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Screenwriters on Writing

Los Angeles Times
November 12, 2015

http://graphics.latimes.com/towergraphic-screenwriters-writing-2015/

The film “Spotlight,” which depicts the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting team — nicknamed Spotlight — uncovering the local Catholic Church’s coverup of sexual abuse within its ranks, was co-written by Josh Singer and director Tom McCarthy. Here’s their take on how the script came together.

Josh: For us, the story of “Spotlight” starts in 2001 with the actual Spotlight team nailing the story of a systematic coverup of clergy sex abuse in Boston. Of course, one might argue that the story began before that, with the [former priest James R.] Porter case in 1992. Or even before that, with Richard Sipe and the research he started doing in the late ‘60s. So, I guess it’s not surprising that as our story moves forward, it also reaches back, pulling up moments from the past in order to shine a light on the present.

Tom: Now you’re going to say that’s what a journalist does.

Josh: Well, it’s kind of what a journalist does. But what I was getting at is that, for me, our story starts on Kosciuszko Circle, the rotary in Dorchester, trying to figure out which turnout was Morrissey Boulevard, the road that would take us to the Boston Globe for the first time.

Tom: We’d both spent time in school in Boston but there we were, totally lost, trying to find the Globe.

Josh: To be fair, the Globe’s out in Dorchester. An institution apart.

Tom: But you were driving, right?

Josh: I was. And you were navigating.

Tom: It wasn’t our most successful collaboration. Kind of a miracle we aren’t still driving around that circle now.

Josh: Which is my point. That was the beginning of a screenplay and a collaboration. I mean, sure, we’d met over Skype and in person a couple of times before that. But we hadn’t really started to work together. And while I’d taken [Globe Spotlight reporter Michael] Rezendes out to lunch four or five times to nail down the basics of the story, those basics were just that. Basic.

Tom: Amazing how much we learned in those trips to Boston. I mean, we really didn’t have a lot to go on, but all those conversations with the Spotlight reporters, other folks at the Globe, the lawyers, the survivors … each one helped us build our story, add a new layer; each one gave us another angle to dig into.

Josh: And sometimes it was going back to the same people. Talking with Walter “Robby” Robinson or Sacha Pfeiffer or Mike a second, a third, a seventh time … like driving around that rotary, each time getting a bit deeper, learning something new about how the investigation unfolded.

Tom: We really were investigating the investigators. In some ways, I think that process helped us understand their process — how they had pieced together the story. It also got us much closer to figuring out what the story was about.

Josh: If I had a dime for every time you asked, “But what’s this story about? Why do we have to tell it now?”

Tom: You kind of wanted to kill me.

Josh: Kind of? The “investigating the investigators” also had another benefit; it was a fun way to start figuring out how to work with each other.

Tom: Thank God we’ll never have to do that again. I mean, the figuring it out. But seriously, that came fairly naturally, didn’t it?

Josh: Oddly enough, I think it did. I say “oddly” only because half the time we were on different coasts. But between the phone and the Skype and the long-distance screen sharing, we managed to get on the same page. And sometimes the time zone thing was helpful. I like to write late (much to my wife’s chagrin), so I’d stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. writing in L.A., then I’d shoot you something.

Tom: I could dig in when I got up in New York and by the time you got up we could get into it together.

Josh: Something else that helped is that we went round (and round) on the script more than a couple of times. We spent fall of 2012 researching, then the first six months of 2013 writing our first draft, then we both went away to work on other projects. So when we got back together to dig in again in the spring of 2014 …

Tom: We knew we loved each other.

Josh: I was going to say we had a shorthand.

Tom: Oh. That’s awkward.

Josh: We had a foundation. That made the rewrite process that spring … and the rewriting through prep and production, uh, productive. And fun.

Tom: See? There’s the love.

Josh: Can I get back to my metaphor now?

Tom: The rotary. Right.

Josh: I’m just saying, it’s a circle. Writing, reporting, collaboration, it’s a circle. The more times you go around, the deeper you get, the closer you get …

Tom: To knowing when it’s time to end the story?

Josh: Pretty much.

Contact: calendar@latimes.com

‘Room’

Emma Donoghue

As soon as I’d sold my novel “Room,” I began to consider how the story of a child growing up in a locked room might work on film. Nibbles of interest from the industry had already started, but I was wary: I wasn’t going to let anyone make a voyeuristic abduction thriller or a sappy, cute-kid movie of the week out of my novel. I also knew I wanted to write the screenplay myself, not just to protect the material but because the challenge fascinated me: This story seemed a test case for what film and fiction could each do. So I took the unorthodox step of drafting my screenplay — before the novel was even published, before anyone could tell me what to do or how I should probably let a more experienced screenwriter do it.

Some months after publication, I got a 10-page letter from a fellow Dubliner, director Lenny Abrahamson. It was exemplary in its intelligent analysis of the novel and its confident vision of how he’d bring it to the screen. Aspects that alarmed other filmmakers — such as the fact of the first half being confined to one room — didn’t phase Lenny at all.

Over several drafts I worked with him to reshape my script, feeling I was learning film from a native speaker of that language. It wasn’t as if I was defense counsel for the book; quite often, it would be Lenny who’d say, “Let’s get back to how it was in the novel.” For instance, one of the first things I’d changed had been Jack’s long hair because I’d assumed that on screen that would be too distractingly androgynous, but the hair turned out to be yet another thing that didn’t scare Lenny. I remember him telling me that, yes, we could get a wide mainstream audience for this film, but only if we made it fearlessly.

Much of our working time together was spent swapping anecdotes about our kids because we were always trying to find — within this weird story of a childhood in captivity — what’s universal about the experience of trying to keep them safe, yet knowing you need to train them to leave you someday.

As we moved toward production, the creative circle widened and I got to meet the experts in charge of everything from scouting locations to making a realistic rotten tooth. What surprised me was how much I found myself enjoying this phase of handing over control, or rather, giving up any illusion that the screenwriter is in control.

The very things that make writing fiction my first love — the privacy, intensity, autonomy — can make it a claustrophobic experience. In writing “Room,” the novel, I’d often felt like the captor, Old Nick, especially when I was selecting their furniture from the lower-budget options on Ikea.com. But now, collaboration was lifting the weight off my shoulders; it was the designer who had to pick the old, stained rug; the head of costume who had to decide whether Jack would sleep in pajamas or a T-shirt.

One of those lines from the how-to-write-movies books finally became real to me: The script is only a blueprint. During filming, last-minute decisions have to be made because of weather or budget, an individual’s availability or the director’s flash of insight. Pushing for greater naturalism, Lenny often got the actors to improvise within a scene and I was startled by how much I liked the results.

People sometimes ask me to quantify how much I had to change the book, what percentage did I manage to keep? But that’s the language of accountancy, not adaptation.

A novelist shouldn’t write the screenplay unless she embraces the chance to change everything, to try to make the same magic all over again, out of different ingredients. (For instance, “Room” the novel gives hundreds of pages of Jack’s thoughts; the film gives him an expressive child’s body. The book is one boy’s story, and his mother is shown only in flashes, through his limited perspective; the film is a two-hander, with Brie Larson’s extraordinary performance bringing Ma right into the spotlight.)

Adapting fiction for the screen is an act of mysterious translation, and working on “Room” taught me much about both forms that I’d never known.

Contact: calendar@latimes.com

 

 

 

 

 




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