Tom McCarthy is the director of Spotlight, a film about the journalists who uncovered the Catholic Church abuse scandal.
Spotlight, the movie about The Boston Globe’s famous series on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the early 2000s, hits theaters Friday. You can read our review of the film here. The Diamondback had a chance to sit down with Tom McCarthy, the director of the film, and Josh Singer, his co-writer, as part of a roundtable interview. Check out what they had to say about making the movie and the importance of its themes below.
DBK: When these stories came out in 2002, I was 7 years old, and I think that for a lot of people my age, you watch the movie and not only learn about the newspaper’s coverage but of the story itself. When you were making the movie, did you think you would be informing part of the audience that this happened in Boston?
McCarthy: ”It’s funny, I don’t think we necessarily considered that. We knew it would be inevitable on some level, and truthfully, not everyone does know the story. Or if they do know the story, they don’t know the scope of the story. Very few people are aware of the actual investigation, which is what our movie deals with.
“What we were concerned with was transporting people back to that moment in time when we didn’t have a sense that there were all these bad priests and there was this massive cover-up happening and the church was a place you could leave your children. Because now that trust is severely fractured, if not completely broken.”
Singer: “A lot of people too may think they know the story. So we were looking for the layer that people might be surprised by, and as Tom said, people know the result, but they don’t know how we got there in terms of the investigation, which is a great story in itself. And also, everyone always thinks of the church as the bad actor here but, as Mitchell Garabedian says in the movie, ‘It takes a village.’ It’s often not one bad actor; it’s a lot of people looking the other way. It’s not just the church; it’s lawyers and politicians and reporters who aren’t quite getting the story. And we thought about how can we change that paradigm so it doesn’t happen again at places like Penn State and with Bill Cosby, which are similar situations in a lot of ways.”
DBK: How much would you say this is a movie about the “power of the press?”
McCarthy: “We made this movie because I don’t think people understand what’s happened to the institution that is journalism in the last 15 years and how bad of shape it’s in and how essential it is to our community. Josh and I wanted to show great local journalism and how it can affect not just a city, not just a country but the world. Hopefully this speaks to that on some level.”
Singer: “The public is very cynical about the press often, and it’s such a shame. … There have been like a dozen metro dailies that have gone out of business in the last decade, and when you don’t have these journalists on the front lines, that’s when corruption happens. This is really a huge problem that people aren’t really talking about, and we thought the best way we could talk about it would be to show great local journalism doing its thing. This was a local story. It was about … this local archbishop lying, and then it turns into a huge story with international ramifications. We need more of this, not less.“
Here are some other highlights from the talk:
On the star-studded cast:
McCarthy: “Working with big actors is a blessing and a curse because you need actors that can put their persona aside. Something that great actors wrestle with all the time is, ‘As I become more famous, how do I continue to disappear into roles?’ Because there’s a certain face recognition. Great actors are really willing to throw that aside and dive in, and there’s something incredibly vulnerable and brave about that. You watch, and these are grown men and women really diving, and they can fall on their faces with that kind of work. The good guys make it look easy. … And star or not, I just believe we got the right person for every role.“
On the controversial material:
McCarthy: “Yes, we faced some resistance. But some people were very excited we were putting this out there. And look, the issue is still an issue. This abuse is still happening, and the Catholic Church handling of it is subpar. They really haven’t changed. I think [Pope] Francis is a really exciting guy, and his visit was really exciting, but he didn’t do anything about it differently; he just talked about it differently. And talk isn’t going to solve this probem. The church has to change their practice and policy with this or else young lives will continue to be ruined, and that’s just a fact.”
On shooting a scene at Fenway Park:
McCarthy: “We were going to shoot the Boston Red Sox play the New York Yankees — we wanted to shoot the scene live at a game. But the Yankees read the script and they were like, ‘Nope, not touching it.’ It was a marketing decision. They didn’t think the Yankees should be associated with the story.”
On screening the movie for more than 300 journalists the night before:
McCarthy: “Between getting Boston right and the journalists, it’s a lot. We got a good response afterward and that was very nice. It’s always good when your movie connects with people because there are certain things that as writers, you just worry about. For me, David Simon seeing the movie was keeping me up for the past year and a half. Terrifying.”
