When it comes to AI, director James Gray doesn’t mince words. The auteur called the current push for AI-driven filmmaking “obscene,” but he told IndieWire in a recent interview he has increasingly come to believe that it is a movement that will ultimately fail.
“I have a strange optimism about it because I think we will begin to recognize pretty quickly, if we don’t already, that AI is not going to be able to get at all of the infinite layers of the soul,” said Gray on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It’ll be able to hopefully help us speed up medical clinical trials for people that need it, but who we are, really, our souls are the only true infinite. You’re trying to reach for in movies, and any creative endeavor, really, to represent the never-ending mystery, the unending layers that exist. And so what does that mean? It means imperfection is part of the equation.”
It was a theme that ran throughout Gray’s entire interview about his new crime drama “Paper Tiger.” The filmmaker finds artistic beauty and humanity in images that are “flawed.”
“What I have found is that when you get technically great, what you start to miss is the imperfections in the medium that force a kind of magic,” said Gray. “When we say ‘the magic of the silver screen,’ what we’re actually talking about are things that in isolation you may never do: slightly soft [focus] on the actor, the image is grainy, you don’t see their face completely, you’re withholding some aspect of them physically.”
Gray equated going to a museum to see Van Gogh’s brushstrokes on a painting to watching something on celluloid: “It’s magical, and that’s what we’re trying to get at with the grain in the film, we’re trying to get at a humanity.”
Gray has gone back on what he told IndieWire in 2022, to say he now regrets shooting his last film, “Armageddon Time,” digitally. That choice was his — believing he needed the freedom digital provided to do longer, continuous, repeated takes because the film relied on its young cast’s performances — but he now sees it as a mistake. Gray is immensely proud of “Armageddon Time,” and gushes over Darius Khondji’s cinematography, but he did feel something was missing while making it.
Explained Gray, “I found myself on the digital fighting and fighting and fighting to get the imperfection, to get the grain, to get the kind of elusiveness of the image, the irretrievability of the image.”
The essence of that “irretrievability” is something Gray has been thinking about against the backdrop of what he fears technology is doing to his art form. He went on to remark how “disposable” digital imagery has become: “We take more photographs than ever; people are constantly photographing, but we don’t really look at them. Do you ever see a teenager [scroll their] Instagram feed?”
Gray continued, “There is an inherent melancholy attached to the photograph. It is a moment frozen in time that you will never get back. Now, people don’t consciously think that, but unconsciously they know it, ‘This is a moment I was really happy. It’s gone.’ So in cinema, one of the things that’s so beautiful is that melancholic pull, the irretrievability of that image is somehow turned into something beautiful. The immediacy of digital, the thing that offends our eye, is that it feels present. It’s why if a movie looked like you were watching an NFL game, it would offend you. It would look terrible because it feels so live. It doesn’t have that beauty of the past.”
On his new film “Paper Tiger,” Gray and cinematographer Joaquín Baca-Asay not only returned to shooting on celluloid, but also embraced vintage lenses and equipment, particularly tungsten lights, which he said was another way to incorporate greater “humanity” into his images. Gray doesn’t believe he is alone in this view, suggesting cinema and cinephiles, at this AI moment, are going through something akin to the return of 12-inch records in the music industry.
“We’re trying to get at a humanity. My kids know it, and young people know it; it’s why vinyl has made a comeback,” said Gray. “We went all digital in the ’80s and early ’90s, and all of a sudden people heard a vinyl record and went, ‘Wait a minute, that sounds better,’ because it’s a continuous signal. The needle goes into the record, and the signal is continuous, and digital, of course, breaks it up into zeros and ones. That imperfection, the warmth, is what reminds us of who we are.”
“Paper Tiger” has been selected as the opening night film at this year’s New York Film Festival, and NEON will release the film theatrically on November 13, 2026.
To hear Gray’s full interview, airing in November, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.