the bus everywhere as well yeah and it is a fascinating, you can meet some great people and
some scary ones too but some great people that'll just open up even the bus drivers will tell you
everything yeah and you can really just soak in life public libraries things like that yeah and
it's funny because when I do come to Los Angeles usually I'm here for a limited amount of time
and I'm always driving everywhere I go and there are some days where I'm doing multiple meetings
where I realize wow I have not even touched the air today I've gone from my hotel to the garage
the car to another garage another office back there and so at the end of the day I have not
even haven't even been outside and so I always find that I used to worry about living here
if I ever lived here full-time that sense of being cut off a little bit from life around
you and in New York of course that's impossible you can't you have to just stay in your apartment
there but everywhere you go stores the streets just teaming with drama all around you
in fact I always do this thing on my twitter feed where I every now and again I'll put overheard
and I'll come up with a little piece of dialogue that I that I just happen to hear
it's great I got you not long ago I heard somebody just walking by me on their cell phone
and they said I just heard them saying I'm all out of body bags check with me in march
oh gosh that's great where does that come from oh my god professional autopsy is that right
so it's great to just try to stay in tune with what's going on around you and be a be of sponge
I'll tell people that it won't even be conscious at a certain point as you're writing
that these things you have observed and absorbed just start to seep seep into it and you start
to see these characters and hear them and you'll start to hear these familiar voices
oh yeah yeah this is that guy I know who this is always the greatest moment in writing any writer
will say this it's not my original thing but the greatest moment either in a script or in a fiction
when the characters start to rebel against you and you you you have a plan you're gonna go hit
this where we're going with the story this is what's happening and suddenly as you're writing
it you could just feel like it's just not working they're resisting it they don't want to go in this
direction and they want to go this way and and then I'll follow them now and when that doesn't
happen all the time but when it does it's just like golden and that's where a good understanding
of character really really helps you out and is that your signal to you that this is this is the
right direction with this like I know this is a real character now absolutely and it's frustrating
sometimes because you realize oh no I've been on the wrong path for the whole first act of this
the script and now I found the right path great but now I gotta go back and rewrite everything
but you still it's a gift and and you you just take it but yeah once that if that happens
to me then I realize oh yes I'm now I'm in the zone and now the characters are telling
me what they want to do so they've come to life they're they're real now and I pay attention
are there times when the characters fall flat and you feel there is no resistance and then
you realize should I cut this character or do I need to really work on who this is
yeah there are moments where there's always that deadly thing where I feel like
I know what this character is going to say next and that's you can't have that you just cannot
you don't want to be in a situation where the character starts to say something and now okay
we all know what the rest of that sentence is going to be so when that starts happening a lot
then I have to kind of sit down and just rethink that character but I will say oftentimes there's
a trap there's a danger in that as well because it can stop you in the middle of your story
in the middle of your work it's like okay now I've got to stop I figure so what I tend to do
is I just go through the script start to finish and get it done and as I'm going I know okay this
isn't right this is not going to be this is I'm going to have to work on this but I'm not going
to stop now because then I may never finish I may just get bogged down on this who knows how
long and I'm going to learn things about the rest of the story as I go along even though it's not
quite right yet so I will do everything I can I try to even read like come down in the morning
to work I don't even read what I wrote yesterday because I'll just get bogged down I'll start to
fix it I'll start to worry about it I just want to get that words on paper that sort of vomit
out of that of the story and then once that's done that's a huge step and then I go back and now
that's when the real writing begins once that first draft is done and I can go back in
and I try to take a little rest from it I have people read it my wife Melissa Peltier is just
brilliant with story and everything else in the world and she will give me great feedback
about what works what doesn't work and and so once you've had little outside eyes on on the material
then you can go back in and start to really mold it and shape it and
leave on the second draft to say I do the same with every draft I don't stop I just keep going
even when I know I'm going to throw this out I'm going to probably throw this entire second act
but I got to keep going to get to the end and then I'll start over again.