James Gray, Adam Driver and Miles Teller on Paper Tiger: “What You Don’t See Is Going to Devastate You”

John Horn opened by reading James Gray an FBI Ten Most Wanted poster. It was for a man with a $5 million reward on his head, wanted for wire fraud, mail fraud and money laundering, who is still at large and, as Horn put it, a character in Gray’s movie. Could the director talk about him?

“No,” Gray said. “What are you trying to do to me?”

That set the tone for a Paper Tiger Q&A with Gray, Adam Driver, Miles Teller and producer Rodrigo Teixeira, moderated by Horn. The Nerd Wire was in the room. Gray did eventually say a little about the Russian mob figures who moved into Brighton Beach in the late 1970s and early ’80s, before cutting himself off: “That’s all you get out of me.”

Paper Tiger is set in 1986 New York. Driver plays Gary Pearl, a former cop with a business proposition; Teller is his younger brother Irwin, an engineer who takes the deal; and Scarlett Johansson is Irwin’s wife, Hester. The brothers end up in the path of the Russian mafia. We’ve already reviewed the film and covered Driver’s solo Q&A at the Aero. This conversation went somewhere different, and we’ve kept it light on plot for anyone waiting for opening day.

“Very little of the story is actually invented”

Gray said the film stays close to what happened to his own family. The real events played out over roughly 14 months, which he compressed into a couple. “I was stealing from my own life and from my parents’ life as much as I could,” he said.

He also pushed back on the idea that the brothers are fools for walking into this. Nobody in 1986 understood what was arriving, he said, his father included. Soviet emigres came in as engineers and scientists and no one “raised a peep,” he argued, while Cubans arriving in the Mariel boatlift were written off as criminals. That blind spot, to Gray, is tied up with class and race, and it’s why the film is a period piece.

Gray directed The Marriage of Figaro before this, and Horn asked about the film’s operatic streak. Gray’s definition is worth keeping: “Operatic actually just means a total commitment to the emotion of the moment, no matter what the moment is.” Staging opera taught him that telling a singer to cross the stage gets you a walk, and giving them a reason gets you a scene.

Teller: “I never looked down on Irwin”

Teller said he and Gray talked a lot about nobility. The Pearls are a proud family, and he didn’t want Irwin played as a bumbler. He’s naive, maybe, and out of his depth, but he sees an opportunity to go into business with his brother and decides this time he’ll be the one to answer the door. “I never looked down on Irwin or his family,” Teller said.

Asked later how much of Irwin’s choice is about providing and how much is about proving something, Teller said both, and landed where the film does. On your deathbed, he said, the questions are simple: “Was I a good brother? Was I a good son? Was I a good husband? Was I a good father?”

Driver on scripts that trust you

Driver credited the structure of Gray’s script for doing a lot of his work. Gary looks like a certain kind of guy, and the film uses that against the audience. What interested Driver was a man who leaves, comes back with the same tools, and finds the world has changed around him. It’s the family version of going away, having experiences, and expecting a hero’s welcome for your new identity, only to be handed the role you left.

He was also blunt about how rare this kind of writing is. “Now you get a lot of scripts where it’s someone telling you where they just came from, how they feel right now in the moment and where they’re going next,” he said. Paper Tiger rests on whether you believe the brothers, not on a gimmick or a plot point. “It’s always great to play subtext. It makes my job so much easier.”

Unlike Teller, who said he took every bit of family history Gray would give him, Driver didn’t want to know which lines came from where. He focused on believing what he was saying and let Gray be “the barometer” of whether it felt true.

On the set itself, Driver said you’d expect a Gray shoot to be heavy and self-serious, and it’s the opposite. He compared him to Vittorio De Sica, a director of weighty films who was nothing like them in person. The seriousness shows up in the choices instead: 35mm film, tungsten lights, vintage lenses, costumes that were thought through. “All films are their directors,” Driver said, and the environment “starts from the top down.”

The brothers, according to each other

A pre-submitted question asked how the two calibrated the brothers’ physical and emotional rhythms. Driver took emotional (“A lot of crying, a lot of tears”) and then admitted there was no calibrating. They liked each other and trusted each other. Of Teller: “He conveys so much with so little.” The trap in a part like Irwin, he said, is playing the ending at the beginning, and Teller never does.

Teller took physical. “We just worked on how handsome we could be,” he said. Then he got serious about the day Driver walked into the Pearl house set carrying Peter Luger bags, played the piano, did a magic trick and took over the room. The walk Driver found for Gary told Teller who Irwin was: the brother standing a little in that shadow, wishing he had those tools.

31 days, on film, in the heat

Teixeira, who also produced Gray’s Ad Astra and Armageddon Time, said the team was still chasing financing in March of last year and rolled cameras on June 2. Gray agreed to a 31-day schedule on one condition, that he shoot on film. Teixeira gave a lot of the credit for the calm set to fellow producer Anthony Katagas, and said that even with a crew of around 150, it felt like an independent movie.

The exception was the July day in the marsh grass, which Driver described at the Aero and which sounds no better from the producer’s side: about 100 degrees, Driver in a suit. Gray said he once made a movie in the Amazon “and this was much harder.” He also had words for his cinematographer, Joaquín Baca-Asay, who operated the Technocrane from outside the weeds and kept calling out how great the shot looked, “practically with someone feeding him grapes,” while the director and actors stood in the ticks.

Gray’s larger point was about what sells a sequence like that. He brought up the chase in The French Connection, which he called the best in cinema history, and said the thing that makes it work is a plain close-up of Gene Hackman at the wheel. “It’s performance that always wins.”

Shoulder pads and one non-negotiable pair of glasses

Horn singled out Amy Roth’s costumes. Driver said Gary’s suits were a mix of vintage pieces and new ones made by tailor Leonard Logsdail, and that the right clothes change how you move. Teller auditioned several pairs of glasses for Gray, some of which just made the director laugh. At one point Gray suggested Irwin might not need glasses at all. Teller’s answer, per Gray: “I’m wearing glasses.”

Gray added that true 1986 accuracy would have sunk the movie. Johansson tried on one period-correct outfit and “looked like she was auditioning for the New York Giants.” His rule: “You have to do less than the reality,” or the film turns into a joke about the decade.

Jet fuel and the Gowanus

The Gowanus Canal runs through the film as a business opportunity and as something worse. Gray traced the idea to going back to his old Queens neighborhood for Armageddon Time. He couldn’t finish a single two-minute take outside his former school because planes kept passing overhead, and he noticed for the first time that the air smelled of jet fuel. “I grew up basically in jet fuel,” he said.

The canal, he said, is still filthy, even though the real estate along it has exploded the way the brothers predict. It works as fact and as metaphor: “When integrity cannot be monetized, eh? Dump it in the water. Who cares?”

That connects to what Gray said the film is about. Everyone in it measures themselves in money, down to the kids wishing their parents drove a better car, because that’s what people are taught. “What is leverage, really? Leverage is a weapon, a bit of cruelty,” he said. The system “certainly does not reward integrity, does not reward love.” He noted that the industrialist Henry Clay Frick is said to have wished at the end that he’d been an artist. “I don’t know of any artist on their deathbed who said, ‘I wish I were an industrialist.'”

Keeping the worst of it outside the frame

Horn’s last question was about a scene with the two boys in a car, the windshield frosted over, someone approaching they can’t quite see. Gray said it comes from the moment in his own life when the danger he’d watched happen to other people on early-’80s New York streets finally came home.

He shot it the way it felt. Throughout the film the bad stuff sits just out of view: a sound, a shadow on a wall, something moving through weeds. “If you see the threat, it becomes a little tamer,” he said. “What you don’t see is going to devastate you.”

For all of that, Gray spent a good part of the conversation deflecting credit to his cast. He described worrying all night about a long exposition scene between the brothers in the basement, then watching Driver and Teller play it and realizing he’d had nothing to worry about. A director, he said, is “a kind of overrated position.” “The director watches talent. The director doesn’t walk in front of the camera. At least I don’t. If I did, it would be a catastrophe.”

Paper Tiger opens in select theaters Nov. 13 and nationwide Nov. 20 from Neon.

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.