The good news: James Gray‘s highly-anticipated, long-gestating The Lost City of Z is well worth the wait. The bad news: if you didn’t get a chance to see it at New York Film Festival, you’ll have to wait half-a-year. To help ease some of delay, today we have the 30-minute press conference following the first press screening. The always affable Gray opens up about not wanting it to be a biopic, but more of a “comment on an age” alongside cast members Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, and Angus Macfadyen. (Papillon remake commitments kept star Charlie Hunnam from appearing.) Also discussed is the use of 35mm, the horrors of shooting in the jungle, and much, much more.
We said in our review, “The film otherwise bears an echo-heavy sound design reminiscent of and compliant with industrial England’s wide, drafty rooms, a space where the cuts feel most hard-edged and Gray and Khondji appear to have the most fun in photographing. (Such rich black tones! And the light seeping through the windows! And, oh, the candles!) It’s especially easy to get lost in all of this technical what-how when seeing a projection that gives proceedings the look and, on a second-by-second basis, movement akin to a picture of yesteryear, even down to the flickering of an individual image — to the end that I often had little interest in the narrative at hand, despite the best efforts of its cast.”
Check out the full press conference below.
The Lost City of Z opens on April 21, 2017.