He even ignored editing the jungle footage until that was all that was left to edit. Gray admits that after wrapping "The Lost City of Z" he vowed he would never make a movie in the jungle again. "You have all these people working for you to realize your dream and that pain goes away and all you remember is the glorious time of making it. "It's a very high-class problem," Gray said of the stories about jungle shoots. He also brought along a suitcase full of San Marzano tomatoes to make pasta every night for himself and the crew, which he said kept him away from stomach problems. He wore long-sleeve shirts and pants that had permethrin in the clothing, which kept him from any disease-carrying bugs, though he admits he looked like a beekeeper. Gray, however, survived the shoot unscathed. James Gray (L) on the set of "The Lost City of Z." "He calls me and says, 'Why do you want to make this movie? I don't understand.' So I said, 'What do you mean, it's that bad?' And he said, 'It's not bad - I just don't understand why you would ever want to do that.' He was talking about the craziness of pulling off the shoot," Gray recently told Business Insider. Gray was aware of what the jungle can do to filmmaking when Brad Pitt's production company Plan B called him in 2008 offering him the job to adapt "The Lost City of Z." Though he agreed to make the movie, even his friends tried to talk him out of it.Ī friend, director Matt Reeves ("Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), gave Gray a warning after seeing the script. Herzog, the poster child of the jungle movie, once said on the set of "Fitzcarraldo," "Taking a close look at what's around us there is some sort of harmony - it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder." Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" was plagued with typhoon, the need for millions of dollars to complete it, and the star, Martin Sheen, suffering a heart attack during production. (L-R) Marlon Brandon and Francis Ford Coppola on the set of "Apocalypse Now." Movies set in the jungle include some of cinema's most memorable works - Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo." They've also been the sources of legendary stories about the grueling efforts to pull them off. So going into the jungle to make a movie about an explorer's obsession with finding a lost city wasn't exactly something that intimidated the 47-year-old director, at least in theory.īut then the toils of making "The Lost City of Z," out Friday (it's based on the nonfiction book), almost did break Gray over the nine-year period of putting it together, plagued with one crisis after another. Over the two decades he's been making movies, Gray has dealt with everything from battles with Harvey Weinstein over two of his movies ("The Yards" and "The Immigrant") to navigating the media circus created when the star of his movie "Two Lovers," Joaquin Phoenix, suddenly decided to quit acting and become a hip-hop artist (Phoenix later admitted the whole thing was a hoax).
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