Hello, everybody.
Welcome to today's podcast, and I'm delighted to welcome Kenny Lonergan, who is a distinguished visitor to Worcester College this week.
So Kenny, welcome. Thank you Kenny.
For those of you who don't know, his work is a US film director, screenwriter, playwright and actor.
Many of you might have seen him acting recently in Ripley with Andrew Scott.
Kenny grew up and lives in Manhattan.
He started writing at the age of 18 and attended the Tisch School of Arts on the Dramatic Writing program.
He's got many credits to his name in terms of writing for the theatre and for films.
His first successful play was This Is Our Youth with Mark Ruffalo, and then very many other accolades,
but he's probably best known in the UK for his 2011 film uh, called Margaret.
But more recently Manchester by the sea, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
So quite a long list of accolades. Uh, Kenny, we're really delighted to have you, uh, in Worcester this, uh, week.
Tell us how you're getting on at Worcester. Very well, thank you. Um, I love it here.
It's beautiful. And everyone's very kind of nice and interesting. And I love being here.
And what do you make of Oxford and the people that you've met here?
Because, you know, you've been living here in the, uh, province lodgings.
You've been in and around college, in eating breakfast, in hotel, eating lunch, in fact, doing lots of eating.
Yes. Lots of eating. Well, it's it's sort of not the press, the metaphor, but it's a bit like your gardens here.
It's just full of beautiful and interesting things and a great variety for me.
It's, uh, everyone's extremely friendly, and I love talking to people from all the different disciplines.
My life is not surrounded by scholars of every stripe, and I, uh, I have a lot of interests that have nothing to do with what I do for a living,
and I don't get much chance to hear about them from friendly expert interlocutors.
Um, and I mean, of course, for a lot of subjects I don't understand and can't follow up, but the ones I can.
I love talking to the professors here, even though you're not called professors.
I don't think the lunches and dinners and, uh, the in-between events are maybe my favourite, because that's where you get to talk to everyone.
Yes. And you've been talking to quite a few students. You've very kindly done some workshops on screenwriting, but also writing more generally.
Tell us a little bit about how those have gone and you know some of your observations on the week.
Well, those have been also delightful. The students are very intense and interested and and friendly and welcoming.
And I've really enjoyed that. You know, in those sessions I do most of the talking.
So I don't know how that part of it is.
But, uh, when they start asking questions and wanting to know about all sorts of aspects of writing for the performing arts that,
you know, they ask questions about acting and producing and writing and getting your screenplay produced somehow.
And and it's and not only that, but many of the students who came to the workshops are not primarily,
uh, in the arts, but quite a few who are there purely out of sheer interest, which is always nice.
Also, it's not so many of the questions were so beautifully phrased.
The students are so eloquent and so well spoken, and that's very refreshing and, uh, encouraging for thoughts of the future.
I know you did a Q&A with me last night in the Nunciature auditorium, and there's some really, really interesting observations.
Very much so. And in those observations, you know, you talked a lot about your interest in specificity.
Yes. Could you say a bit more about that? Yes.
I mean, I think I was there's a there's a sign up in, uh, one of the main acting schools in New York.
It's called the Neighbourhood Playhouse, and it was the founder and and headmaster for many years was named Sanford Meisner, who's a very,
very good acting teacher and not, I don't know, not mystical and find your truth or anything like that,
but just practical, practical training and acting. And, uh, there was a big sign in the main classroom which said, be specific.
There is also a famous saying, I don't remember who, but it says God is in the details.
And so there's something about the specificity of what you're inventing that carries you along in a way nothing else does.
And all the films that I like in the plays that are like the the fiction that I like are all very much interested in the details.
And I think that covers almost everything you can think of, uh, in the arts that, that really has it has real resonance.
Um, even, for instance, the Impressionists, they were less interested in the details of the physical objects they were painting,
but they were focussed entirely on the details of the light, you know.
Um, which looking at painting before the Impressionist, they many beautiful paintings and many painters who did all sorts of things with light.
But the acts they were grinding was outdoor painting that simply had a sky and a and a landscape, and the two weren't integrated.
And so what's interesting when you talk about detail and specificity is that it can be it.
It's not necessarily how much time it takes to get to the train station exactly, but the specificity of some or other aspect of, of life.
Uh, and as a. Creative person or as a writer director.
It just yields wonderful results when you're an actor to have to be.
It's an acting school dictum, but actors have to be very specific.
If you're walking into a room, you're walking into a room from somewhere, from some situation in,
you're supposed to know where you're coming from and who's in the room and who they are to you and, and what you're saying means to you.
Because in real life, there's no there's not really any such thing as generality.
And so if you walk in generally upset without knowing what you're upset about, then you're likely to be just putting on an act.
And so instead of being upset, your character is putting on an act, or the actor is.
At the same time, there's a lot of, uh, inspiration, whatever that means.
Or you have an intuition about what something feels like or what something is like,
and you don't necessarily need to rehearse for yourself with all the specifics are because your personal feeling that's coming out of you,
even if you don't know where it's coming from, is likely coming from somewhere concrete and specific.
And so sometimes the work you do is to build up the specificity of the areas that you don't have an intuition about, and you cover that.
Actually, in a bit of detail last night, were you talking about Manchester?
Yes, so I did, um, I did. I'm from New York City.
I knew the area North Shore of Boston, very slightly.
I'd been there a few times.
It was very valuable to do some research about very simple things, like how far the towns, how far away the towns were from each other.
There's a teenage character who plays hockey.
As it happens, I learned that the hockey rink is not in Manchester, but it's in the neighbouring town, Rockport.
And so there's a there's an important part of the film where the main character,
played by Casey Affleck, has to get to the kid to give him the news that his father's passed away.
And just those little details help feed scenes and make me think of other scenes.
Um, because I hadn't known that, I thought he could just drive up and find the kid and give him the news,
but in fact, he has to make a call to the principal of the high school his to find out where he is.
The principal asks him how, uh, his brother is has just died, so he doesn't want to discuss that.
So says he's fine. All those things really add up to to, um, interesting moments on film and drama, just as there there is in life.
If you get a phone call saying someone you care for has been in the hospital, you don't say, oh my gosh and hang up.
You say, what happened? Where are they? What should I do? You ask a lot of questions.
My favourite example is also hospital one on television and films.
Very often you hear there'll be a scene where someone says, I'm afraid, I'm afraid it's cancer.
She's got six months to live. And then the character bursts into tears quite naturally, and that's the end of the scene.
But in real life, that's not how it goes. They give you tremendous amount of detail.
The doctors and you ask a lot of questions. You say, well, what they got?
What do you mean? Is there any chance where's the best place to go, you ask?
Lots and lots of questions. And that's because you you need to know the answers.
You don't just jump to the general feeling of tragedy.
There are many, many stages in between, all of which are very interesting to put in a film because they're very painful and dramatic in life.
Yeah, yeah. And there must be a balance missing there between getting the detail and some of the nuance onto the script and then into the movie.
Yeah, but at the same time, keeping the momentum of the, uh, action.
Yes. That's true. You can't you can't make a movie that takes place over a weekend and have it take place over a week.
Uh, but so you have to economise and you have to do short cuts.
But that creates an interesting challenge because, say, jump a week ahead,
unless I have an intuition about it and it doesn't matter that much, it's much better to know what happened.
At least I know what happens in the week that wasn't in the story.
Um, that can be very important. Or it can be an uneventful week and not so.
And that came up in one of the questions, didn't it, yesterday about how you play with time.
Well that's different I had well that's not a no. It's related. So the film has a lot of flashbacks.
Um, in fact, it's very central to the story because the main character has a terrible tragedy in his background and his mind keeps going there.
And that was I didn't get to answer that question so well yesterday, but the flashbacks, the editor,
Jennifer Lamb, and I did have no dissolves and no, no, no, no visual clues that they are flashbacks.
I mean, we cut them in as if they were part of the action, and I wasn't sure that was going to work.
And she very much encouraged it because she said he's she said it's kind of it's two stories at once.
He's living his present life, but he's also the past.
Life is so much on his mind and in his heart that it's always there.
So it makes sense to her and me that that the flashbacks would be sort of indiscriminate,
especially as he gets closer and closer to the town where all these terrible things happened.
Um, and so I've been told that the, the first 1 or 2 flashbacks are a bit confusing to the audience.
We both figured the audience would catch up pretty quickly. And they do again talking about specificity.
If that if the tragedy happened five years ago and we're here and the film starts now,
let's say I need to at least be able to tell the actors what happened in between.
If I don't, they're going. That's exactly the kind of work they'll do. Actors who are working on a script that's more sketchy and more open.
Uh, need to fill in the gaps in order to feel like they have a foundation from which to perform.
Um, yeah. Just coming back to act as I was describing your approach is quite generous in the sense that,
you know, within the, uh, guardrails you actually give actors,
particularly actors, you know, that you worked with a lot like, uh, Mark Ruffalo, quite a lot of discretion to build up, uh, you know, characters.
And I think I'm not alone in finding that quite interesting.
The audience last night really picked up on that. Well, I mean, I don't think I'm alone in that because some, as I was saying last night,
some directors barely talk to the actors at all, but they but they, they also it's very common not to have any rehearsal for a film.
And I know a lot of actors find that to be a problem because they come in with their they do all the work on their own,
they come in and they shoot their scenes and they don't necessarily they're not necessarily given any sense of how they fit into the big picture.
More, uh, narcissistic actors who might be truthful in their own behaviour but don't really care about what's going on around them,
don't really mind that so much.
But actors who are interested in the interaction between themselves and the other characters and who are interested in the overall story,
which some actors are, some actors aren't.
They really benefit from rehearsal, uh, and from just having some kind of conversation about what's going on so that there's a mutual understanding.
If you don't give the material to the actors, you're, I don't know what you're doing in the performing arts.
Um, and of course, you want them to be telling the story that you wrote, but it becomes their story at some point.
Some point in every play production, you say, okay, it's your show now, and in some way you do that in a film as well.
When you're doing the scenes, an actor in a play has complete control over the show.
Once the show is up and running, you know, director might come in once in a while, but the actors are running everything.
And that's not the case in film, because once they're done shooting, a lot of other things happen.
But when they're performing, it's their scene and it's their movie.
And if you don't give over to that, I think you're missing out on something. Yeah.
In terms of the point you just made about what happens after the shoot, you talked a lot about the importance of what happens in the editing suite.
Yeah, and I'm fascinated by that because, you know, you've got the raw material.
You. Yeah. And then you really play around with it a lot.
And who plays around with it came through from what you were saying last night to tell us a bit about that.
Well, I mean, it's you and the editor and depending on the relationship,
it's the same as the relationship with any of the other creative people in the film actors, designers and the editor.
But that's a very intense relationship.
You sit with the editor for many, many weeks, there's nobody else there, and you sort of find the film together again.
The three movies I've done have stuck pretty closely to the structure of the screenplays very closely.
Um, a lot of people reshape the entire film in the editing, and that can work beautifully, too.
And then I was saying last night, someone like Hitchcock doesn't change anything.
The whole film is finished even before he shoots it. He knows what every shot's going to be, and the rest is just mechanical for him.
Genius as he was. But it's funny. You can do anything you want in the editing, really.
You can change your performance. You can build up a performance if you have.
Someone has been having trouble with the performance and they have only a few takes that are working,
you can select those takes and suddenly their performance is wonderful.
If you had some reason to it, you could easily make someone look very bad by using all their bad takes.
You know it's no reason to do that. And then you can put music in, which changes everything to have a shot of someone driving along and it's neutral.
Yeah. Say there's no no particular expression on their face.
If you put a melodic classical music piece that gives you one mood, you put rock and roll under there,
it gives you a completely different mood, and you haven't changed anything in the performance or the shot.
So music is immensely, uh, powerful in influencing the tone of a scene.
And we also talked about the importance of funding and, you know,
the outcomes that funders sometimes want, and particularly, you know, what's happening with streaming.
Yeah. No, I mean, these are, you know, really subtle or maybe not so subtle changes.
Um, what's the role of, you know, funders in influencing films these days?
Um, well, I think it's probably about the same as always. You know, it's very much based on a financial model.
If you're in movies, you're making a lot of money.
They're liable to give you more autonomy in your life, and you're able to demand more in your contract.
If you're just starting out and you're working for a big studio, your contract is likely not going to give you complete creative control.
And depending on who you're working with,
you're going to have more or less interference from the producers or more or less help if you want to put it that way.
Most of us think of it as interference, but it isn't always the essential formula as the more money is spent on the film,
the less control your apt to have, because the more anxious the financing entity is about what's going to happen to their money.
So in terms of the streamers, it's a little unclear what the difference is.
I've heard that a lot of the streaming services, it's also television, which is different.
So it's streaming as relates to film is a question of how long it stays in the movie theatre, how it's marketed and how it's distributed.
So that's doesn't really affect the production and the what's happening there.
That's pretty much as always.
And I don't know much about television because I've never done television, but I'm told that once they agree to do a show,
they're much less likely to meddle with it than a film production company is,
or a movie studio is that they tend to give the writers and the executive producers real control over the material.
That may not be true, and that's what I have heard. And again, it totally depends on the the artist and also the financing entity.
So last night you had lots of students and non-students want to be screenwriters.
Hanging off your every word are those who were there, for better or for worse and surely for those who weren't there.
You know, what's your advice? I mean, you shared some quite important advice, I think.
What was it? I think my the first thing I would say to anyone who's interested in writing anything or directing is to start work and not wait for,
not wait for anyone to hire you. And especially nowadays, it's easy to do it, much easier to do that.
You you can shoot a film on an iPhone, and you can edit it and put music to it and put it out on the internet.
And the important part of that being the experience of actually making the film, um,
and you can also raise a little money and get better equipment than an iPhone and get sound equipment,
and you can do it quite well, you know, you can make a pretty good short film and even a longer film.
So I think that's both good for you creatively. And also, it may sound odd, but professionally,
because anybody could be watching your film and run into two years later and say, oh, I like that film.
And then they're like, they're more than you're not just an anonymous person.
And also the people who are your age or in your age group, who are growing up and starting to get jobs in the industry,
are likely to be the people who will help you, as in so many other businesses who you know is very important, especially when you're starting out.
That's just the way it is. It's not exactly a meritocracy, but very few businesses are strictly meritocracy.
Show business certainly is not. But there's room. There's room for a meritocracy.
But it's not the only solution in which we're all swimming.
So to anybody listening, you know, just make those films on your iPhone.
I mean, it's a bit like playing an instrument, isn't it? Or painting.
And as you practice, the more you are engaged in your art and more confident you become, but also the more visible and I suppose,
more noticeable your work, I think so, I mean, you can do a lot of writing before anyone hires you or even sees it in you.
I think it's good to have formed little writers groups and read things to each other.
I strongly recommend not being a little cautious about who you listen to, even when you're starting out.
Young writers tend to want to show their work to everybody and get a lot of feedback.
I don't know that that's necessarily a good idea because, okay, it's an interesting point.
Well, because most people someone might have a very insightful reaction, even let's say a very intelligent,
insightful person might react to your material and see where it's working, where it isn't.
But the next thing is that they have to be able to express that to you in a utilitarian way.
So if you say if you say this scene seems boring to me,
maybe the scene is boring or the scene doesn't work, but the fact is the scene should be there.
But what's missing is that there's a character behaving in some way that that is false,
and you need to think about what they would really be doing, and then the scene will come to life.
Now that's a very hard thing to analyse and a hard thing to express.
And if you don't know how to express that, the writer, young or old, is going to go home and say, oh, this is the scene.
That part was so lousy and they've got their friends voice in their head instead of their own.
That said, it's very hard to do anything without bouncing it off other people,
but I think you have to be a little bit conservative about how many people you listen
to and how many people you show it to until you're sure of what you're doing.
And that's really important advice. Can you've been really generous with your time this week,
shared really important insights from your own experience and approach to making art and and and work.
What happens when you leave Oxford? Well, that's a good question.
I'm not sure I'm going to either London, Dublin or home, and I'll decide that in the next couple of hours.
Um, I'm going to try to go back to work because I have to scripts that I'm anxious to, to get back to.
Uh, and I'm, I'm feeling. More like doing that than anything else.
And when you're in an exciting other country, it's hard to sit down and make yourself work.
Well, we've really enjoyed you being here and contributing to the Worcester community, and we look forward to welcoming you back.
And thank you for listening.
And do drop us, uh, any ideas you've got about, um, who I should interview or things that we should be doing at Worcester, but, uh, have a good day.
Thank you. Thank you.