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John Patrick Shanley Shares His Reasonable Doubt
Writer-director brings his Pulitzer Prize-winning play to the big screen with relative ease—and an all-star cast
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So how did Shanley weather the experience of returning to work behind the camera? “When you write a movie, you direct it and everybody in the racket knows that,” asserts Shanley. “I write every shot… You can actually go and take that screenplay—if it’s a good screenplay—and you can shoot that screenplay and you will have a movie. Whereas a lot of people dream the ultimate thing they could do would be directing a movie, for me it’s more of a cross to bear… The enjoyable part was the actors,” says Shanley. “Amy Adams is a pisser; Meryl is just great; Phil suffers when he does a role like this, it’s like he’s carrying the weight of the world, but he’s a great guy. The hard part is how long it takes… You have to be incredibly creative for 10 percent of your day and 90 percent of the day you’re comatose. It’s just like no stimulation and then 10 percent over-stimulation. Phil asked me one day, late in the shoot, ‘So how’re you doing?’ And I said ‘Overstimulated and understimulated.’ He laughed and said ‘I understand completely.’”
“He was a real team player on this film,” declares Hoffman of his director. “He wrote the play, he wrote the screenplay, but that didn’t mean he was the be-all end-all of what everything meant and what everybody was supposed to do… He was open to interpretations. He had an open heart to everybody.”
“Somewhere in the middle of the first week, [unit production manager] Celia Costas asked me a question about how I wanted to handle some moment in the film that we were about to shoot,” Shanley recalls. “She said, ‘This is sort of what the feeling is about, how you’d handle this moment’ and I stopped and I looked at her and I said, ‘I just realized that you can direct a feature film without ever doing anything.’ That if you just stand there and sort of agree to things the whole movie will get made and it will be directed and you will have the credit and you didn’t do a goddamn thing,” he laughs. “It’s kind of astonishing when you think about it, but you have such a level of support and you have so many erudite people around that something’s gonna happen. I mean, if you won’t come out of your trailer, they’re gonna shoot that scene.”
But Shanley was far from a passive participant in the process, deftly peeling a discerning eye without passing judgment. In a pivotal moment, Adams, as Sister James, confronts her student (Joseph Foster) when he returns to her classroom after a visit with Father Flynn in the rectory. Her back is to the camera and we cannot see the child’s face. “I wanted to leave that moment to the audience. We don’t know that anything happened,” Shanley states.
Though it takes place more than 40 years ago, Doubt feels contemporary. Abuse within the Catholic Church is no stranger to headlines, but that’s not the issue at stake in the story. “Sometimes life is a little gray,” says Hoffman. “We don’t always know, we can’t always know. That’s something that’s really hard to live with.”
“Things are changing a lot right now,” concludes Shanley. “I don’t know where they’re headed—nobody does—but I think that it will lead to a period of greater self-examination, which can only be entertaining. It’s interesting to really live your life and really talk to other people and let other people affect you and affect other people in turn… That’s an interesting way to live… There are conversations to be had and I would like to think that more and bigger conversations could take place on screen.”
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by John Luma on 12/28/08 at 9:08 am
I take my hat off to anyone who can write, direct, or produce a movie that gets mass distribution and gets noticed by press and public. So congrats to John Shanley. But he betrays many screenwriter’s prejudices and fears and condescensions about directing by his comments here. Yes, you do direct when you write a good script, but only on the page, not on film. To paraphrase his claim, just “stand there and agreeing to things and the film will get made,” might be his method of directing—but that is not how our best directors of great movies have succeeded bringing scripts to the screen. If it were really that easy to direct, writers would be directing all their own scripts with great success. Most who have tried either don’t have the skills or the stamina, and have failed. The passivity Shanley describes and obviously prefers is what a writer seeks, not what an effective director wants, ever.
- Comment by memphis drug crime attorney on 6/03/09 at 5:05 pm
How ever talented an actor is, to bring out the best in him a director needs to know his personality more than any thing else. This will ensure that the actor plays his role more naturally and to the best of his abilities.
- Comment by Alex on 11/18/10 at 9:49 am
Doubt is a fabulous film. Meryl Streep is as usual outstanding but the one that really caught my eye was Amy Adams, been following her work since then and she’s Soooo versatile. Loved her performance in Junebug too.
- Comment by pete mclintock on 12/26/10 at 3:16 pm
I will be directing"Doubt" Apr/2011. Will not see the movie as my vision is based on having seen Linda Lavin star in Wilm.NC years ago. The script is “in my wheelhose” as a mid 50’s Cath. with a 20yr. military background. I hope for a cast that can project this vision,simply put, if they “feel” this script the way I do, I really won’t have to direct.
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This story was published in the Fall 2008 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Gods and Monsters
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