Armageddon Time stars Golden Globe-winning actors Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins, and Jeremy Strong. The drama is set in New York in the 80s. It’s an autobiographical film by director James Gray (The Immigrant, We Own the Night), which looks back on the racism he suffered from the age of 12 growing up in Queens in a working-class Jewish family.

The film chronicles the director’s friendship with a Black classmate, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who endures his own battle with discrimination. The story is also about the sociopolitical aspects of that era and how they laid the foundation for the societal edifice standing today. During a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, the American director talks about his most personal film to date.

“The very grim fact is that I am no longer 29 years old. When you get old, you start to look back. I used to tell my children my childhood stories. They asked me to bring them back to where I grew up, and we went. There was very little evidence that I had ever lived there or that my parents and grandparents had been there. All of a sudden, it felt like a ghost story wanting to come out. That was the genesis of it, a few years back. It’s been in my mind ever since,” he explains of the film’s origin story. “Then, I had a bunch of lonely nights in a wonderful Paris apartment. I was doing an opera, The Marriage of Figaro, and I had lots of free time. I started to write it.”

Banks Repeta (Uncle Frank, The Devil All the Time) plays Gray as a child. Anne Hathaway plays his mother, Esther. Jeremy Strong is Irving, his father. Hopkins plays his grandfather. As per Gray’s modus operandi in many of his films, Armageddon Time shines a light on family dynamics. In this case, he utilizes the U.S. at a tipping point: the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. For many Americans that moment in time marked the beginning of a toxic divide, a continually widening sociopolitical chasm that separates the nation to this day.

Gray says, “The truth is, history is very complex and has many layers, but there are inflection points and people do make a difference in both positive and negative ways. My memory of it, at least as a 12-year-old at the time, was when Muhammad Ali, a big hero of mine growing up, lost in very humiliating fashion to Larry Holmes that fall. A few months later, John Lennon was murdered and Ronald Reagan became president. Of this, my mother said, ‘There’s going to be a nuclear war.’ She’d constantly say that. The feeling of Armageddon was just sitting on the family. I also believe it was the beginning of a ‘Market is God’ idea. If you look at the rise of inequality – a world issue, really – it began around 1979, 1980,” he says. “It’s an inflection point in history that is, in some ways, quite underrated. At least so far.”

Jeremy Strong, one of the stars of the hit drama Succession, a Golden Globe winner, draws parallels between the contemporary world in which Succession is set and the Greed is Good ethos of the 80s.

“As an actor, you sort of enter into a piece fully. So, Succession doesn’t exist for me when we’re in this world. But the fault lines that we see starting to crack in this film – that are, actually, enormous – widen and widen and widen and become the political and social and racial divisions in our society and in the world today. This we see, in microcosm, in this film. The television show I work on is, in so many ways, about late-stage capitalism and terminal decadence in the United States. The prefiguration of all of that, in a way, is the genome of this film.”

Anne Hathaway thoroughly enjoyed playing Gray’s mother. “It was an honor. My husband is Jewish. We spoke a great deal about what it would mean to represent this in art but, also, what it would mean for our family. My mother-in-law, who passed recently, was simply the greatest Jewish mother I’ve ever seen. Her legacy influences my life in profound ways that I am truly, truly grateful for. The hand of a Jewish mother will guide the rest of my life,” she says. “If I have done one thing in terms of capturing the depth of that love and that connection, honestly, I won’t even attempt to put it into words. Because it is beyond. That’s why I’m so grateful to cinema. It allows you to say things without words.”

Gray’s latest offering has received rave reviews. The film’s important themes are pertinent wherever you may sit on the socio-economic scale. “I have no idea how to solve issues of inequality of class. When you don’t have an idea of how to solve things, you have to just simply put it out in front of the audience and hope that they can make connections for themselves,” notes the director. “We are here to pose questions. We are here to illustrate and shine a light on our personal and more intimate impressions. The rest is left to you.”