IFFAM_Tom-McCarthy_THE-13-slideshow

All about storytelling

The award-winning director of 'Spotlight' Tom McCarthy was in Macau recently for the 1st Internmational Film Festival and Awards Macao and spoke with us about his movies, the media and film festivals.
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The award-winning director of 'Spotlight' Tom McCarthy was in Macau recently for the 1st Internmational Film Festival and Awards Macao and spoke with us about his movies, the media and film festivals.

 

You are one of the leading guests at this first edition of the Macau International Film Festival. My first question, in a certain sense, is sort of a provocation: don’t we have already enough film festivals? Do we really need another one?

It’s a great question… There are so many! But, I don’t know if there can be enough, right? Ultimately, what this is all about is, hopefully, about bringing people of different cultures and countries together to talk about something we all love, which is films. Every region has their own sort of things to offer. I find it exciting when you have a town, like Macau right now, which is known as the gaming capital of the world, introducing something with the cultural value of a film festival. It’s great. And to be able to come here, to this part of the world, and share movies and talk about movies, I think it’s … I think, in large part, it’s why we do it: it’s about storytelling and sharing stories …

On the opening day of this Film Festival we saw Shekhar Kappur saying that this is an opportunity for the Asian film industry, for Asian directors, and defending that this is the right time for Asia to shine. Asia has given us Bollywood and Korean dramas, just to mention a few things. Being a representative of the most important movie art industry in the world, do you see the rise of Asia as a threat?

I don’t think about art that way. I don’t think about it as a competition, really. I think about it as a way for storytelling. Yes, there’s a business to it. When you get into the business side, that’s still a thing, but I tend to focus – specially in festivals – more on just the story telling aspects and I think it’s really exciting. There is obviously something happening here. You can tell by the business side in China: they are getting very involved in Hollywood now, doing a lot in their own studios and they are drawing major productions here. To me that’s just more opportunities to … It’s a bigger canvas to paint on, now. It’s the whole world, really.

You mentioned a few moments ago the biggest industry in Macau, the gaming industry. Macau became bigger than Las Vegas. We are only in the first edition of this International Film Festival and it is too soon to say, but do you believe the movie business can become something here in Macau? There’s a lot people nowadays talking about the need to diversify the local economy … Could this movie festival help to attain that purpose?

Certainly. It’s such a massive industry, the movie industry. Makes sense to me. That would not only add another dimension business wise, but culturally it wraps around really nice. There’s something wonderful about just being able to relax and see a movie. To come to this beautiful place and do that, to have that opportunity I think it kind of fits nicely in what you are building here, you know? I always think that every place is better with movies. That’s my opinion …

Even Boston? In a certain sense, you have made a very difficult movie, because you stood in front of the bull and you took it by the horns. You managed to portray the sort of thing that Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, would call “the nausea”: the problem that we all know is there, but we cannot talk about it and even less try to explain it. Were you in any way surprised by the success of “Spotlight”?

You know, I think with every movie you make you set out to make the best movie you can and I think with that movie there was just a very high bar in terms of how to tell it and therefore a certain responsibility to get it right. Spending two years researching it and talking,  not only to the reporters and all the people involved, but to the victims of abuse … Spending all that time we would just feel “We want to get this one right for them. We want to tell it in a way that will connect with people”. I was talking with some people here Friday night about the film and they were saying how emotional they found the film, which to me is really interesting because, obviously it’s an emotional subject and emotional matter, a painful one. But ultimately we try to approach it as much as possible like the reporters did, which is somewhat fair. We tried to not weight it too much. We tried to let the facts and the information speak for themselves and I think somehow that allowed audiences to connect with a material that maybe it was not always so accessible. Part of the reason that crime persisted for so long is who wants to talk about sexual abuse of children? Who wants to talk of sexual abuse anyway? It a horrible thing. It’s a horrible thing to talk about … But the silence, the not having the conversations allowed this to exist. I think that, as storytellers, we were trying to approach it in such a way … I don’t want to make it … Not that it was palatable, because it never is, but it was more accessible for audiences. They could follow and see this crime that was perpetrated through the eyes and the discovery of the reporters.

In a certain sense, the thing that you were saying is that, sometimes, we need more than newspapers to make justice in to a good story …

Yes. I think we can’t undervalue the importance of a strong press. I think right now that in our country [the United States of America] that press is under attack on a daily basis by a President-elect that keeps trying to discredit them? Why? Because powerful people don’t like other people watching them, don’t like to being held accountable. That’s exactly why we need a strong and free press in a democracy. I couldn’t, sort of, overvalue that enough and specifically in regards to our story, but I will say –  yeah – the story sort of speaks to even more than that, right? It’s about a societal complicity in this crime. The quote that best sums up the movie is “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one” and I think that’s actually true. It makes us all ask questions about it: “Are we doing the right thing as a society and taking some responsibility, being somewhat culpable for our decisions”. Well, I think that in America we are all doing that right now, the country is really taking a hard look at itself right now. We are we, who we want to be.

You were mentioning the importance of journalism, the free press and the importance that some news outlets had in this election, but doesn’t it depend on the public also? We have seen Breitbart News and other platforms of the kind getting more and more followers… How is this possible in a society that we all thought was enlightened? This is happening not only in the United States, but also in Europe…

In the United Kingdom we had the same things with Brexit. You are right. To be a citizen it’s important to be informed and to do the work and I think that, as a society, a lot of people just got very lazy. Thy don’t dig up stories. The Internet is a big problem: people don’t know where this stories are coming from, what’s real, what’s not. It’s a pretty complex problem and it’s a pretty new problem and that’s because of technology. But you are right. There was a time when you would turn to your local paper to get a sense of what was the news, what you could rely on. The age of disinformation – which didn’t start in this election, it started about twenty or thirty years ago and you can point to men like Roger Ailes, who believed that it had nothing to do with fact and everything to do with the narrative – it’s been going on for a long time and I think that what we are seeing now is a culmination of it, it was sort of a perfect storm. It was a year of campaigning where no one talked about issues. It was really a hard thing to live through, to watch happen and now we have to live with the consequences.

Almost ten years ago, you gave life to a bad piece by a reporter, the unscrupulous Scott Templeton. You have had this strong connection with journalism and the media. We can’t really say it´s a love-hate relationship …

For me it´s like any other industry, right? There’s good and bad. And I think Scott Templeton, on “The Wire” represented the bad. All over the years, I have met a lot of great journalists who were just hard working, passionate people who cared about the truth and getting to it. I’ve just watched “The Front Page”, which was a play on Broadway, a great play by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, and the whole movie the reporters were being made fun off: “They are horrible, horrible people.. “. Sounds very familiar. That play was a hit on Broadway in the 40’s but it sounds like what we say now about reporters. Reporters are used to the mudslinging, they are used to taking flak. The good ones that I met are just great people.

Let’s get back to your work and “Spotlight”. You managed to work with a stellar cast, a handful of good actors – Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, just to mention a few – but the movie wasn’t at all about their roles or about the way they performed. It was mainly about a good story. In “Spotlight”, more than anything else, the narrative mattered?

I think so. I think these actors were all very fine actors. We had Liv Schreiber, John Slattery, Billy Crudup and it just goes on … They understood that the movie sort of hinged on the ensemble nature of not only the film, but of the work the actual reporters did. Having spent some time, each one of them on their own accord, with the reporters, they got a sense of that kind of play, they got a sense of that ensemble, the ensemble nature of the work that is team reporting. I think it helped them really kind of drop in on that level, so … It was really fun to watch and you could tell they all enjoyed it: they liked being in a room, five and six at a time and playing out a scene. You know, it’s a pretty high calibre bunch of actors too and they all know they are only as good as the people they are acting with across the room.

Is it really true that you refused a first version of “Spotlight” when you were given the script?

Well, it wasn’t a script. Two of the female producers approached me and said: “What do you think of this?”. I said “Wow, it’s really a compelling story”, but I was in the middle of something else. I just said to them “I don’t think I am your guy. I don’t have the time and energy to kind of devote to this right now”. They went away and then, one year later, they approached me again and I said “Let me take a look at that again” and I took another look at it and I realised it was something I could really dig my teeth into. I guess I just always had a tremendous amount of respect for the subject matter. On all sides, including the church: what that means to so many people and how many people felt betrayed by what happened. The second time …. Well, it’s like everything else in life: it’s timing. The second time I had kind of the needed brain space to consider it.

Nevertheless, did you have the perception that you were playing, somehow, with a hornet’s nest? You were raised as a Catholic. Did you, at any moment, think that you were making some people that you knew very upset?

I considered that. And I didn’t’ get into it lightly. The first people that I talked to about it were my parents because they were devout Catholics and I wanted them to know and understand why I was doing it and it wasn’t just about taking a shot at the Catholic church. I didn’t need to do that, that had already been done by some very good reporting. I thought, nevertheless, that the bigger story was very compelling and very relevant and maybe it’s more relevant now than it was a year ago. So, I did understand that and I think it was part of the reason I wanted to tell this: I felt maybe I was the right person to tell it, because I came from that Catholic culture, I went to school in Boston. I know those people. I know what it’s like and I know what that complete commitment to the church is like, so I wanted to make sure we got it right.

Unlike other movies of the kind – “The Last Temptation of Christ” –  it was quite well received by some sectors of the church …

That was surprising to me, how well it was received. By large, incredibly well. A lot of very smart people within the church wrote about the movie in really interesting ways. For me, that’s a win-win situation, because I felt I was kind of promoting dialogue. I heard from all over the country and the world that over time things like “Wow… My priest talked about this in Mass today and it started this discussion and …” My nephew, who goes to Boston college right now, his teacher was talking about the movie as part of his curriculum. When it crosses over like that and, you know, it became a discussion point, we feel like we have done something right or at least we have done our job.

Let’s get back to your visit to Macau. If I am not wrong, this is your second time here. Your first was twenty years ago. This time you were invited by Mr. Stephen Hung, which I must say, was something that got my curiosity. Last year, we had Martin Scorsese, Robert de Niro and Leonardo diCaprio working on a small film for one of local gaming operators. Will we have something of the kind concerning Mr. Hung’s hotel, “The 13”? Will we have Tom McCarthy shooting in Macau?

Nothing would make me happier. You are right, Stephen and Deborah are friends and I was thrilled to come here. They are really excited about it: about the Festival, of course, about “The 13”, “The 13” Enterprise. It was great to do a tour of the hotel, which is really incredible and really exciting. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be around people like that. People who are highly creative and highly motivated. Stephen is one of those guys who crosses over, right? He is an incredibly creative guy but he understands that any sort of business needs to be done very well and people like that are just interesting to spend time with.

 

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