James Gray And Jeremy Strong Say ‘Armageddon Time’ Is About “The Comingling Of Love And Violence” – Contenders L.A.

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Armageddon Time director James Gray’s got a tip for aspiring filmmakers: If you want to look good as a director, work with gifted actors, like Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong. “I’m a big fan of great actors because what they do is tend to make you look considerably more capable than you actually are,” Gray joked during a panel for his Focus Features film at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles awards-season event. “You write a line and you sit at home and you have the computer and the yellow legal pad and the thing and you go, ‘Uh, is that a good line?

I don’t know if it’s a good line.’ And then you go on the set and all of a sudden you say, ‘He made it work.’ ” RELATED: The Contenders Film: Los Angeles – Deadline’s Full Coverage Armageddon Time is Gray’s autobiographical story of growing up in a multi-generational Jewish-American family in the Flushing, Queens neighborhood of New York City.

The film confronts issues of race and class, with the backdrop the impending election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980.

One of the talented stars Gray hired is Succession’s Jeremy Strong, who plays Irving Graff, essentially Gray’s real-life father. “We’ve seen this man be unequipped to handle the things that are happening in his life,” Strong observed of his character. “And we’ve seen him deal with his feelings by hitting his son with a belt and resorting to violence and sort of being unable to deal with his feelings … I remember when I read the script, I was very surprised by the sort of hard carapace of this man cracking open briefly.” RELATED: Deadline Contenders Film Los Angeles Arrivals & Panels Gallery Strong added, “This movie in a lot of ways is about the comingling of love and violence and how