James Gray on Broader Takeaways From Personal Film ‘Paper Tiger’: “What Connects Us Is What Matters”

James Gray‘s latest film Paper Tiger, like most of his work, draws from his personal and family history to tell a semi-fictionalized story of a Queens family in the 1980s that becomes entangled with the Russian mob, thanks to a moneymaking scheme pitched to patriarch Irwin (Miles Teller) by older brother Gary (Adam Driver).

Coming after semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama Armageddon Time, the crime thriller, Gray says, is not a sequel and doesn’t hew as closely to his own experience.

“This one is much different. I think that one was much more close to the facts of the case,” Gray said after Paper Tiger‘s North American premiere at the 2026 New York Film Festival of the differences between his latest film and Armageddon Time. “There are many things that my brother, I’m sure, will recognize as from our life, but it’s not a documentary. And I didn’t think it was a sequel. I wanted to make something kind of a little bit … Hitchcockian. … Pulpier is the wrong word, but a little bit more dramatically intense.”

In addition to the thrills, Gray told THR before the Paper Tiger premiere that he’s hopeful audiences recognize the power of interpersonal relationships in the domestic drama.

“I was trying to make a film in which the personal connection is everything, that love is everything,” Gray said. “Through that of course you want people to feel suspense and intensity and things that we love in a good drama, you hope. But then in the end, dare I use the word catharsis, what connects us is what matters. It’s almost a cautionary tale.”

That broader human resonance is also reflected in the guidance Gray gave actor Roman Engel who plays the youngest of Irwin’s two sons, serving as somewhat of a stand-in for the director himself.

“He would mostly just try to tell me to be myself on set and don’t try to live someone else’s experience, try to live your own and do the actions you would do while whatever’s happening to you,” Engel told THR of Gray’s direction.

The film ends as Gary, Irwin and wife Hester (Scarlett Johansson) are each dealing with their own personal issues and before they learn of each other’s fates, but Gray hopes that that lack of resolution allows the story to continue on beyond the bounds of the film.

“I love the idea that the life of the movie goes on past the movie,” he said in a post-screening Q&A at the NY Film Festival Friday night. “I love the open ending. I love the idea that the film exists past the boundaries of the screen and the time. … With all of the characters, I wanted to make sure that there was a completion to their openness in a way, how open their characters were, and that nobody has the whole picture, because that’s like life, and it’s very untraditional actually for movies. Usually, in a movie somebody has the whole story.”

Neon is set to release Paper Tiger in select U.S. theaters on Nov. 13, with a wider release on Nov. 20.