From Gray to Z

Jordan Mintzer, international man of mystery, wears many hats: he’s a tax consultant, he’s the Paris correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter, he’s one of the producers of Matt Porterfield’s remarkable first two films, “Hamilton” and “Putty Hill” (for the latter, he also co-wrote the story), and tomorrow his book “Conversations avec James Gray” will be issued by the French publisher Editions Synecdoche. Gray, of course, is the director who, in a mere quartet of films, from “Little Odessa,” in 1995, to “Two Lovers,” from 2009, has made a cinematic universe of his own, the working-class Jewish families of Brooklyn and Queens (“Two Lovers,” in particular, is one of the meteoric movies of recent years, a romantic melodrama with a surface of dreams and limits and a substratum of colossal wars of the soul). And he was scheduled to make a film based on the book “The Lost City of Z,” by David Grann, of this magazine; Brad Pitt was slated to star; and then it all fell apart.

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