The writer-director James Gray's last movie, We Own the Night, had the most visually stunning car chase scene in some thirty years, and that's an achievement that a lot of moviemakers would be happy to retire on. But though Gray knows his way around an action scene, his first three features are all stories about men involved in crime that can't be easily shoehorned as genre movies. His latest, Two Lovers (which Nick Schager reviewed earlier this week), might at first glance seem to be a change of pace, because the violence is all emotional. But on a deeper level, the movie, in which Gray returns to the Brighton Beach area of his feature debut Little Odessa and reunites with the star of The Yards and We Own the Night, Joaquin Phoenix, is of a piece with his earlier work, all family dramas about people in extreme situations torn apart by mixed feelings and divided loyalties.

How did you come around to wanting to tell this story?

It was really a combination of three different things that sort of inspired the movie. I was at a party with Gwynneth Paltrow, and she said to me, "Y'know, I'm quitting acting, and I'm just gonna raise my kids." And I said, "That's terrible, because you have a real gift, and now you're not going to use it." And she said, "Well, what do you care? We were never gonna work together, you make movies about guys who shoot guns off all the time." Which sucked.

And it wasn't how you saw yourself?

Well, I kinda did, but at the same time, you don't want people thinking that's all you can do. So the seed was planted then, and you might almost say this movie was my rejoinder. Then I got my wife pregnant, and we both had to go to a genetic counsellor. It turns out there are sixteen or seventeen disorders that are connected to your genetic makeup. There's something called Tasacs disease, which is a genetic disorder. My wife and I were fine, but I learned that if the man and the woman are both potential carriers, the child has such-and-such a chance of getting the disease. And the counsellor told me that couples break up over this. I thought that was interesting, and it got me to thinking about the precarious nature of relationships, but I just sort of put it in the drawer, thinking maybe later I could do something with it.

Then, when I was waiting to start shooting We Own the Night, I was waiting for Mark Wahlberg to be available, and one night I pulled this collection of novellas and short stories by Dostoevsky off the shelf one night, and I read "White Nights." I had read it twenty years earlier, and then I was too young to really read it. This time, I read it and I thought, what a wonderful story about the unknowable nature of desire. I thought, this is something worth pursuing. But I couldn't really remake that film; it's already been made into a film by Visconti, and Bresson did his own version. But in a way, it could use updating. I thought that if you told that story today, the person would probably be under heavy use of pharmaceuticals, and he'd be called bipolar or manic depressive, any of the maladies that have been invented because of the advent of psychoanalysis. And I thought that I could use a couple that broke up, maybe because of the fear of something like Tasac's disease, as a starting point.

So I decided that the challenge here would be to make a movie about love and desire and have it not be a comedy. I wanted to play it straight, and for it to have ... [pause] an authenticity of emotion. I wanted to do it with no postmodern irony and no jokes at the expense of the characters, so that we would be totally with them. I just thought that would be worth pursuing as an experiment. It's funny, because in most ways it's the least autobiographical of the films I've made. But some people have said, oh this must be more autobiographical than your other films, and I go--[expression of horror]--No! I mean, I'm happily married, to this fabulously beautiful woman, but I guess what they mean, I hope what they mean, is that I try to put myself into the film as much as I can.

Joaquin Phoenix's performance struck me as really brilliant, and it's very daring. It shows a real willingness to risk the audience not liking him, and even, as you say, to laugh at him because he's so openly vulnerable. You've worked with him twice before; did you have him in mind for this from the start?

I wrote the part for him and I would not have made the movie if he hadn't wanted to do it. He's unbelievably complex, and he really knows how to relate the inner turmoil of a person who's kind of at war with himself. He's an artist, and his only priority when he's working is to the character. That's really rare.

What about Gwynneth Paltrow? Because she also shows a side of herself here that I'm not sure she's explored in a movie before.

I've known her socially and loved her personally, and I know her as a very different person that whatever's this public image of her, but I didn't know what it would be like working with her. Joacquin and I were both very nervous about it, because we'd heard that she likes to do two or three takes, no improvisation, knows her lines, does it very precisely, and goes home. And Joaquin and I like to do twenty, thirty takes, do a lot of improvisation, really explore. And we just adored working with her. She has such emotional intelligence, and was so present in the scenes. And what I found was that, working with her, Joaquin started to become more precise, and she started to improvise, and they sort of met somewhere in the middle. It was a very happy set.

You seem to have a history of getting actors who might have some kind of established image and getting something different from them than they've shown before.

Actors are kind of hostage to context, very much hostage to the narratives they're in. Movie drama is so intimate, and you can see what the actor is doing all the time, so there's no lying in movies. Its emotional truth twenty-four frames a second, and you either believe it or you don't. And if you don't believe it, you don't believe it forty feet high. I try to give actors a context where they can play more than one thing, and sadly, I don't think they often get a chance to try to do that. I think that most American movies ask the actors to only play one level of performance, which is the action in the scene, not what's going on beneath.

The movie has this view of the destructive possibilities of love and the choices people make that's a little scary. And finally, you have this ambiguous sort of ending that probably looks like an uncomplicated happy ending, except that the person at the center of it all knows that it's not that simple.

An upbeat ending is fake, unless it's something like a Fred Astaire musical, which is meant to be transcend reality. And an unhappy ending is gratuitous and bleak and often just a kind of bogus existentialism. So what you want to do is square the circle and present an ending that could be perceived as part bitter, part sweet, because that's life. You know, when the Titanic sank, there were seven hundred survivors, and half of the witnesses believed that the ship broke in two as it sank, and the other half believed that the ship just basically went... [points his hand down and mimes it diving straight towards the floor] Two people who saw the exact same thing can have two completely different reactions, and that to me is a presentation of the world, in complete.