James Gray on 'Paper Tiger' and Why He Won't Preach Politics

"Paper Tiger" writer-director James Gray walked into the New York Film Festival on Friday with a crime drama he swears he made before the headlines caught up with him.

The film stars Adam Driver as a former police officer who drags his brother (Miles Teller) into a deal with Russian mobsters. Scarlett Johansson plays Teller's wife, who gets hit with a sudden illness mid-crisis. Gray told Variety at the NYFF premiere he didn't set out to make a political statement.

"All movies are political in one way or another, but I like movies that exist with subtext," Gray said. "I don't want to preach to you. That's a polemic. That's for debate class."

He went further: "The reason we can watch some of those beautiful Hollywood movies from 1940 and still find them moving is because they weren't trying to teach us a lesson. Not Sunday school. Art is not Sunday school."

What does "paper tiger" actually mean?

The phrase originates in the Ming Dynasty and entered Mao Zedong's vocabulary to describe an enemy that looks strong but can't bite. Gray said he borrowed it for the same reason he borrows anything: because it felt vivid.

"This term was originally [popularized] by Mao Zedong in China to describe us," Gray explained. "I always loved it because it seemed so vivid. A tiger made of paper — what is that? It's the brittleness that's underneath all of us no matter how tough we think we are."

In the film, Driver's character Gary calls the Russians "paper tigers" — all talk, no bite — and then discovers he miscalculated. The title works the same way on the family. Their middle-class American life looks navigable until the system chews them up.

Why does the timing feel weird?

Because President Donald J. Trump has spent the past year applying the phrase to Vladimir Putin. In a Truth Social post roughly a year before the NYFF premiere, Trump wrote: "Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia. In fact, it is very much making them look like 'a paper tiger.'"

Gray insists the script predates that usage. "It's very weird because I wrote and made ['Paper Tiger'] before [Trump] ever started using that term," he said. "It had nothing to do with him…. It's sort of like half frightening, weirdly flattering. I don't know. What would you think?"

What changed between his last film and this one?

"Paper Tiger" began life as a sequel to Gray's 2022 autobiographical drama "Armageddon Time" — a coming-of-age story that lost awards-season oxygen to Steven Spielberg's "The Fabelmans." The sequel was going to track his mother's death from glioblastoma (an aggressive brain cancer). Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong were even in early talks to reprise their roles as his parents.

The script pivoted when his father's criminal history became the louder story. Driver stepped into the parent role that wasn't, Teller took Strong's part, and Johansson took Hathaway's. The result is Gray's eighth feature, and another entry in his running autobiography told through genre.

So what does the moment change for the film?

Hours before the NYFF premiere, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Trump was brokering a trilateral (three-party) peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. A reporter asked Gray whether Trump himself qualifies as a paper tiger.

"No comment," Gray smirked.

It's the one line Gray won't expand on, and it lands harder than any of his Sunday-school disavowals. The film opens in theaters as the phrase he picked for aesthetic reasons becomes a fixture of the U.S.–Russia news cycle — and Gray is letting audiences draw their own conclusions.