Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
DR. WILLIAM P. KELLY: Welcome to the twelfth episode of
Irish Writers in America, CUNY TV's 13-part series
featuring Irish and Irish-American writers.
This week we hear from two successful Bronx-born
playwrights who are also screen writers and film directors.
John Patrick Shanley and Kenneth Lonergan both have
complicated relationships with their Irish heritage.
For Lonergan, the writer of Analyze This, You Can Count
on Me, Gangs of New York, it's part of his Irish-Jewish mix.
For Shanley, it's separating from the Irish literary Mafia,
as he calls it, and maintaining his own identity that is
paramount. Writing in the New York Times about visiting his
father's family in Ireland, Shanley, an Academy, Pulitzer,
Tony, and Obie Award winner, said, "Life holds its miracles,
good erupting from darkness chief among them."
JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY: I've always said about myself
that I'm the jury, that's who I am, and I've gone out,
I'm deliberating, and the only problem is I'm never
coming back. I'm always going to be in the jury room,
I'm never coming back with the verdict, and I'm going
to live my life that way, and I believe that I can be an
effective member of society living that way,
and so far it seems to have proved to be true.
♪ [Theme Music] ♪
JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY: I was in rehearsal with another
play, Dirty Story, about Israel and the Palestinians,
and I was on a break. I was sitting in the empty
audience with one of the actors in the show, and there
was a silence fell, and in the middle of the silence I said,
"I'm going to write a play called Doubt, and he said,
"What's it about it?" I said, "That's all I got."
But gradually I realized that it was going to be about these
nuns, this order of nuns, the Sisters of Charity
that I had when I was a boy at St. Anthony's in the
Bronx as a kid, because they had these peculiar bonnets that
I hadn't seen shown in any movie or in any play,
and I thought, "I should do a play about those nuns."
I read the newspaper to see what isn't in it,
and that's what I want to write about, and that absence,
that darkness, that dark spot in the frame, that I thought,
"Well, there's a play there", but I still didn't think it was-
I felt it was too on-the-nose.
And then one day I thought of this black mother,
and her particular perspective on her child and the child's
problems in the school, and the suspicion of wrong-doing
against this child, and that's when I thought,
"Now I have a play," and that's when I began write.
Sister Aloysius is me, and Father Flynn is me, and the boy
is me, and Sister James is me, and none of them are,
you know, because they're all extractions of one part of
my personality going to war with another part.
There is a part of each of us that really wants to
have certainty, and there's a part of us that
pleads against it, that says, you know, life is more
complex than a simple yes or no, and you will never
have the full explanation of the motives and even the actions
of others so you must reserve judgment.
Well, the great thing about my childhood was
that I was raised in an Irish-American household.
My father had a brogue. He came to this country when
he was 24. He was from County Westmeath,
from a little farm, and he had several brothers who
also came over, and they were also always over my
house, and I had several aunts who were either
first generation Kellys from Tipperary or they were Irish,
so I was surrounded by Irish people.
My father played the accordion and Irish music,
and my aunts danced in the living room and I danced
with them as a little boy, a lot, and everybody had to sing
a song or tell a story or tell a joke, and that's how we
were raised. Now, it's important for a writer to get some
kind of distance in order to be able to write, so for
me to simply write about that, it was just too close to me.
It was like trying to write about my own eyeball, but I grew
up in an Irish and Italian neighborhood, and so I turned
my Irish sensibility on the Italians and listened to
the way that they talked, and celebrated them as an
Irishman would, without having an Irishman in the story.
An Irishman was just outside the door, holding a light
on their family, and that's what Moonstruck is.
That's me delighting in the Italians because they
weren't Irish. They had better food than I did,
they had more interesting clothing than I did,
they had better hair than I did, they were a little more
about sex than I was, and I loved all of that,
and it opened my heart and my eyes to many things I wouldn't
have had otherwise, and it was something that as an
artist, I could really, really get behind. You know, I was
this downtown playwright. I was poverty-stricken.
I did Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and I made $5,000
total from the run of the play, so there's no money in it,
you know. I had a straight job at the time, the only I've ever
had where I had to wear a shirt and tie, and I quit my job
and I said, "I'm going to be a fulltime playwright from
now on," and I was 34 years old and I was below
the poverty line, and nobody wanted to do my next play,
"Savage in Limbo", except this one little theatre company that
just started with some kids just out of college, and they
produced it, and it created a certain excitement, but
the reviews from the standard reviewers were not good,
nor were they for my next play but I at that time realized
that if I didn't do something to change my situation,
I'd be back painting people's apartments again.
So I got a national endowment for the Arts grant, which was
enough for me to live for one year very modestly, and I
set about during that year to change my situation.
So I watched a bunch of movies, read a bunch of screenplays,
and I wrote two screenplays. The first one was a movie
called 5 Corners that was made with Jodie Foster and
John Turturro and Tim Robbins, and it turned out pretty good,
and George Harrison, the Beatle, put up the money
for it. Then back-to-back with that, that wrapped,
and a week later Moonstruck went into production, and then
that wrapped and it opened, and it turned out to be a
phenomenon, and the next thing you know,
this downtown playwright who's never made a buck in
his life is sitting at the Academy Awards waiting for
his category, which takes three hours to come up, and then they
read my name. And I walked down the aisle,
first I walked very slowly and then I started walking
faster, and I was embraced by Gregory Peck and kissed
by Audrey Hepburn, and handed this golden statue,
and I turned around and I thought, "Put down your sword
and your shield and let this in," and I realized that I'd be
fighting all my life, and that here was a moment of acceptance
and approbation like a golden light which comes along
very rarely, if ever.
"I'd like to thank everybody whoever punched or kissed me
in my life. And everybody who I ever punched or kissed."
It had been these years of struggle and these years
of sudden love and pleasure from unexpected directions.
That is the sensual affects that people give you, the things
that they hand you, they hand you in these moments where
they grab you to kiss you or they grab you to throw you off
the roof, both of which had happened to me many
times in the Bronx. They wake you up, and they remind you of
who you are, and they connect you to the human race,
and in that moment I could finally put my defenses
down and admit my pleasure at both extremes.
I was very fortunate in that nobody taught me how
to write a screenplay because if anybody had,
I probably wouldn't have written Moonstruck.
I just had the time of my life and wrote the speeches as long
as I wanted, and let the people say as much as they wanted,
and it turned out that the audience wanted them to go
on like that and wanted to hear that kind of real
celebration of language that maybe had been absent
from film for a while.
The great thing about working in theater for as
long as I did and I have and I do is that you get the
audience in your body. You're there night after night.
When you do a play, night after night you're in this
little room with these 50 or 60 people,
100 people, 300 people, as often as eight times a week,
and you are experiencing the play with them and through
them, and you get them in your body, and when you sit
down to write a screenplay where there is no audience, until
it's too late, you can write a line and then you can
feel yourself as the audience responding to that line.
You are a participant. It's not until the audience shows up
that the last character is present for every story that's
told. I very often have decided to write plays where I lay
out everything I know and the problem that I'm
wrestling with in the first five minutes,
with no idea what comes after that except that
this is a burning question because this is a problem
in my life, and I'm going to attempt to work out
what to do about this problem in my life on
stage, and the thing that makes it have high stakes
is I make a deal with myself that whatever the
solution is, I'm going to do it in real life after
the play, and you'd be amazed at how that puts a
fire under you to get it right. To find a place in the
literature, and Irish place or an Irish-American place,
that has not been investigated is a formidable challenge for a
young writer, and maybe too much of a challenge.
Part of being Irish is to be clever, and I was a clever
young fellow, and I had no intention of being taken up
by the Irish-American literary Mafia because I felt that
I would be categorized in a way that would be
limiting to me. Probably one of the two plays that I admire
most in the world is Playboy of the Western World,
which I consider to be a masterpiece on every front
-- a masterpiece of language, of human insight, of plotting,
and of structure.
Can I, is there some avenue that I could find
to top John Millington Synge in that particular area?
I think not. I am going to have to outwit not only him
but myself to find a place that I can stand on and call my
own, and that's the real estate that I always seek.
The fascinating thing that happens sometimes when I'm
writing I come unexpectedly upon structure, upon great
structure, and it's a revelation.
Stanley Kubrick said, "A story that works is a
miracle," and he was right, and so when you're writing
your way forward and suddenly a door opens and you're in
this big, beautiful room you didn't know was in the house
that you walked into, that's structure, and you go, "Wow!
I had no idea this was part of the house that I had just
entered, the story that I'm telling, but I am so glad it
has this room." And then if you find like three or four of those
rooms, you've probably found something very good.
Well, you know, I found that Facebook is an excellent place
to write poetry and to write short thoughts that are
provocations for other people to look at life maybe a little
bit differently. I like the idea of art for art's sake,
and I like the idea of art that is destroyed or is transient.
I like the idea of theater in part because either you
were there or you weren't. There's a night sometimes where
something enters an actor from another dimension,
and you see something that is a once-in-a-lifetime
come out of that person -- if you were there, and if you
weren't you missed it, and you can hear about it
in the folk tradition that surrounds the theater,
but you weren't there, and I like that very much.
So I like to put on shows for one night only and
then never do them again. I've done I would say a dozen
of those in my life, big, you know, 90 minutes, musicians,
actors, singers, the works, script, and I script the whole
thing and do the whole thing, and that's a very important
part of my life. And Facebook and being able to do
these status updates, where I write things that occur to me
that morning or that afternoon, are very stimulating to me.
The challenge of saying something that isn't bad
at least once a day is good for me.
KENNETH LONERGAN: Well, the more you don't have to
invent, the easier it is. I do write for screen and for stage,
and you frequently get asked which do you prefer,
and what's the difference between writing plays and
movies, and they're just different forms.
I'm almost never confused about whether something is
going to be play or a movie. If I have an idea,
I'm lucky enough to have an idea, it usually comes to
me with the form attached, and I think, "Oh, that would be
a good idea for a play" or "that would be a
good idea for a movie."
I wouldn't refer to Margaret as an
art film. I wouldn't refer to any film as an art film.
Art film to me, I usually think it means it doesn't have much
of a budget. It'll be judge by a different standard,
by critics and by distributors alike, and to me it has no
meaning whatsoever. A movie is a movie.
A bad is a bad movie and a good movie is a good movie.
This is our Youth is autobiographical in the sense
that it's the life I led at the time and the people that I
knew at the time. I'm not in the play myself but the characters
are all composites of people that I knew, and I'm including
myself, I'm sure, but not in any direct way.
But in every way except the fact that I'm not one of the
characters, that's exactly what we were doing in 1982,
and that's exactly how we were talking, and that's exactly
the kind of trouble we were getting in and hopefully
getting out of. In This is our Youth and Margaret,
I write about affluent, urban youth. When I grew up in the
Upper West Side, we described ourselves as upper middle class.
We very much didn't want to be thought of as rich.
Compared to the rest of the world, of course, 99%
of the world, we were very wealthy, and compared
to 95% of the rest of the country, we were very wealthy,
but my parents were not business magnates or
psychiatrists so I grew up in comparatively comfortable
circumstances like a lot of Americans, and comparatively
comfortable circumstances like a lot of New Yorkers
or a lot of Manhattanites. Some critics in London when they saw
This is our youth say, "Why should we
care about these spoiled brats?" And I sort of wanted to point
out that one of the spoiled brats had a sister murdered when
he was 10 years old but his mother was mentally unstable,
and that his father beats him up physically and throws him out
of the house frequently, that he's nearly addicted to drugs.
You sort of feel like there's an income -- occasionally when
I ask at what income level do people stop being spoiled
and over-privileged, like Lisa in Margaret is often described
as over-privileged, and isn't there just privileged?
I mean, I don't that she's over-privileged.
I mean, I'm privileged. I'm privileged to be alive,
and healthy, and not starving to death, and not living
in a country which is at war and where my village is
being burnt down and my children massacred in front of me.
I mean, we all are so, I mean those of us who don't
have to live like that. Over-privileged?
-- I don't know. I feel like -- I grew up being taught
not to feel good about having been born into relatively
comfortable circumstances, and then at some point when I was
in my 20s or 30s, I thought, "Gee, you know, there's so many
people who would be so happy if they had a nice,
safe house in a relatively safe neighborhood in the world,"
and it's sort of obnoxious -- there's something obnoxious
and hypocritical not to be appreciative of that and to say,
"Oh, I feel bad that I'm not in worse circumstances."
I have no Irish skills. I like to make a distinction between
Jewish skills and Irish shame. My friend, Matthew Broderick's
mother, Patsy Broderick, who is one of my best friends
and was the smartest person I ever met, said that guilt is a
very cheap emotion. I don't know if she was quoting someone
or if she made it up but she said, you know,
"You do something and you feel bad about it, then you go out
and you get over it, and you go ahead and do it again,
and it doesn't really cost you anything." And I think shame
has a little more of a half-life than guilt.
These are just crass generalizations, I don't know if
they have any validity whatsoever, and I definitely
consider myself half Irish, half Jewish.
I wouldn't lose either half. I got involved in
Gangs of New York because one of the great fortunes of my
life is having gotten to know Martin Scorsese and having
him take an interest in me when I was younger,
and help me out, and be sort of an avuncular figure
to me through a very circuitous route. I had written a script
for him which had never gotten produced, and he had
almost optioned my first film script that I wrote to
sell for money, Analyze This, and we discussed doing this
or that together over the years, and then I heard about
Gangs of New York and I tried out for the job but he had
already given it to someone else.
Jay *** and he had written the script together and they were
looking for another writer, and they ended up hiring
Steve Zallian, and then I forgot about it.
Then a few years later, I had just gotten married and got
a call from my agent saying that they were about to start
shooting Gangs of New York in Cinecittà outside of Rome,
and they needed the script rewritten, but they were
shooting in two weeks and they needed me to start right
away, and would I consider flying to Italy and being
put up in a really fancy hotel and working for
Martin Scorsese with Daniel Day-Lewis and
Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, and I said,
"Yes, sure, I would be very interested."
Marty has been very grateful to me ever since
because I allowed him to think that he was disrupting my
honeymoon. The fact is that we rented a place on
Long Island to get married in and then stay there for
the summer, and that was going to be our honeymoon,
and we had been there for a month-and-a-half so this
was like mid-August, so we did plenty of honeymooning,
but he felt so bad about taking me away from my
honeymoon that I used it as a negotiating wedge,
both psychologically and with Miramax to get them to pay
me a decent wage because Miramax didn't like to pay
full scale in those days. My agent was like,
"They won't pay you anything but they'll treat you great,"
and I knew if the director wanted to hire me, that that
meant I would be hired, so I said, "Look, tell Miramax that
I'm happy to help out for free if they don't want to
pay me but I'm not going to rewrite the script.
I'd like to get paid my regular fee, and I'd like them to
put me in a nice hotel, and any time they didn't do that,
I would complain to Marty and he'd call them up and
he'd be like, "He's writing the movie. He's writing the
*** movie. Maybe he should have a room to write in."
So, anyway, that was one of the great experiences
of my life. It was wonderful.
I think Gangs of New York is more of a New York
story than it's a particularly Irish story.
I think it could have been about any group of immigrants.
It happened to be about the Irish immigrants chiefly.
If it had taken place 20 years later, it would have
been about Italian immigrants; 20 years after that,
another group. I think Marty wanted to make a movie
about the cauldron that the city came out of.
MALE 1: "Is this it, priest, the Pope's new army?"
KENNETH LONERGAN: When I approach writing dialogue,
I just try as best I can to imitate the way
people really talk. Every person has their own
syntax and way of speaking. James Joyce is the great
master of this, my father pointed out to me when I was 13.
He said, "He's really the only writer whose characters really
sound different from one another completely," and
it's really true. If you read his stories or his novels,
the distinction of the different voices is astonishing,
and it's way head and shoulders above anybody else.
We all tend to fall into our own rhythm no matter how hard
we try to make the characters speak distinctively but my
approach to dialogue is to have people say what I
think they would say. I think I have a good ear for
dialogue just naturally and I happen to like overlapping
dialogue. I just like, it just sounds cool to me,
and it's fun to write and it's fun to see it acted.
MALE 2: Try not to focus on that aspect of it too
much right off the bat.
FEMALE 1: Why not?
MALE 2: Well --
FEMALE 1: I think you should.
MALE 2: Well --
FEMALE 1: I mean, maybe it was better when you came
in here and they screamed at you for having sex with
your married boss.
KENNETH LONERGAN: For the most part, I just try to write what
I hear, and I do consciously try to go through it and make
sure the characters all have their own way of speaking.
I just think that's more life-like. I've never been
interested in didactic writing. I never wanted to write a
play to prove a point or to make a statement,
in fact I think it's very, very difficult to write a
successful, and I mean creatively successful play
or film whose main aim is to persuade people to think,
to have a certain opinion. Movies and play are about
human beings. You know, there's all kinds of movies
and plays so they don't all have to be like the kind that I
like to write, but the kind that I like to write and the
ones that I like to see are more -- they're more descriptive
of something that you haven't seen before,
or they point out things in life that you haven't noticed
yourself and that the writer has noticed or that
the director has noticed, or that you've noticed but no one
else has described in a work of art before, so you have
that sense of seeing something familiar right you've never
quite, "Oh, I know that situation" or "that speaks to
me," or something that you know nothing about that speaks
to you which is even more interesting. I think that you're
trying to recreate life in some way, and one thing about
life is that it's coming, there's so much of it, it's
hard to get a handle on. I mean, that's part of, that one
thing that interests me. Everyone sees the world from
their own point of view, naturally, because it's the only
point of view they've got, and the writers that I like point
out patterns that I myself have not noticed or connections
that I haven't noticed, or paint pictures of worlds that I
don't know, and if they paint them truthfully, then I do know
something about them which is almost impossible.
How would I know? You red Proust, how in the world would
I know anything about what it was like to be mixing with the
French aristocracy in the late 19th century and early
20th century. Well, the fact is I do know something about
that because I've read Proust, who is wonderful.
And how would I know anything about like life in Dublin in
1904 if I didn't -- but you read Dubliners and you do know
something about it, and it's one of the great things that human
beings can do is describe the world accurately enough
for someone who doesn't know that world to have a feeling
about it an understanding of it, so that's what I try to do.
I'm not saying I'm as good as those guys but I try.
"So he points at Dawn and he says,
You want me to tell you what I see out there?
Jeff: Sure.
Bill: I see a little girl wearing a police uniform, okay?
I see a little girl from the neighborhood who some moron
told her she could be a cop. She's not a cop right now
but if somebody takes a shot at her or somebody's life depends
on her, they're not going to know she's not a cop.
They're going to think she knows what she's doing.
She walks around the corner where somebody's
trying to rob somebody or *** somebody or kill somebody,
they're not going to know she's a little girl in a cop suit.
They're going to see a badge and a uniform and a gun,
and they're going to blow a hole through her *** head.
If somebody runs up to her and asks her to help them, she's
not going to help them. She's going to look around and say,
"Where's Bill? Where's Bill?" That's me.
I'm Bill. Now I could tell that girl likes me.
It's only natural. I'm her partner.
I'm a big, strong, father figure, whatever, I've got a
lot experience, got a lot of confidence.
I know what I'm ***' doing and that's attractive
to a woman. It's attractive to anybody.
So she's attracted to me, and that's okay.
She's human, I'm human, and maybe part of what I'm doing,
part of building her confidence is making her feel like I'm
interested in her too. Maybe that makes her feel impressive.
It makes her feel cocky. It makes her feel like she's
got something on the ball.
It makes her feel like she's really a cop."