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Tom McCarthy redeems himself after Cobbler dud with Spotlight

SPOTLIGHT directed by Tom McCarthy, written by McCarthy and Josh Singer, with Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and John Slattery. An Entertainment One release. 128 minutes. Opens Friday (November 13). For venues and times, see Movies


Tom McCarthy brought Spotlight to TIFF with a perfect redemption narrative. 

I’m not talking about how the writer/director has re-established his artistic bona fides after last year’s Adam Sandler dud, The Cobbler, mind you. 

McCarthy, who played an ethically bankrupt Baltimore reporter in the final season of The Wire, has made a movie celebrating how the Boston Globe in 2001 exposed the Catholic Church’s shielding of pedophile priests for decades – a scandal that had international ramifications and took years to bring to light.

“Yes, I think I owed it to journalism,” McCarthy laughs, making sure I’m not taking him seriously.

Okay, so it’s not a karmic thing, just the love of a good story. And Spotlight tells a great one, compressing years of exhaustive shoe-leather reporting into two brisk, infuriated hours. I ask McCarthy if he and co-writer Josh Singer were ever intimidated by all the factual detail they had to fit into the script.

“Any good actor smells exposition from a mile away and quickly wants to push it to the other actors in the scene,” he says. “In rehearsals the actors were very quickly pushing back on repeating information: ‘Haven’t I said this? Didn’t I say this?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, you did. Exactly. Say it again. Say it again and again and again until it connects with something Matt Carroll is saying, or that Robby Robinson is saying. This is how these guys connect the dots. They’re constantly just replaying information and putting pieces together. They’re kind of grasping in the dark a little bit. They’re trying to connect things in such a way that ultimately when they do, boom – we see the story.”

It also helped that McCarthy – who’d assembled excellent casts for The Station Agent, The Visitor and Win Win – was able to grab an A-list ensemble this time around, centred on Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James as the core Spotlight reporters.

“Not only are they very good at just being human on screen, but you can see their wheels spinning,” he says. “They’re very good listeners.”

And they took to their characters very quickly.

“A lot of times we were just getting them in rooms together, and you could tell they were revelling in the back-and-forth,” McCarthy says. “Figuring things out and sharing lines: ‘Why doesn’t he say that? He should say that, because that’s his thing.’ There was a bunch of that going on – which as a writer usually gives me hives – but they were so dialled in at that point, it was exciting.”

The more he worked on Spotlight, the more he started to see parallels with his own process making movies.

“There’s nothing really glamorous about filmmaking. Some people manage to do it glamorously – I don’t know how,” he laughs. “For me it’s the hardest I ever work. You’re working in a vacuum, half the time you think you’re crazy, you collaborate with a lot of wonderfully, similarly crazy people, and you’re banging heads, going to war. 

“There are moments when you get to premiere in Venice or Toronto when you’re like, ‘Hey, this is cool and beautiful and I’m glad I’m having this experience.’ But that hard work, to me, is the best part of it.”

Tom McCarthy on finding the humanity in characters whose personal lives are mostly left out of the movie:

McCarthy on his insistence on shooting in the Boston Globe building whenever possible:

McCarthy on the importance of including 9/11 in the narrative of the film:

See our review of Spotlight and our interview with actor John Slattery.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner 

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