Paper Tiger Returns Gray’s Family Scandal to New York

James Gray’s Paper Tiger, the 1986 Queens crime drama that began as an Armageddon Time sequel, opens the New York Film Festival on Friday. Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson star. Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong were first in line to play the parents again.

The recast killed the literal follow-up. What arrived is closer to the family collapse Gray has been filming since The Yards in 2000, when he first put his father’s contracting scandal and his mother’s illness on screen.

Paper Tiger Reaches New York Without Its First Cast

On September 21, Gray said the new film “definitely started from another autobiographical place,” then added that he “wanted to do something almost Hitchcockian.” He talked to Hathaway and Strong first. Driver, he said, was “always” the third piece.

Hathaway was ready to return. Then Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey took her for about seven months. Strong moved onto the television version of The Boys From Brazil, a job Gray put at about two years. He did not wait. “I decided it was better to cast different actors anyway, because I planned on making something in a different style,” he said. “I wanted very much to go back to film.”

Teller took the father. Johansson took the mother. Driver stayed as the former-cop brother. Gray later told a Cannes-week interviewer that the new pair “fit a slightly more operatic idea of the movie” and let him treat it “as a whole new movie.” He called that shift “very liberating.”

Seven Months, Then Two Years

The path from sequel pitch to Opening Night is a short list of closed doors. Gray had already named the next chapter in November 2022, when he said he wanted “a kind of Armageddon Time sequel about what happened to my mother,” including his father’s legal trouble and her brain cancer.

FROM SEQUEL TALK TO LINCOLN CENTER

1. November 2022: Gray says he wants to continue the family story into his mother’s illness and his father’s fall.
2. Summer 2025: After Hathaway and Strong drop out, he shoots Paper Tiger in 31 days with Teller, Johansson and Driver.
3. May 16, 2026: The film premieres in Cannes competition, Gray’s sixth trip there, as one of two American titles in the slate.
4. June 25, 2026: Neon dates a select opening for November 13 and a wider run for November 20.
5. July 16, 2026: Film at Lincoln Center names it Opening Night of the 64th New York Film Festival.
6. September 25, 2026: North American premiere at Alice Tully Hall, with Gray and the three leads in attendance.

Armageddon Time, released in 2022, stopped in 1980, with a boy based on Gray watching his parents from below. Paper Tiger jumps six years in story time and hands the plot to the father.

His Father’s Case Already Filled The Yards

In 2000, while The Yards was heading into theaters, Gray described the real window behind that film. He went to college in 1987. Two months later his mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor. A few months after that, federal investigators began chasing his father, Irwin Gray, a partner in Envort-Gray, an electronics-parts firm that supplied the M.T.A.

I went off to college in 1987, and two months later my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and a few months after that the federal government began pursuing my father. For the next five years, it felt like someone was stepping on my chest.

James Gray, speaking in 2000 as The Yards opened

In 1991, prosecutors brought a 56-count indictment accusing Irwin Gray and a partner of paying $500,000 in bribes to a Metro-North official, who killed himself during the investigation, and of billing for parts that were never delivered. In 1992, Gray said, his father pleaded to three counts, paid a $50,000 fine, and took a suspended sentence. Irwin Gray, talking at his Queens house that same autumn, said even reading the script brought back “the period when agents with guns were at the door.”

The Yards turned that scandal into a rail-yard thriller, with James Caan as a contractor and Ellen Burstyn as a dying mother. Paper Tiger keeps the same household weather and moves it to 1986, the year Queens borough president Donald Manes killed himself in a corruption probe Gray still cites as the moment the city’s graft became impossible to ignore.

THREE FILMS, ONE FAMILY FILE

The father Teller plays is named Irwin Pearl, the same first name as Irwin Gray. That is not subtle, and it is not new. Gray has been using the man’s case for a quarter century. “My own life was touched with crime,” he said this month. “My father had legal troubles and was a convicted felon, for example. So I see the films as being personal.”

What the Gowanus Scheme Does to the Pearls

The film runs 115 minutes. It follows Irwin, an engineer trying to lift a middle-class household, as his brother Gary, a former NYPD cop, pulls him into a deal with Russian importers dumping oil at the Gowanus Canal. Johansson’s Hester is trying to hold the house together when she learns she is gravely ill. Their sons are played by Gavin Goudey and Roman Engel.

HOW THE PEARLS GET TRAPPED

• The pitch: Gary thinks the brothers can make a killing helping Russian criminals work around dumping rules at Gowanus.
• The father: Irwin wants comforts for the family and a work ethic for boys he fears are slipping out of his class.
• The canal: He looks at a poisoned ditch and, Gray said, sees “promise,” even beauty, in “a big oil ditch.”
• The cost: Gary endangers Irwin, Hester, and the sons, and Irwin finds he cannot control what he walked into.

Gray said he does not blame Irwin for taking the boys to Gowanus at night, because in 1986 “nobody knew about what they call the Russian organizatsia.” Soviet immigrants, he noted, were known as engineers and doctors. He scouted the real canal, found it transformed, and rebuilt 1986 Gowanus digitally after shooting on the Paramus River. He put the bed at 30 feet of water over 10 feet of pollutants, a pit he dated to the 1840s. The waterway later became a Superfund site, and the EPA began full-scale dredging of the Gowanus Canal in 2020.

He had already put Russian money into Brooklyn nightclubs in We Own the Night in 2007. Little Odessa, his 1994 debut, started in that immigrant world. Paper Tiger folds those streets back into the parent story Armageddon Time left unfinished.

Do Not Imitate My Parents

Hathaway and Strong had asked for family detail on Armageddon Time. Teller and Johansson did the same, then Gray shut it down.

Guys, I do not want you imitating my parents. This is becoming its own thing.

James Gray, to Miles Teller and Scarlett Johansson

He wanted a tender father this time, not the bruising, watchful Irving Strong played from a son’s point of view. Teller’s Irwin, Gray said, has “nothing but the best intentions,” and that is what wrecks the house. “We wanted to love him completely, but the world can be wrecked by well-meaning individuals.”

Teller’s engineer, chasing a public-works payday with a flashier brother, sits in the same line as Caan’s contractor in The Yards: a man who thinks he can work a dirty system and learns the system works him. Driver’s Gary is a composite, Gray said, built from a man who later died under unexplained circumstances, from his father’s brother, and from a business partner he would not name because “he’s still around.” He called the character noble, someone who “won’t play in the dirt.”

Johansson, a New Yorker, was the actress Gray had wanted for years and assumed would refuse. Driver and Johansson share only a handful of scenes, a small reunion after Marriage Story in 2019. The temperature of the film, Gray said, rose because these three could carry a more operatic register than a straight sequel to 1980.

The Shoot Lasted 31 Days on Asphalt

Gray shot Armageddon Time digitally, with Darius Khondji behind the camera, because he expected many takes from two young boys. The boys delivered early, and he regretted the choice. “I do think it is still a more beautiful recording mechanism,” he said of film. Actors, he added, change when they hear the money running through the camera, a point he has argued with Nolan.

Paper Tiger was designed for that sound. It is a 31-day shoot from the summer of 2025, which Gray called the most physically brutal of his career, worse in the moment than The Lost City of Z in the Amazon: 98 degrees, 90 percent humidity, “on asphalt, every fucking day.” He filled supporting parts with New York stage actors because, he said, they know how to play an “anti-influencer movie.”

The finished film is 115 minutes. Festival prints for Opening Night are 35mm. That is the style change he said he wanted once Hathaway and Strong were gone: not a childhood sequel on a digital sensor, a period crime picture on film.

Friday Night on 35mm at Lincoln Center

The 64th New York Film Festival runs September 25 through October 12. Paper Tiger is Gray’s fourth title there, after The Immigrant in 2013, The Lost City of Z as closing night in 2016, and Armageddon Time in 2022. It is his first Opening Night. Artistic director Dennis Lim called it a “career-best achievement” and “a movie of immense emotional power, at once lovingly realistic and grandly mythic.”

Gray’s own note to the festival stays close to the same ground he named in 2000. “This deeply personal film is rooted in New York City; from my upbringing to life-changing family experiences,” he said. The opening-night screenings on 35mm at Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater include a 6:00 PM Q&A with Gray, Driver, Johansson and Teller, plus Gray intros at 6:30 PM and 9:00 PM.

On September 22, Neon posted a new trailer ahead of those seats.

“An utterly gripping thriller.” Adam Driver, Miles Teller, and Scarlett Johansson star in PAPER TIGER, written and directed by James Gray. Opens only in theaters November. pic.twitter.com/umJzQI03Iq

— NEON (@neonrated) September 22, 2026

Gray has never lived on multiplex grosses, and Paper Tiger is not built to start. Neon has it in theaters November 13, then wider on November 20. Friday is the homecoming: a recast 1986 crime film, on film, in the city where the real Irwin Gray once sat in a living room and told his son, “I could never get it to work.”