Film Spotlight

By Jane Edwardes

This Oscar-nominated film draws loosely on the director's real life experiences. We reveal what drives this playwright-turned-film director

Doubt is an emotion common to many playwrights. It’s part of the job to be able to look at the world from several points of view. As Christopher Hampton once wrote: ‘My trouble is, I’m a man of few convictions. At least, I think I am.’ Politicians are very different. They infantalise the rest of us by dealing in certainties. When did you last hear a politician say ‘I’m not sure’? This was never more true than in the US run up to the Iraq War

It was during that time that the American playwright and director John Patrick Shanley began to feel isolated in his own country.  ‘I was watching the news and listening to these pundits talk about the invasion and there seemed to be such certainty. There was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction and yet they all believed in them. It reminded me of an earlier time in my life and another belief-based culture.’

The culture that came back to him was the Catholic one of his youth when he was growing up in the Bronx in the ’50s. It was there that the lanky, 58-year-old playwright of Irish extraction first began to question the assumptions of those around him. It was also there that the young bruiser would get into fist fights over his use of what he describes as ‘elevated language’ inspired by his favourite play ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’.

As the ideas for the piece began to coalesce, Shanley was sure about one thing, that it should be a play. ‘Doubt’ opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2004 and pretty well scooped all the awards including a Pulitzer for Shanley. Further productions have followed including Roman Polanski’s in Paris and at the Tricycle Theatre in London last year. The play – and the film that followed – is set in 1964, a time of great change in the USA, and describes what happens when the principal of a Catholic school, Sister Aloysius, becomes convinced that Father Flynn is showing too much interest in one of the boys. The Sister doesn’t have a shred of evidence and the situation is further complicated by the fact that the boy is the first black pupil the school has ever had. His mother appreciates Flynn’s kindness to her son, more than she does Aloysius’s interference. In some ways ‘Doubt’ is like an old-fashioned thriller except that there are no last-minute revelations. Whether or not Flynn molested the boy is up to the audience to decide.

It was during the play’s New York run that the producer Scott Rudin said that he felt that it should be turned into a film and that Shanley should direct it, his first film directing job since ‘Joe Versus the Volcano’ in 1990. Shanley was keen to do it but he admits that he struggled with the film script. The play has a cast of just four and largely consists of a series of debates. Hardly promising film material. The breakthrough came when he realised how steeped he was in the penury of Off-Broadway and how much his script would both benefit from a larger cast and from the opportunity to show the society in which it was set. ‘It was artificial,’ he says, ‘and strange not to see the boy that they were all fighting over. And artificial and strange not to see the congregation.’ He also started to investigate the life of the convent, to provide viewers with a glimpse of a world they could never experience for themselves. He spoke to the son of a housekeeper who was unusually familiar with both the rectory and the convent. ‘He said that she was scandalised because the nuns only got inferior cuts of meats. The priests got all the steaks and chops. She began to steal from the priests and give the good cuts to the nuns and instead of turning her in they thought she was a hero!’ Shanley roars with laughter. This anecdote inspired two contrasting scenes in the film: in one the ageing nuns sit in silence chewing on gristle supervised by Meryl Streep’s Sister Aloysius; in the other Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Father Flynn and the other priests drink wine, smoke and tell jokes as if in a private members’ club. Aloysius is a woman in a man’s world and her power comes from the force of her personality. It is the more liberal, forward-looking Flynn who has the hierarchy on his side.

Despite his working class background, the young Shanley managed to get to a private school where he was championed by one of his teachers who also affected the play. ‘The director of studies took me under his wing but it turned out later that he was interfering with children and that that was a lifelong practice of his. Certainly one of the reasons that he championed me, that he gave me my education and protected me when they wanted to throw me out of the school was because he was attracted to me. But he never did anything. And I only found out about him later. Does it negate all the good things that this guy did for me? I couldn’t begin to answer that question.’

And so the seeds of doubt were sewn. ‘I start with the stereotype of the disciplinarian nun and I reaffirm the stereotype,’ he explains. ‘But then you begin to realise that your assumptions about this kind of person are not sufficient to carry you through the story. That is my biggest goal. I want to share with the audience my honest experience of life. I have to live with a lot of stuff that I never get to figure out but that doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to work on it. There is a jury but the jury is out for good and the deliberations go on and on. We just never get back in to deliver the verdict.’