James Gray teases his next film: it could be an adaptation in the spirit of David Lean

Director James Gray, whose film “Paper Tiger” opened the 64th edition of the New York Film Festival on September 25, has revealed in an interview for Deadline that his next project may move away from the autobiographical mode of “Paper Tiger” and “Armageddon Time” and return to expansive, wide cinema — in the spirit of David Lean, as The Playlist reports, citing Deadline’s original interview.

Gray said he greatly loved the “expansiveness” of “The Lost City of Z” (2016), the adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction book: “I really liked the kind of expansiveness of ‘Lost City’… I was keen to completely break the mold of what I was doing and do an adaptation, to try my best at something like David Lean. I could do it again. In fact, in the next film, I might do exactly that.” He added: “Maybe I’ll return to things outside my autobiographical experience in the next film.” The director specified no concrete material, so the statement is a creative direction, not an official announcement of a specific project.

His inward, personal period of work, Gray explained, was partly shaped by the COVID pandemic and two years spent at home with family. “Paper Tiger” itself had started as a more direct sequel to “Armageddon Time” before becoming its own story. The film — starring Miles Teller, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, two brothers drawn into a Russian mafia scheme — had its world premiere at Cannes, where it received a ten-minute standing ovation in May 2026, and will be released in theaters on November 13 via Neon.

Gray also mentioned his long-gestating epic on the Russian Revolution, “The Dream of a Thousand Men,” which remains shelved after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He described Cannes as “a very strange environment in which to premiere a movie” — a bubble where a film can fall victim to context — and said that for a New York film like “Paper Tiger,” the New York Film Festival is the right place to relaunch it outside Cannes.