![]() Critics seem to love it as well: It has an 88 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie, which opened Friday, is an adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling book, which tells the exploits of the British explorer Percy Fawcett. "The Lost City of Z" is now playing everywhere.It took the director James Gray an agonizing six years and three leading men to get The Lost City of Z out of so-called “development hell.” And that, it would turn out, would be the easiest part about making the movie. She had that widow's catastrophe about her. She was so uncertain and wary and troubled, and I loved that it was a trance that she had to be in. That whole day, which was shot the same day as the scene in the room with the compass, and her work was magnificent that day. Music, it's an old quote of Stanislavski's, is the most direct path to the human heart. I remember I was playing Tosca, a piece from Tosca, it was a very grand thing. But then I think she realized what it was. I think, at first, she thought I was insane. I think that's take 24 that's in the movie. Weirdly, the motion of the person always dictates the motion of the camera. Because she comes down and the camera booms down and there's something very counter-intuitive for the camera operator, because the camera has to move away from her and at a speed she isn't walking. It was a weirdly difficult shot to do because it involved correctly placing her in the mirror and getting the camera move right. It was the literal visual correlative to that idea. It was all about coming up, if I can use a pretentious term, a visual objective correlative for the narrative idea that the obsession was going to swallow her up. Then there was a visual effect at the end with the mountain and the sky because otherwise it looked too much like a greenhouse. I can't imagine what the neighbors thought. It was very funny to see these greens people coming in with huge palm trees and you're in the middle of Northern Ireland. It was a very strange set because we had this Victorian house in Belfast and we created this long corridor. So right before filming I had scouted this Victorian house and there was this mirror so I thought she could walk off into the jungle, literally. He's combining two different spaces and all that. And there's all this stuff at the end with Henry Fonda, and it's a psychoanalysis and he's talking about, "I don't know what I was doing, I was in a house." And it cuts to him in the house with Henry Fonda. I was watching an excellent movie, " The Boston Strangler," with Tony Curtis. And the inspiration came from a weird source. I thought about how we're going to deal with this. You can't just cut in the Royal Geographic Society with the compass and all that. But I couldn't figure out a way to express that his obsession became her tragedy. So how do you put two people in the same frame walking away from each other?īut this ending I struggled with. It's a love story that's never consummated thankfully and the worst people ever connecting but not connecting and I thought there you couldn't kill one of them off. It was there from the beginning because it was a story about codependence. ![]() In the case of " The Immigrant," that final shot, which I quite like, was always in the script. Can you talk about the shot and how you did it and the reasoning behind it? You've had two movies back-to-back with amazing final shots. ![]() It's a staggering shot, as subtle as it is complex, and when we sat down with Gray a few weeks ago to talk about the film, a large majority of that conversation was centered on this incredible shot. In the final moments of the film, Miller, who plays the wife of presumed-dead explorer Percy Fawcett, walks down the stairs of the stuffy Royal Geographic Society, and, as we glimpse in a hallway mirror, we're staring into the Amazonian jungle that took the life of her husband and child. But what might be the most dazzling thing about a movie almost exclusively filled with dazzling things is the final shot of the film. ![]() If you saw director James Gray's thrilling " The Lost City of Z" this weekend, then you were undoubtedly blown away by the film's true-life story of obsession and Amazonian exploration and the finely calibrated performances of the cast (led by an impeccable Charlie Hunnam and Sienna Miller).
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