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James Gray’s The Immigrant (2014) is a film bursting with the integrity of its performances, with Marion Cotillard’s Ewa at the forefront. This is not accidental, as Gray’s intent was to construct a female-focused story with a heroine resemblant of years past.

Gray was originally inspired to craft a female-centered story after seeing Puccini’s “Il Trittico” with his wife back in 2008. “You know, they don’t make movies about women anymore, like the old ones with Barbara Stanwyck and Greer Carson,” he said to her, crying.

“Why don’t you make one?” she replied.

Drawing on experiences from his own family’s history, Gray set out to obey his wife. He first recalled a story involving his father and grandfather, when they visited Ellis Island in the 1970s after it became a tourist attraction.

“There was a woman there that my grandfather started to talk to in Yiddish and she was in tears, just crying and crying and crying and finally my father talked to my grandfather,” recalled Gray. “For some reason, I asked [my father] what she was talking about and he said, ‘Oh, she had a story, very interesting – her sister and she were separated on the island and she never saw her sister again.’” - Stephen Saito, Movablefest

It’s Gray’s grandparents that can be seen in Ewa’s locket photo during the film.

Gray’s grandmother once ate a banana with the peel on, and referred to spaghetti as bloody worms - two cultural things that found their way into Ewa’s character in The Immigrant.

“The production design of the restaurant where Bruno takes his women was based on photos he has of his great-grandparents’ restaurant on the lower east side. (In fact, Max Hochstim, the real-life pimp that Bruno was based on operated out of a restaurant run by Gray’s great aunt called Hurwitz’s.)” - Movablefest

The Immigrant was actually shot on Ellis Island - the first major film to do so - and Gray took that distinction very seriously. Researching through the Island’s history, he found accounts of Enrico Caruso doing an opera performance there, and another event by a magician. Those two acts collide to provide a crucial moment in the film’s narrative.

When asked by The Dissolve about how Gray learned all the interesting details about his family’s history, Gray replied “There were several different ways. The first is that our family history was pretty well documented in paperwork from Ellis Island and photographs from Czarist Russia, that sort of thing, a lot of which the family had saved. Very little of it was thrown out, which was great. That’s where a lot of that stuff came from. Then there was also my great aunt Sue. She just died last year at 101, and she was a great source of stories about the Lower East Side, where her parents had a restaurant called Hurwitz’s, which is actually in the movie. Then of course there’s the research that really isn’t your family history, but informs what your grandmother and grandfather and your great aunt have been talking about. All that stuff wound up in the picture.”

His great-grandparents were even beheaded by Czarist troops. That disturbing fact, and his grandfather’s response to it, colored the way he hoped to present immigrants’ opinions towards their new country, and their old.

“You would think after that my grandfather would be like, ‘America is the greatest.’ Until the day he died, he would romanticize Mother Russia. I never understood it. All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe and it can’t leave you and there’s always that longing. And yes, America is better than Czarist Russia. That’s an objective truth for almost anybody. But it doesn’t remove the longing. And I had never seen an immigrant story which had that angle to it. That maybe there was something that the person had to do to survive that maybe led to a better place, but still kept itself in that person’s memory.” - James Gray, talking to Salon.

One of the oldest writing adages is to write what you know. Though it’s usually easier said than done, in the case of The Immigrant, Gray’s ability to pull most of the film’s details from real life helped him construct a rich, believable screenplay that captured many dark realities of the time, and instilled the conflicted feelings of hope and grief that permeated early American immigrants.

His intended result, an honest story about a powerful, authentic female, was realized perfectly through a fictionalized version of his own grandmother. It’s a wonderful way to speak to American history, and an apt reflection of spirit.