E-mail a friendJohn Patrick Shanley
airdate January 15, 2009
John Patrick Shanley made a name for himself as a writer with Danny and the Deep Blue Sea—his first published play. The Bronx, NY native got his Hollywood breakthrough with the romantic comedy, Moonstruck, and won an Oscar for writing the original screenplay. His '05 play Doubt, about a molestation charge in a Catholic school, won the Pulitzer and a Tony, and the film version, which he adapted and directed, is currently garnering rave reviews. Shanley began writing poems at age 11 and studied educational theater at NYU.
Doubt writer discusses the impact of having four of the strongest actors of our time working on the film. (3:26)
Full interview. (11:23)
John Patrick Shanley
Tavis: John Patrick Shanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter who's adapted his play, "Doubt," for the big screen. He serves as both screenwriter and director of the project that stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Here now, a scene from "Doubt."
[Clip]
Tavis: That's the best you could do -- Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman? You couldn't do any better than that?
John Patrick Shanley: We asked everybody else, (laugher) but she was the only one who'd do it.
Tavis: When you got Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, you're halfway there, aren't you?
Shanley: And, well, then the other actress is --
Tavis: And the screenwriter, of course --
Shanley: -- Viola Davis and Amy Adams. I knew with this particular thing that this was going to be a celebration of acting, and I wanted to get the best actors I could. And it turned out we got maybe four of the strongest American actors working at this time, given where they fit in the age category and all that stuff, to go into a room and just knock into each other as hard as they could.
Tavis: Because this is an adaptation from your play and you wrote this some years ago -- so you've written his thing, you've lived with this thing, you've loved this thing, you know this thing inside and out like nobody does, the actors that you did get -- at the top of your short list? What I'm trying to get at is when you're that intimately involved with a project, do you have a really, really good sense, I would assume, of who in this business can bring out these characters in the way that you've written them?
Shanley: Yes, I do.
Tavis: Okay.
Shanley: And I knew Phil Hoffman for many years before this, and Meryl was sort of a no-brainer. Everybody in New York, people on the subway, people on the street, would say, "Well, Meryl Streep should play that in the movie." But with --
Tavis: Why do you think that is? I'm just curious.
Shanley: I think it's like Meryl said in rehearsal at a certain point. We had just rehearsed this scene and then we broke and she just sat at the table for another minute and she said, "I am this character." And then she got up from the table. And she knew that it was a part that was perfect for her. She's an intellectually rigorous, vibrant person with a very dry sense of humor, and that's the character. So it was very close to who she was.
Phil Hoffman is more of a chameleon, and the great thing about Phil was when I closed my eyes and thought about what Phil would do with the part, I couldn't figure it out. I just knew he was going to do something great. And then when you see it it looks inevitable, and you say, "Well, of course he would have played it that way." But in fact I couldn't have predicted it in advance.
Tavis: For those who have not seen the movie and don't know the play, tell me about the storyline.
Shanley: Well, it's set in a church school in 1964, in a working class neighborhood in the Bronx, and there's a sort of stern authoritarian nun named Sister Aloysius who runs this church school in a very authoritative way, and there's a sort of new priest in town who his more of the new sixties and wants to be warmer, more open, and more of a member of the community.
And she looks at him with suspicion, and then she becomes suspicious that he's actually interfered with a child, and starts a campaign to oust him from the parish.
Tavis: A Black child.
Shanley: Yes. The first Black child in the school. And in fact, at that time in my life in the world that I grew up in, there was one Black kid in -- like when I went to high school, in 1964, actually, there was one Black kid in my class and one only. And I always thought, what is it like for that guy?
Tavis: Let me ask, because I've been curious to ask you two questions in this regard. One, why make this child Black? What do you get a chance to excavate in the screenwriting process because the child is Black, number one -- so why this child being Black? And secondly, why important to set this in a post-JFK era? That's your phrase, not mine. So those two things really I wanted to kind of probe with you.
Shanley: Well, 1964 was a period -- we were on the cusp of great change.
Tavis: JFK's assassinated in '63.
Shanley: That is correct, and I was at that church school in the Bronx when that happened and they announced that, and I saw the sort of sea change take place in the attitude of the people around me and within myself. But at first it was a very subtle thing, and there were people who were trying to keep us from moving into the future.
And looking back, I think that they had some really valid reasons for wanting to do that. The sixties turned out to be a massive cultural hurricane that went through the Bronx and left it in ruins. There was a tremendous amount of drugs and criminality, vandalism, and finally arson, and the Bronx was burning by 1968, 1969.
And that was completely unexpected in 1964, but some few people were sniffing that, and I thought that was very interesting. And also, that's the time when it comes out, all these revelations about the church scandals and the stories of abuse, a lot of them took place around that time when there was such a belief in the priest as somebody who would never do such a thing that adults were blind. They just couldn't see very obvious stuff.
The kids saw it. The kids understood the reality of what was going on, but the adults didn't see it. And it reminded me of the time when I wrote the play, which was during the invasion of Iraq, when the weapons of mass destruction were kind of a faith that some people espoused.
It's like I know they're there, and it had a certain religiosity about it that reminded me of that earlier time. The earlier time had some great things about it and it had some terrible things about it. There were great dangers in that earlier time caused by the blindness.
And I thought in the time that I was living in when I was writing the play that I felt tremendous doubt about what we were doing, but I felt kind of isolated. When I would watch television, everybody seemed so certain of what was going on. And now that I'm opening the film, the world has changed again. And now I feel like if I had Donald Rumsfeld sitting next to me and I said, "What do you think we should do next," he'd say, "Gee, I don't know, what do you think?" (Laughter.)
Tavis: That title, "Doubt," is -- and I don't know if you intended it this way, but it's a double entendre for me. I don't know if it's doubt about the point you raised earlier, where the country's headed, where the society is headed. This priest who wants to be more cosmopolitan, if you will, in his particular role, or the doubt is about his character and whether or not he has done, in fact, what he was accused of doing or believed to have done.
Shanley: Well, that's one level to look at it on. Another level would be is that I actually wanted to re-elevate the concept of doubt as a positive thing in adult society, and that if somebody says --
Tavis: Question authority.
Shanley: Yeah, but also question yourself, actually, much more than authority. It's like leave room in yourself to be convinced by somebody else, otherwise there's no possible real discourse. And I feel like we've gone through a period of terrible partisanship masquerading as honest debate. And I don't think anybody's been in real conversations on the political level, on the national level, and that that has bled down to the grassroots as well.
It's time for people to have a more open mind, and part of having an open mind is you say your point of view and at the end of it you say, "But I'm not sure. Maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?" That's the place in you, that thing that I'll label doubt, that stays open for being affected by another human being. If you don't have that, you might as well be alone on a desert island.
Tavis: So it's a double double entendre -- a double-double. Maybe a double-double-double --
Shanley: Or quadruple.
Tavis: Yeah, a quadruple. (Laughter.) So many ways to take this title, "Doubt."
Shanley: Yeah.
Tavis: That's a not a bad strategy or bad philosophy as human beings. Is it a good philosophy for closing a film?
Shanley: I think --
Tavis: To not take a side?
Shanley: Well, I'm not sure that I don't take -- I think it's actually quite the reverse. I think I take a lot of sides, which I think is what happens in life. You're talking to people and they say things and you go, "Well, that makes a lot of sense, what that person said." And somebody objects to what they say and you hear them out.
And you go, "Actually, that makes a lot of sense, too, except they don't agree." And becoming at home with contradiction and being able to hold more than one point of view aloft at a time to consider and meditate on, rather than feel like you have to make an immediate ruling about right and wrong, good and bad, I think that's an important adult quality.
Tavis: Does our society, even in a film context, even in a Hollywood context, does society want, does society accept, a film that allows us to be open-minded about this kind of subject matter? And I ask that because there's certain things we don't really want to have doubt about. We don't want to necessarily be open-ended about that X is wrong and X ought to be wrong and X ought to be stamped as being wrong, rather than complex and full of doubt.
Shanley: Well, no offense but you sound like one of my two 16-year-old boys. (Laughter.)
Tavis: No, I'm just asking questions. I'm asking questions.
Shanley: They want to know good or bad. It's like if you start to describe something, somebody -- what the head of another country did or something, he said, "Well, we just ought to bomb those people off the face of the Earth." (Laughter.) I said, "Well, it's easy to say, it's a quick answer, but maybe that isn't the right thing to do. We may have to be a little more considerate in our approach to things."
The great thing that's happening is that people are going to see the film, and they're going out with the people they saw it with and they're having interesting conversations. And it isn't simply about right or wrong, good or bad. They're starting to notice that they have assumptions, and that maybe some of them are wrong or maybe some of them are worth questioning.
And that maybe that their spouse or their kid has a point. It's like gee, I didn't really think of it that way. And I'm finding that that's happening. I probably shouldn't even mention it, but I have my email in the program of the play when it was done all over the country, and people are sending me emails from all over the country.
And most of the time they said, "We went out afterwards and we had this great conversation that we haven't had for years." If I can save a few marriages, it's worth it. (Laughter.)
Tavis: I've said many times over the six seasons of doing this show that the express purpose of this show is to introduce Americans to each other, to help us reexamine the assumptions that we have, and to expand our inventory of ideas. So never mind the fact that I sounded tonight like a 16-year-old boy, that is the purpose of this show. (Laughter.) That said, I'm honored to have you on.
Shanley: It's an honor to be here.
Tavis: Congratulations on the film.
Shanley: Thank you very much.
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