‘Lost City’ director treks jungle

CHICAGO — “The Lost City of Z,” one of the year’s highlights, takes place in the early 20th century and chronicles the adventures of British explorer Percy Fawcett and his search, far from the confines of London’s Royal Geographical Society, for an El Dorado-like civilization hidden away in the Amazon jungle. It seemed best to meet to meet the film’s writer-director, James Gray, in a location reeking of wood-paneled Gilded Age white-male privilege.

So that’s where we talked: in the lovely restored lobby of the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel on Michigan Avenue, dating to 1893. Gray, a native of Queens, N.Y., turned 48 recently. He has a producer-director wife, Alexandra Dickson Gray, and three children. His films include “Little Odessa”(1994), “The Yards” (1998), “We Own the Night” (2007), “Two Lovers” (2008) and “The Immigrant” (2013).

“The Lost City of Z” has been in development for years, initially with Brad Pitt aboard to produce and to play Fawcett. Pitt stayed committed to the project but passed on the role; eventually it went to Charlie Hunnam. Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji, his ace collaborator on “The Immigrant,” shot the movie on 35 mm film on a mid-sized budget, working first in Northern Ireland, then London, and then in the jungles of Colombia.

Gray told me he knew it’d be difficult, but “you trick yourself. You think you can plan better, and that you’re smarter (about jungle filming logistics) than Herzog or Coppola and all the rest. But you can’t, and you’re not. You get down there, and the jungle rules the roost. It’s not just the physical punishment; but there’s a kind of sameness that sets in. Every day, 100 degrees, 100 percent humidity, 12 hours a day on the river. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a high-class moviemaking problem to have, and I got to make a film that was like a dream to me. But I’m a wimp, and there I was, with scorpions crawling up my leg.”

Gray and Khondji used very little artificial light in the jungle sequences, letting sunlight and firelight do the real work. Throughout the exterior scenes, and the more controllable Belfast-based sequences, Gray paid as much attention to getting the period details right. “There’s a certain percentage of any audience that’s crazily dedicated to that sort of thing,” he said. “One pin on a lapel that’s one year out of date, and all of a sudden you’re on the IMDB goof page.”

Get to greater truth

Gray adapted David Grann’s 2009 nonfiction book for his movie, and he knew fairly early on what he didn’t want to keep. Grann’s book, for starters, spends a good deal of time on Grann’s own odyssey retracing Fawcett’s steps into oblivion. Thwack, gone. Fawcett embarked on seven expeditions to the Amazon across his life; Gray compressed those into three, tailored to the three-act screenplay structure.

“The one risk I took,” he said, “and maybe I don’t get away with it, is that in real life Fawcett was considerably weirder and more racist. Toward the end, especially. His experiences in the trenches in World War I did serious damage to him, and he became obsessed with the occult. I got rid of some of that, and I tempered some of the racism; he was racist in some ways that simply mirrored what the culture was like then, in 1905 and later, when they believed in eugenics theory and all that crap. … I knew some people would be angry. But it’s not a documentary. In the end, you’re trying to get at a greater truth, and you get there by way of all these major, totally subjective decisions. That’s the beauty of filmmaking.”

In its visual quality and narrative sweep, “The Lost City of Z” evokes an earlier era and style of filmmaking. Gray’s movie is not crazy-long, but it takes its time within scenes to hold a shot, and not simply because it makes a pretty picture.

The other night, Gray told me, he couldn’t sleep. “‘Cleopatra’ was on Hulu, or Turner Classic Movies, or Netflix, or something. That movie is tough going. But it is an unbelievable testament to the resources filmmakers used to have. How many thousands of extras? And costumes for all those people! I look at that in awe.” It’s all relative, he said. “One hundred years from now,” he said, looking at the future through his own movie’s lens, “people are gonna be, like, ‘They made things called movies? They used to get 120 people together for two years and spend tens of millions of dollars? Now we just take out our device and say the words, ‘beautiful woman kisses handsome guy in a park.’ And all of a sudden, that image is right there.”

“I mean, we’re almost to that point already. So when you look at ‘Cleopatra,’ when you look at the films of David Lean, you’re looking at a period that existed once. But it won’t come back.”