‘Armageddon Time’ Clip: James Gray Breaks Down ‘Painful’ Scene Ripped From His Experience (Exclusive Video)

“Armageddon Time,” writer/director James Gray’s wonderful new coming-of-age drama set in 1980s New York City, is now playing in select theaters, and in concert with the release TheWrap has an exclusive clip to share along with commentary from Gray himself.

Gray’s latest, after two expansive epics in “The Lost City of Z” and “Ad Astra,” is an intimately scaled drama about a young Jewish boy in Queens (played by Michael Banks Repeta), who is navigating a complicated relationship with his parents (played by Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) and his beloved grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), while also getting put into an oppressive private school with ties to (trigger warning) the Trump Family.

The scene, which you can watch above, is between Hathaway and Repeta, and is an absolute wonder.

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“This is a moment, I hate to say this. It comes toward the end of the picture when the main character, Paul’s mother, begins to realize that something is seriously wrong with her father, the grandfather,” Gray said of the scene. “And it’s her expression, her attempted expression of love to her son, which I think goes a little bit of awry, but we can talk about that.”

When we asked what it was like to get Banks to that place emotionally, Gray explained: “I find it a very painful scene personally, because Annie is telling him something, which she means to be filled with love, but puts enormous pressure on the child. All of my hopes are with you. It’s a crazy thing to put on the shoulders of a 12-year-old. And when it came to him, he was just willing to listen to Annie. A lot of acting is simply listening and being aware of the situation and reacting when the actor gives you something that you can play with. And that’s one of the things I discovered when I did auditions with him was how well he could listen and how he would respond if I threw a curve ball at him.”

Gray said he tried “a bunch of different temperatures in the scene,” before landing on the right tone. “I remember there’s this line where he says, ‘But we’re all here,’ which I meant to imply that the kid doesn’t understand that won’t always be the case, that the mother knows but that he doesn’t,” Gray said. “And he says, ‘But what’s…’ He’s a little bit uncomprehending. We’re all here. What’s the problem? And the mother is beginning to acknowledge the impermanence of life, the ephemerality of life. It’s the clash of those two ideas, the experience of one and the inexperience of the other that forges, I think, the meaning of the scene.”

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They shot the scene many times, Gray confirmed. “It was recreating something that was direct from my experience. I wanted the light to look a certain way, that she’d be sitting in the dark, that the light would come only from the dining room, that she would be in bed, in the sofa, sit up in a certain way,” Gray said. He admitted he was “being a jerk” too, about getting everything exactly right. “I was being so specific about what it is that I was after in both the blocking and also in performance,” Gray said.

Hathaway, Gray said, was “driven” to make sure that he was happy. Gray told her, “Don’t worry about making me happy. All you have to do is be in the scene.”

“I think we did eight takes and I think in the movie is take five. But she gave me many different versions, iterations. One was as brilliant as the other,” Gray explained. “It just was about context in the story. Some were very stoic, some were very teary. And I think I wound up going with somewhere in between. And we actually did some where she was kind of narcotized a little bit. We did some where she was very clear eyed. We played.”

“Armageddon Time” is now playing in select theaters.

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