James Gray if a filmmaker who has shot to fame producing movies in the crime genre, as well as his several collaborations with Joaquin Phoenix.
He attending the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts were he learnt his trade, producing student film Cowboys and Angels.
But it was this production that landed him an agent and brought him to the attention of Paul Webster, and industry producer. Webster encouraged Gray to pen a script that he could produce.
It was 1994 when Gray directed his first feature film in the form of Little Odessa, starring Tim Roth, Edward Furlong and Vanessa Redgrave.
A Russian hit man is instructed to execute an Iranian jeweller in Brighton Beach. There is one problem, however: Joshua can't show his face in the old neighbourhood. His father despises him, and Volkov, the local mob boss, wants him dead.
Nonetheless, Joshua clandestinely returns to Brooklyn only to discover that his mother is dying of a brain tumour, his little brother is a high school dropout, and his father is having an affair with a younger woman.
Nor has Volkov forgotten his promise to do Josh in -- a killer's already been lined up. Joshua finds his only solace in the bed of a young woman he knew years ago.
The film launched Gray as a filmmaker as it scooped the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival as well as the Critics Prize at the Deauville Film Festival.
However But it would be six years before he released his second feature as The Yards brought him together with Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix for the first time in 2000.
Mark Wahlberg plays Leo, a 24-year-old who has just been released from prison and is in need of a job. Leo gets a job working for his uncle Frank (James Caan) in the railway business, where his best friend, Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), shows him how to bribe politicians by day and sabotage the competition's work by night.
Almost immediately Leo and Willie run into trouble when they go down to the railway yards to damage their competitor's work. Leo is soon on the run, hunted for a murder that Willie committed.
The film wasn't a big commercial success as it received a limited release. But the trio teamed up again seven years for We Own the Night.
Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival the film and follows Joseph and Bobby who inhabit two conflicting worlds in late 1980s New York, the former becoming a cop and the latter running a nightclub. Bobby spends his evenings in a den of iniquity, indulging in drugs, alcohol, and gambling, and his model-like girlfriend Amanda (Eva Mendes) is never far from his arm.
Their two worlds meet when the father of the two men, Burt (Robert Duvall), who is also a cop, gets together with Joseph to ask Bobby for information about a patron of the club named Vadim (Alex Veadov). Vadim is the nephew of the club's owner, and also a dangerous member of the Russian criminal underworld.
Bobby sides with Vadim, and the tension in Gray's brother-versus-brother potboiler reaches melting point as Joseph goes after both his sibling and his Russian foe.
The film received mixed reviews, with many similarities being drawn with The Yards, despite this it did well at the box office in the States and overseas.
This week sees the director once again team up with Phoenix in Two Lovers, which is the first time the filmmaker has deviated from his usual crime genre.
Two Lovers is a classical romantic drama set in the insular world of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn by director James Gray (We Own The Night, The Yards, Little Odessa).
It tells the story of Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), an attractive but troubled young man who moves back into his childhood home following a suicide attempt.
While recovering under the watchful eye of his worried but ultimately uncomprehending parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov), he encounters two women in quick succession...
There's Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a mysterious and beautiful neighbour exotic and out-of-place in Leonard's staid Brighton Beach neighbourhood. But he soon discovers that she too is deeply troubled.
His next project is The Lost City of Z which focuses on explorers who are searching for a British Colonel who disappeared trying to find a legendary City of Z during the 1920s.
Brad Pitt is currently attached to the project.
Two Lovers is out now
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
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