A Conversation with John Patrick Shanley on the making of Doubt, the origins of Moonstruck, and the dire fate of his first novel.
By Terry Keefe
By Terry Keefe
[Note: This article will appear in this month's issue of Venice Magazine.]
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 21 years since John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay for Moonstruck made a whole generation of moviegoers want to move to Little Italy, marry Cher or Nicolas Cage, Danny Aiello even, and look for the mythical Cosmo’s Moon. The young Shanley had already been having a good career run at that point, with a number of successful Off-Broadway plays, along with another produced 1987 film, Five Corners, which starred Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, and John Turturro. But the capper for him during that period was undoubtedly his win at the 1988 Oscars for the Best Original Screenplay for Moonstruck. From there, he went on to continue his career as one of America’s top playwrights, with notable works such as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Four Dogs and a Bone.” He also directed the feature film Joe Versus the Volcano, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in 1990. A near decade and a half later, in 2004, he found his greatest success as a playwright to date, at least as far as awards and ticket sales go, for his original play “Doubt,” which swept all the major theater awards, including a Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “Doubt” also brought Shanley back to the film director’s chair for the first time in almost two decades with his adaptation of the play, which will hit theaters this December.
Doubt takes place in the St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx, in 1964, a time when the winds of change were coming to not just the United States, but the Catholic Church, an institution known to embrace change warily. The Vatican II proclamations by Pope John XXIII two years prior were designed to make the church more open, diverse, and modern. Embodying the spirit of Vatican II, in his outward manner at least, is the young Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is an older nun who prefers the more rigid traditions to stay exactly as they are. The major mystery upon which the plot hinges is sparked by the observations of the young nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), who informs Sister Aloysius that she suspects an improper relationship of some sort between Father Flynn and a young student named Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first African-American pupil. (Note: There are considerable SPOILERS ahead.) Sister Aloysius, who sees the world in strict right and wrong terms, is certain that Father Flynn is guilty, although the actual proof is sketchy, and makes it her goal to force his resignation. Thematically underlying the story is the conflict alluded to in the title, of certainty versus doubt, and the primal question of whether we can ever really know the truth of an event which we did not see with our own eyes. Sister Aloysius is forced to confront her own morality of purpose when she meets Donald’s mother, Mrs. Miller [Viola Davis - read our interview here], who reveals that she believes her son to be gay, and that because of an abusive father and the fact that no other school wants her son, she feels that staying at St. Nicholas might actually be the best thing for Donald. While the plot of Doubt certainly comes to a conclusion, the mystery of what happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller is left hanging for the audience to resolve themselves, or not. Shanley’s great achievement here is that he has managed to craft what is, on one level, a mystery, and on another level, he has created a platform to discuss the impenetrability of that same mystery.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 21 years since John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay for Moonstruck made a whole generation of moviegoers want to move to Little Italy, marry Cher or Nicolas Cage, Danny Aiello even, and look for the mythical Cosmo’s Moon. The young Shanley had already been having a good career run at that point, with a number of successful Off-Broadway plays, along with another produced 1987 film, Five Corners, which starred Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, and John Turturro. But the capper for him during that period was undoubtedly his win at the 1988 Oscars for the Best Original Screenplay for Moonstruck. From there, he went on to continue his career as one of America’s top playwrights, with notable works such as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Four Dogs and a Bone.” He also directed the feature film Joe Versus the Volcano, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in 1990. A near decade and a half later, in 2004, he found his greatest success as a playwright to date, at least as far as awards and ticket sales go, for his original play “Doubt,” which swept all the major theater awards, including a Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “Doubt” also brought Shanley back to the film director’s chair for the first time in almost two decades with his adaptation of the play, which will hit theaters this December.
Doubt takes place in the St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx, in 1964, a time when the winds of change were coming to not just the United States, but the Catholic Church, an institution known to embrace change warily. The Vatican II proclamations by Pope John XXIII two years prior were designed to make the church more open, diverse, and modern. Embodying the spirit of Vatican II, in his outward manner at least, is the young Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is an older nun who prefers the more rigid traditions to stay exactly as they are. The major mystery upon which the plot hinges is sparked by the observations of the young nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), who informs Sister Aloysius that she suspects an improper relationship of some sort between Father Flynn and a young student named Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first African-American pupil. (Note: There are considerable SPOILERS ahead.) Sister Aloysius, who sees the world in strict right and wrong terms, is certain that Father Flynn is guilty, although the actual proof is sketchy, and makes it her goal to force his resignation. Thematically underlying the story is the conflict alluded to in the title, of certainty versus doubt, and the primal question of whether we can ever really know the truth of an event which we did not see with our own eyes. Sister Aloysius is forced to confront her own morality of purpose when she meets Donald’s mother, Mrs. Miller [Viola Davis - read our interview here], who reveals that she believes her son to be gay, and that because of an abusive father and the fact that no other school wants her son, she feels that staying at St. Nicholas might actually be the best thing for Donald. While the plot of Doubt certainly comes to a conclusion, the mystery of what happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller is left hanging for the audience to resolve themselves, or not. Shanley’s great achievement here is that he has managed to craft what is, on one level, a mystery, and on another level, he has created a platform to discuss the impenetrability of that same mystery.
Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius in DOUBT.
Shanley grew up in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, and attended Catholic School himself. We met in late November of this year.
What was the initial kernel of inspiration that got your writing of “Doubt” the play started? Was it wanting to write a story about the concept of doubt itself, or were there specific plot elements that propelled the writing?
John Patrick Shanley: Well, when I wrote the play, we were living in a time of great “certainty” in our country, leading up to the Iraq War, and I didn’t feel certain. And the culture around me seemed to be sending me the message that I didn’t feel certain because I was weak. I didn’t agree with that. So, that germ of an idea, about certainty and doubt, was there. But, it’s not something that I would have written about just by itself. And then I thought about the black mother, and I thought that was an interesting story. That’s when things started to get interesting. Because in all of my experiences of life, people have their reasons for doing things, and there are rarely very specific reasons why people do things. It’s usually a fairly complicated tale. And I wanted to tell that tale. So, I wrote the play. And [producer] Scott Rudin came to me and said that he thought it should be a film and that I should direct it. I said that I agreed, but I hadn’t directed in 18 years. It was very daunting because the play only has a few characters and a couple of locations, and I was wondering how I was going to open up this thing cinematically in a way that is meaningful, you know?
You did find a lot of ways to open up the story for film. How did those ideas come about?
I realized that as a playwright I had sort of hypnotized myself into coming up with a way of telling a complicated story, with limited characters, and in fact, that was highly artificial. And if I were to lose my self-hypnosis, I’d see that it was only natural to show the kids, the congregation, and the nuns in their convent. That there were lots of aspects that I could include which were organic, and would only enrich the story. The first big challenge I had in the adaptation was with the opening sermon. I thought, “What am I going to do? This guy talks for a long time. At a certain point, this is just not cinematic.” Then I realized that this movie is partially about the joining in combat of these two characters, the priest and the nun. So, I decided to introduce her during the sermon, and that would make it cinematic. Because then there would be her major entrance, which was non-verbal, up against his major entrance, which was verbal. And then the cutaway shots would have real significance, rather than just busying it up by trying to put various reaction shots and such. I also realized then how difficult this was going to be. I’ve written a lot of screenplays, and this was the hardest one for me. It was going to be trench warfare as a writer. I was going to have solve the problem of how to shoot it, page-by-page. There wasn’t going to be any overarching solution. I was going to have to exploit and investigate the physical world and environment that these people lived in, and how it affected them, and I was going to have to do that repeatedly. I came up with this idea, in my head, for Sister Aloysius, that she was kind of a submarine commander, of an old, broken-down submarine. She kept plugging leaks, and lights would blow out, and she was trying to keep this vessel going, but eventually, it was going to sink [laughs]. The future was going to come but she was trying to keep it out. There was a thing in the play about a windstorm, which you don’t see in the play, you hear the wind. And I came up with the idea that the wind could be a character of sorts in the film. That it could be strangely cinematic. So, piece by piece, light bulbs blowing out, window blinds being shut, the mouse, and the cat…I put it together. Lots of little solutions to the problem of opening things up. But I always wanted to make sure that those little solutions did a few things: they propelled the story forward; they propelled character; and they motivated camera moves. So if I had two or three people talking for an extended period of time in a room, these small events propel the action of the scene. The intercom ringing makes Sister Aloysius get up to answer it, and then the camera moves to deal with that. The small events become part of the larger story and have a purpose. Then, there were, of course, things that happened [in dialogue] in the play, that you had to show on-screen. In the play, they just say, “Father Flynn left.” Well, you can’t do that in the film! [laughs] You have to show the guy leaving! And that became a natural new scene, with the farewell sermon, and in that scene, I could let a few other stories play out.
While writing the piece, did you keep in your head your own version of what truly happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller?
Let me put it to you this way - you never know what’s going on in somebody else’s head. You never know what’s going on in somebody else’s heart. A lot of time is spent coming up with a conclusion in this story, but it’s like life, you don’t get to know for sure what really happened. You don’t get to know for certain. I feel like the narrative form, because of television to some degree, has boiled down to posing a question and, at the end, answering that question. And that form has become the standard, but it’s a little different than what the experience of life is. In life, you don’t get to know everything. You get to know that you think you know, maybe. You receive a lot of information, or a little information, and you reach your conclusions from that. And yet, life is sweet, and life is provocative, and life is gripping…and why can’t you have all that in a story? I didn’t want to pull a parlor trick, or a puzzle, that’s not what the story is about. I wanted to have a fierce dialectic and invite the audience to continue the conversation after the movie, about whatever topics they chose to.
Did you find that postproduction was particularly challenging, because you really could sway the audience ‘s perception of Father Flynn’s guilt by the way the film is cut?
No question, this was a very difficult film to cut, because you have to leave just the right amount of space for the audience. And [editor] Dylan Tichenor was a great asset. The “Final Confrontation Scene” between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius, along with the scene between Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, were the most difficult scenes to cut. We thought the “Tea Scene” [between Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, and Amy Adams] would be the most difficult, but Dylan just went through that quickly and did a beautiful cut right away. But we suffered over the Final Confrontation Scene. It was complicated scene because of the constant shifting between the two actors. I don’t even remember how many days we shot it, but we did endless coverage.
What was the initial kernel of inspiration that got your writing of “Doubt” the play started? Was it wanting to write a story about the concept of doubt itself, or were there specific plot elements that propelled the writing?
John Patrick Shanley: Well, when I wrote the play, we were living in a time of great “certainty” in our country, leading up to the Iraq War, and I didn’t feel certain. And the culture around me seemed to be sending me the message that I didn’t feel certain because I was weak. I didn’t agree with that. So, that germ of an idea, about certainty and doubt, was there. But, it’s not something that I would have written about just by itself. And then I thought about the black mother, and I thought that was an interesting story. That’s when things started to get interesting. Because in all of my experiences of life, people have their reasons for doing things, and there are rarely very specific reasons why people do things. It’s usually a fairly complicated tale. And I wanted to tell that tale. So, I wrote the play. And [producer] Scott Rudin came to me and said that he thought it should be a film and that I should direct it. I said that I agreed, but I hadn’t directed in 18 years. It was very daunting because the play only has a few characters and a couple of locations, and I was wondering how I was going to open up this thing cinematically in a way that is meaningful, you know?
You did find a lot of ways to open up the story for film. How did those ideas come about?
I realized that as a playwright I had sort of hypnotized myself into coming up with a way of telling a complicated story, with limited characters, and in fact, that was highly artificial. And if I were to lose my self-hypnosis, I’d see that it was only natural to show the kids, the congregation, and the nuns in their convent. That there were lots of aspects that I could include which were organic, and would only enrich the story. The first big challenge I had in the adaptation was with the opening sermon. I thought, “What am I going to do? This guy talks for a long time. At a certain point, this is just not cinematic.” Then I realized that this movie is partially about the joining in combat of these two characters, the priest and the nun. So, I decided to introduce her during the sermon, and that would make it cinematic. Because then there would be her major entrance, which was non-verbal, up against his major entrance, which was verbal. And then the cutaway shots would have real significance, rather than just busying it up by trying to put various reaction shots and such. I also realized then how difficult this was going to be. I’ve written a lot of screenplays, and this was the hardest one for me. It was going to be trench warfare as a writer. I was going to have solve the problem of how to shoot it, page-by-page. There wasn’t going to be any overarching solution. I was going to have to exploit and investigate the physical world and environment that these people lived in, and how it affected them, and I was going to have to do that repeatedly. I came up with this idea, in my head, for Sister Aloysius, that she was kind of a submarine commander, of an old, broken-down submarine. She kept plugging leaks, and lights would blow out, and she was trying to keep this vessel going, but eventually, it was going to sink [laughs]. The future was going to come but she was trying to keep it out. There was a thing in the play about a windstorm, which you don’t see in the play, you hear the wind. And I came up with the idea that the wind could be a character of sorts in the film. That it could be strangely cinematic. So, piece by piece, light bulbs blowing out, window blinds being shut, the mouse, and the cat…I put it together. Lots of little solutions to the problem of opening things up. But I always wanted to make sure that those little solutions did a few things: they propelled the story forward; they propelled character; and they motivated camera moves. So if I had two or three people talking for an extended period of time in a room, these small events propel the action of the scene. The intercom ringing makes Sister Aloysius get up to answer it, and then the camera moves to deal with that. The small events become part of the larger story and have a purpose. Then, there were, of course, things that happened [in dialogue] in the play, that you had to show on-screen. In the play, they just say, “Father Flynn left.” Well, you can’t do that in the film! [laughs] You have to show the guy leaving! And that became a natural new scene, with the farewell sermon, and in that scene, I could let a few other stories play out.
While writing the piece, did you keep in your head your own version of what truly happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller?
Let me put it to you this way - you never know what’s going on in somebody else’s head. You never know what’s going on in somebody else’s heart. A lot of time is spent coming up with a conclusion in this story, but it’s like life, you don’t get to know for sure what really happened. You don’t get to know for certain. I feel like the narrative form, because of television to some degree, has boiled down to posing a question and, at the end, answering that question. And that form has become the standard, but it’s a little different than what the experience of life is. In life, you don’t get to know everything. You get to know that you think you know, maybe. You receive a lot of information, or a little information, and you reach your conclusions from that. And yet, life is sweet, and life is provocative, and life is gripping…and why can’t you have all that in a story? I didn’t want to pull a parlor trick, or a puzzle, that’s not what the story is about. I wanted to have a fierce dialectic and invite the audience to continue the conversation after the movie, about whatever topics they chose to.
Did you find that postproduction was particularly challenging, because you really could sway the audience ‘s perception of Father Flynn’s guilt by the way the film is cut?
No question, this was a very difficult film to cut, because you have to leave just the right amount of space for the audience. And [editor] Dylan Tichenor was a great asset. The “Final Confrontation Scene” between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius, along with the scene between Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, were the most difficult scenes to cut. We thought the “Tea Scene” [between Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, and Amy Adams] would be the most difficult, but Dylan just went through that quickly and did a beautiful cut right away. But we suffered over the Final Confrontation Scene. It was complicated scene because of the constant shifting between the two actors. I don’t even remember how many days we shot it, but we did endless coverage.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in DOUBT.
How do much direction do you give actors of the caliber of Phil and Meryl?
Well, what you do is…if what they’re doing is true and it takes the scene where it’s got to get to, then it’s valid. If it’s interesting. And most of the time, they’re interesting. But if you see something that isn’t grounded, which most of the time you don’t…there was a time when we were rehearsing the Confrontation Scene and Phil came over and asked, “How was that?” And I said, “It was good. It was very good. There was that one part that was a little maudlin by the window…” And he said, [quickly] “Let’s go over that!” That’s what he’s looking for with direction. It’s “Tell me when I jump the rails. Please, before it’s too late!” And then, if I see somebody do something and think, “Okay, that may well be over the top,” then I go back and say, “Okay, let’s take it down a bit.” There was a time in the confrontation scene where Meryl got very sarcastic, and I said, “Okay, do it again, but this time, take the high road.” And she then did a beautiful and quite different performance, and that was all the direction I gave her [laughs]. She was so impressive. And then, once in awhile, when someone knocks it out of the park, you stop a minute and say to them, “You knocked it out of the park.” Because they need to hear that. It gives them the juice to get to the next part.
You went to Catholic school. When you started researching this for the preproduction on the look of the film, what memories that came back did you find the most surprising?
I didn’t have to do any research [laughs]. Not for this one. I remember [costume designer] Ann Roth showed me the costumes for the kids, the jackets for the boys. I said, “You can’t use these. They’re all going to be in the same jackets.” She said, “But that will be visually boring.” And I said, “But that will be true!” [laughs] We had some wonderful fights, Ann and I. She’s very strong-willed, but she couldn’t tell me the kids should have different colored shoes on. They all have the same colored shoes on! She was like, “Give me a break!” [laughs] I said, “It’s wintertime. You can do it with the overcoats. They all have different colored overcoats on.” I have a good memory for this era, and we shot at the same school I actually went to. So, when the guys are playing in the street, it’s the same street I grew up on. When the woman cuts the pillow on the rooftop, that’s the rooftop I used to play on. The alleyway, the same thing. And I hired Sister James [whose name the Amy Adams character shares], my first grade teacher from that school, as my technical advisor. She was the one who told us things like that we had to put the rosary over the belt in this way, or it’s wrong.
Did Sister James get to see the play?
Oh yeah, Sister James saw the play in previews. I was in previews and I got this email from somebody which said, “I’m from the Bronx and I saw the play, and I know Sister James, and she’s really excited about this play, and she’s coming to visit.” I thought, “I thought she was dead!” I had no idea the woman was alive. None. I hadn’t seen her since I was six. And now she was en route to see my show. So, I rushed over to the theater and I sat with her, and I watched the play. She was now 70. She had been 21 when she was my teacher. I was in the first class she had ever taught. Now, here we were, 49 years later, sitting watching the play together. The designer had gotten a photograph of the school and rebuilt the school on stage. So, these two people who hadn’t seen each other in so long, we were sitting there looking back in time to this stage. It was very powerful. Afterwards, she was very enthusiastic and really liked the play, and she’d come with another nun. And then, I knew she liked it, because she came back with a whole bunch of nuns [laughs] ! And all of the nuns loved the play. They said, “Anything you need, you come to us!” And indeed, we ended up shooting in the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which is owned by the Sisters of Charity.
Well, what you do is…if what they’re doing is true and it takes the scene where it’s got to get to, then it’s valid. If it’s interesting. And most of the time, they’re interesting. But if you see something that isn’t grounded, which most of the time you don’t…there was a time when we were rehearsing the Confrontation Scene and Phil came over and asked, “How was that?” And I said, “It was good. It was very good. There was that one part that was a little maudlin by the window…” And he said, [quickly] “Let’s go over that!” That’s what he’s looking for with direction. It’s “Tell me when I jump the rails. Please, before it’s too late!” And then, if I see somebody do something and think, “Okay, that may well be over the top,” then I go back and say, “Okay, let’s take it down a bit.” There was a time in the confrontation scene where Meryl got very sarcastic, and I said, “Okay, do it again, but this time, take the high road.” And she then did a beautiful and quite different performance, and that was all the direction I gave her [laughs]. She was so impressive. And then, once in awhile, when someone knocks it out of the park, you stop a minute and say to them, “You knocked it out of the park.” Because they need to hear that. It gives them the juice to get to the next part.
You went to Catholic school. When you started researching this for the preproduction on the look of the film, what memories that came back did you find the most surprising?
I didn’t have to do any research [laughs]. Not for this one. I remember [costume designer] Ann Roth showed me the costumes for the kids, the jackets for the boys. I said, “You can’t use these. They’re all going to be in the same jackets.” She said, “But that will be visually boring.” And I said, “But that will be true!” [laughs] We had some wonderful fights, Ann and I. She’s very strong-willed, but she couldn’t tell me the kids should have different colored shoes on. They all have the same colored shoes on! She was like, “Give me a break!” [laughs] I said, “It’s wintertime. You can do it with the overcoats. They all have different colored overcoats on.” I have a good memory for this era, and we shot at the same school I actually went to. So, when the guys are playing in the street, it’s the same street I grew up on. When the woman cuts the pillow on the rooftop, that’s the rooftop I used to play on. The alleyway, the same thing. And I hired Sister James [whose name the Amy Adams character shares], my first grade teacher from that school, as my technical advisor. She was the one who told us things like that we had to put the rosary over the belt in this way, or it’s wrong.
Did Sister James get to see the play?
Oh yeah, Sister James saw the play in previews. I was in previews and I got this email from somebody which said, “I’m from the Bronx and I saw the play, and I know Sister James, and she’s really excited about this play, and she’s coming to visit.” I thought, “I thought she was dead!” I had no idea the woman was alive. None. I hadn’t seen her since I was six. And now she was en route to see my show. So, I rushed over to the theater and I sat with her, and I watched the play. She was now 70. She had been 21 when she was my teacher. I was in the first class she had ever taught. Now, here we were, 49 years later, sitting watching the play together. The designer had gotten a photograph of the school and rebuilt the school on stage. So, these two people who hadn’t seen each other in so long, we were sitting there looking back in time to this stage. It was very powerful. Afterwards, she was very enthusiastic and really liked the play, and she’d come with another nun. And then, I knew she liked it, because she came back with a whole bunch of nuns [laughs] ! And all of the nuns loved the play. They said, “Anything you need, you come to us!” And indeed, we ended up shooting in the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which is owned by the Sisters of Charity.
Shanley directs Meryl Streep in DOUBT.
The scene with Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, when they discuss her son’s possibly improper relationship with Father Flynn, seems like it would be one of the hardest to write, because it is filled with so many emotions, with also a great deal of ambiguity in regards to how Mrs. Miller feels about the situation. Lots of drafts?
No, I wrote it the first time. It’s because when I was 15, I ended up by fluke, in a lay Catholic prep school in New Hampshire. I had a heavy Bronx accent. The teachers didn’t want me very much. I was kind of violent. The kids didn’t want me that much. There was one teacher who took me under his wing, and protected me, and educated me. He was a very good English teacher. Now, he didn’t try anything. He didn’t do anything with me, but it was in the air. I didn’t admit that to myself at the time though. Now, three years or so later, I would continue to see him, because I was close to this guy and connected to him…he introduced me to another 15-year old kid and said, “This is my son.” But he didn’t have any children. And then he did it with a second kid and said, “This is my son.” I felt very strange about that. Much later, we had a 30th year reunion, when people who went there got together for a reunion. One guy pulled me aside and told me that this teacher had abused him when he went to school there. He was traumatized. And that’s when I had concrete confirmation that that’s what was happening. Then, just a few years ago, I got a letter from this teacher, and when I looked at the letter, I knew he was telling me that he was dying. I was that connected to him, just intuitively. He told me where he was and that I could come visit him. And I didn’t go. I have no regrets about that, but it’s bittersweet. So, when I wrote that scene, that’s where I was coming from. A very complex equation. This guy who was good to me. Who, in fact, saved my life, and educated me. And yet, had done terrible things. But not to me. And how do I feel about that, you know? And then I thought, “Did I, when I was a kid, know? Completely know. And use the situation to my advantage, and walk that line with him?” That’s a line that Mrs. Miller is also walking.
Did anything in particular from your life inspire the story of Moonstruck?
I was around 35-36, and I knew lots of women in their 30s, and they all had this kind of similar story. That they had some type of guy they always wanted to meet, and they had been looking for him, but they never found him. And now they were in their 30s, and they thought, “Maybe I’m never going to meet that guy.” So maybe they were going to have to make this concession to marry a real guy, as opposed to the fantasy guy. I thought, “What if you did that and the right guy shows up right then and there?” Sally Field had taken me out to lunch, and she said, “I like your writing. Why don’t you write something for me?” And I said, “I’ll write something for you. But you can’t pay me. If you like it, then you can option it. If you don’t like it, it’s okay, we were never in business.” So, I wrote Moonstruck. Sally loved the screenplay, but nobody would make it with her. And so, I sent it to Norman Jewison, but I didn’t want to option it until I talked to him. I met with Norman and I said, “Is this particular script the movie that you want to make?” Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Norman realized that he was in the first job interview he’d ever had with a screenwriter [laughs]. Because I was saying, “If you don’t want to make this, that’s fine, but I am going home. This is not the basis for a film. This is a film.” And Norman said, “Okay, let’s read it.” And he took half of the parts, and I took the other half, and we acted the whole thing out together. And in the end, he said, “Yeah, I’m making this film.” And I said, “Okay, we’re in business.” [laughs]
No, I wrote it the first time. It’s because when I was 15, I ended up by fluke, in a lay Catholic prep school in New Hampshire. I had a heavy Bronx accent. The teachers didn’t want me very much. I was kind of violent. The kids didn’t want me that much. There was one teacher who took me under his wing, and protected me, and educated me. He was a very good English teacher. Now, he didn’t try anything. He didn’t do anything with me, but it was in the air. I didn’t admit that to myself at the time though. Now, three years or so later, I would continue to see him, because I was close to this guy and connected to him…he introduced me to another 15-year old kid and said, “This is my son.” But he didn’t have any children. And then he did it with a second kid and said, “This is my son.” I felt very strange about that. Much later, we had a 30th year reunion, when people who went there got together for a reunion. One guy pulled me aside and told me that this teacher had abused him when he went to school there. He was traumatized. And that’s when I had concrete confirmation that that’s what was happening. Then, just a few years ago, I got a letter from this teacher, and when I looked at the letter, I knew he was telling me that he was dying. I was that connected to him, just intuitively. He told me where he was and that I could come visit him. And I didn’t go. I have no regrets about that, but it’s bittersweet. So, when I wrote that scene, that’s where I was coming from. A very complex equation. This guy who was good to me. Who, in fact, saved my life, and educated me. And yet, had done terrible things. But not to me. And how do I feel about that, you know? And then I thought, “Did I, when I was a kid, know? Completely know. And use the situation to my advantage, and walk that line with him?” That’s a line that Mrs. Miller is also walking.
Did anything in particular from your life inspire the story of Moonstruck?
I was around 35-36, and I knew lots of women in their 30s, and they all had this kind of similar story. That they had some type of guy they always wanted to meet, and they had been looking for him, but they never found him. And now they were in their 30s, and they thought, “Maybe I’m never going to meet that guy.” So maybe they were going to have to make this concession to marry a real guy, as opposed to the fantasy guy. I thought, “What if you did that and the right guy shows up right then and there?” Sally Field had taken me out to lunch, and she said, “I like your writing. Why don’t you write something for me?” And I said, “I’ll write something for you. But you can’t pay me. If you like it, then you can option it. If you don’t like it, it’s okay, we were never in business.” So, I wrote Moonstruck. Sally loved the screenplay, but nobody would make it with her. And so, I sent it to Norman Jewison, but I didn’t want to option it until I talked to him. I met with Norman and I said, “Is this particular script the movie that you want to make?” Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Norman realized that he was in the first job interview he’d ever had with a screenwriter [laughs]. Because I was saying, “If you don’t want to make this, that’s fine, but I am going home. This is not the basis for a film. This is a film.” And Norman said, “Okay, let’s read it.” And he took half of the parts, and I took the other half, and we acted the whole thing out together. And in the end, he said, “Yeah, I’m making this film.” And I said, “Okay, we’re in business.” [laughs]
Cher and Nicolas Cage in 1987's MOONSTRUCK.
Moonstruck is a film that has been often imitated, never duplicated, over the years. It mixes tones so well. You’ve got a little magical realism, romantic comedy, and then the touches of absurdity, like Nic Cage’s wooden hand.
I grew up with a guy who caught his hand in a machine, it got chewed off, and he got a wooden hand. And he was always trying to pick fights with people, but people wouldn’t fight him. They’d go, “I’m not fighting you. You’ve got a wooden hand!” And he did that with me, and I knocked him to the ground [laughs]. He also stayed with me as a character.
At what point in your life did you start writing?
Grammar school. From 10 years old on. Most of it poetry, a few essays, and short stories. But a lot of it was poetry. I was pretty much exclusively a poet until I was 22 or 23. Then I got my first poems published, and I immediately stopped writing poetry [laughs]. I started writing short stories. The Paris Review said, “Not this story, but the next one.” I stopped writing short stories [laughs]. I wrote a novel for a year, and when I finished it, I burned it. Because it didn’t have a plot. And that’s when I started writing plays.
Was that the only copy of this novel?
Yes. It’s gone.
Do you regret burning it?
Never! [laughs] You’ve got a lot of bad writing to do in this life. Get it out of the way early [laughs].
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt opens on December 12th, via Miramax Films.
I grew up with a guy who caught his hand in a machine, it got chewed off, and he got a wooden hand. And he was always trying to pick fights with people, but people wouldn’t fight him. They’d go, “I’m not fighting you. You’ve got a wooden hand!” And he did that with me, and I knocked him to the ground [laughs]. He also stayed with me as a character.
At what point in your life did you start writing?
Grammar school. From 10 years old on. Most of it poetry, a few essays, and short stories. But a lot of it was poetry. I was pretty much exclusively a poet until I was 22 or 23. Then I got my first poems published, and I immediately stopped writing poetry [laughs]. I started writing short stories. The Paris Review said, “Not this story, but the next one.” I stopped writing short stories [laughs]. I wrote a novel for a year, and when I finished it, I burned it. Because it didn’t have a plot. And that’s when I started writing plays.
Was that the only copy of this novel?
Yes. It’s gone.
Do you regret burning it?
Never! [laughs] You’ve got a lot of bad writing to do in this life. Get it out of the way early [laughs].
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt opens on December 12th, via Miramax Films.
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