04/11/2024 - Fully financed by Leone Film Group, the US auteur’s next film will be a crime thriller about betrayal and the “American Dream”, starring Adam Driver, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway

Director James Gray at this year's Venice Film Festival (© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

One of the current US auteurs who’s an honorary resident of the Croisette, given his constant fêting at the Cannes Film Festival, James Gray is setting up his next feature Paper Tiger, with Adam Driver and past collaborators Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway heading up the cast, and cameras mooted to roll next year. Raffaella Leone of Italy’s Leone Film Group produces, and the Rome-based company is also the film’s primary backer. Rodrigo Teixeira of Brazil’s RT Features co-produces, after having worked on Gray’s two previous features Armageddon Time and Ad Astra. The Veterans and CAA Media Finance are representing world rights at the upcoming American Film Market (AFM). 

A crime thriller based on Gray’s original screenplay, Paper Tiger's reported synopsis chimes with his first features and his most recent Armageddon Time: “the story is set to follow two brothers who pursue the American Dream – only to become entangled in a scheme that turns out to be too good to be true. As they try to navigate their way through an ever-more dangerous world of corruption and violence, they find themselves and their family brutally terrorised by the Russian 'Mafiya'. Their bond begins to fray, and betrayal – once utterly unthinkable – now becomes all too possible.”

Whilst Gray’s career has always been strongly associated with the European industry due to his cinematic influences, and the loyal support he received from Cannes and Venice (where he was just on the feature competition jury), this is his first feature to be primarily financed from the continent. The Leone Film Group, run by the children of Sergio Leone, has done very well in Italy as a distributor of top US independent titles, and is now moving more robustly into international co-productions, with films by Isabel Coixet, Gabriele Muccino and David Bernard (producer of HBO’s The White Lotus) on their upcoming slate. 

Armageddon Time – which co-starred Strong and Hathaway as fictionalised versions of the director’s parents – was Gray’s previous film, his last to compete for the Palme d’Or after The Immigrant [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Two Lovers, We Own the Night and The Yards. Adam Driver now adds Gray to the list of high-end auteurs his name can support on the market, following his work with Francis Ford Coppola this year in Megalopolis, and with Michael Mann and Leos Carax.