Homecoming

Much of "The Yards" is accurate, down to details as small as postcards taped to the walls of lower-middle-class Queens apartments and illegal payoffs done in the nude (to be sure no one's wired). That "The Yards" is billed as a work of fiction might be the biggest fiction in the film, and Gray is worried that when the movie comes out, so will too much information about its origins.

Indeed, the New Yorker's Tad Friend did some digging and, in an Oct. 13 "Talk of the Town" piece, uncovered what Gray told me in the yards. Friend writes that in the early '90s, the government charged Gray's dad (who owned an electronic parts company that supplied New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority) and his partner with bribing an MTA official.

Gray is worried about having made such a personal, intimate film -- which lays some painful family truths on the table for the world to see. He's worried his dad will be hurt by it all, and about what he'll think of the film itself (though his father read the script, and suggested changes for the sake of reality) -- if he even decides to see it.

James Gray is furious

"I'm so fucking miserable!" Gray is furious because he has promised to treat everyone in the car at Eddie's Sweet Shop, which serves, according to Gray, "the best fucking ice cream ever." For blocks, he has been talking about how wonderful this place is -- the flavors, the textures, the cones. He has built it up for us (and for himself) big time, so when we pull up to the small corner store and it's shuttered (closed on Monday nights), Gray is disappointed -- for us and with himself.

I don't want to make too much of the Eddie's Sweet Shop incident, but it does convey a little bit about Gray's expectations. He wants always to please, and he has raised the bar high for himself and for his work. He compares what he does, or at least what he's striving for, with opera, with art. If "The Yards" feels melodramatic and clichéd at times, that's because Gray is trying for nothing less than capturing the zeitgeist on film by channeling Greek mythology and its progeny. He wants to tell his generation's versions of Homer, Shakespeare and Zola.

And movies are the way to tell those stories at the turn of this century. Directing is more than "a guy with a folding chair, a black beret and a paper megaphone," Gray says, walking outside the Juniper Elbow Co. -- another building that inspired scenery in "The Yards." "Movies are the most direct path to doing something emotional."

A muscular Rottweiler prowls inside Juniper's chain-link fence. So many jets fly above us, coming into and leaving JFK Airport, that they seem more like mosquitoes we could swat away if need be. Gray is talking about Wahlberg's character and the "classic tragic structure" of his movie.

"Tragedy is when a character knows or believes his life is not in his hands," he says. "That's true of Leo. His life is out of his control when he gets out of prison. What he wants is control of his life back, but that doesn't happen -- things continue to spin out of his control. His life is unraveling and he can't do anything to change it. Ultimately, he takes control back by seeking help from the legitimate system. Which is all he wanted to begin with."

At one point, while we're walking outside Lutheran Cemetery, opposite the Juniper Elbow Co., he stops.

"Do I sound like an ass?" he asks. "Seriously, tell me when I sound like a pretentious prick. Make me stop."

He continues talking about Wahlberg's character, but he could just as easily be talking about his own obsession with the movies and his career as an independent-minded director in Hollywood trying to imitate his childhood heroes.

"His fate is in the destiny of the system at large," he says. "It was dictated to him from moment one."

• View blog reactions