It felt like James Gray was nearly everywhere this weekend at the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.

He introduced an outdoor screening of Paper Tiger, written and directed by him and starring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller, and received the Career Leopard honor from the Swiss festival. And he discussed the role and power of cinema during a press conference. He even made time to meet for reporter roundtable interviews, one of which The Hollywood Reporter participated in.

Among other things, Gray quipped about how his wife and kids really provide no fodder for stories. “My wife is fantastic. My children are great,” he said. “I love them, and that’s not very good for drama. It’s like a sitcom or something [where someone says:] Who left the vacuum cleaner out? I tripped [over] it.”

But growing up, his family was, of course, a key influence, and that is why Paper Tiger is autographically inspired. “The formative thing in my life, so far, was my brother and I, my mother and father, a very close family unit — screwed up, very troubled, unable to express love a lot of the time,” Gray shared. “But there was love in the house, as screwed up as it was. And within a span of two months, I went off to college, my brother moved out, my father got into legal trouble, and my mother died of glioblastoma, brain cancer, like Scarlett [Johansson] has in the movie. And so that family unit, which was the love that I knew, came apart.”

Continued the filmmaker: “I found myself trying to reckon with this loss for a very long time, and sometimes it wasn’t conscious. My father never spoke to it, and my mother, of course, wasn’t there to speak to it. My brother and I now talk all the time, and a lot of the times we laugh about it, and a lot of the times we reflect on how sad it was.” And at this stage in his life, “I think you have enough distance to look back on something that has real drama to it,” he concluded.

Asked about the characters in Paper Tiger, Gray said: “One of the big struggles that men have had in the world, as we’ve currently constructed it, is that they’re really not allowed to engage with the tender side, the feminine side, love. That’s seen as running in contradiction to what the man was supposed to do, which is to earn a living, to make money, to quote unquote provide for the family.”

The writer-director added with more thoughts on a difficult topic. “So much of what our system is organized around is a principle of cruelty and viciousness,” Gray said. “If you focus on an idea, for example, as simple as a negotiation, in any business, negotiation rewards the person who cares less, which means a kind of cruelty, a viciousness, a coldness is built into the system. And women, being oppressed in that way in that realm, have been able nonetheless to engage with the more emotional maturity. So I think this is a strange and difficult scenario where you have men not able to express themselves in that way, but also women not allowed to participate in the marketplace.”

That was one of the themes that he wanted to explore in the movie. “You have in it three characters,” Gray explained. “One is a man who knows there’s a game out there to be played and how to make money, and is probably great at it, but won’t make the ethical compromise to succeed. Another knows it is a game, but probably doesn’t have the social skills to succeed in that framework. And the third is a person who may or may not have the social skills, but certainly has the awareness of the game. But fate deals her a terrible hand, and something comes from the gods that will disable her participation.”

Concluded Gray about Paper Tiger: “So I was trying for a panoramic idea of what it means to be functioning in the world. That’s what was going through my mind.”

Are there any big topics that he is thinking about now that could make their way into a future film?
“I’ve never thought that there’s a big topic I need to wrap my head,” Gray told reporters. “The way that I treat it is what is interesting to me in that moment. What am I going through? What’s inside of me emotionally that’s trying to get out? What relationship is really troubling me? And then that’s how the work starts to grow. It doesn’t come from a desire to say that big thing.”

Gray added his creative process: “You work from a position of craft. Let me express myself, and then you let the bigness of it, to the degree that it has any big idea, come out of it organically.”