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Hello, everybody.

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Welcome to today's podcast, and I'm delighted to welcome Kenny Lonergan, who is a distinguished visitor to Worcester College this week.

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So Kenny, welcome. Thank you Kenny.

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For those of you who don't know, his work is a US film director, screenwriter, playwright and actor.

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Many of you might have seen him acting recently in Ripley with Andrew Scott.

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Kenny grew up and lives in Manhattan.

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He started writing at the age of 18 and attended the Tisch School of Arts on the Dramatic Writing program.

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He's got many credits to his name in terms of writing for the theatre and for films.

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His first successful play was This Is Our Youth with Mark Ruffalo, and then very many other accolades,

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but he's probably best known in the UK for his 2011 film uh, called Margaret.

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But more recently Manchester by the sea, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

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So quite a long list of accolades. Uh, Kenny, we're really delighted to have you, uh, in Worcester this, uh, week.

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Tell us how you're getting on at Worcester. Very well, thank you. Um, I love it here.

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It's beautiful. And everyone's very kind of nice and interesting. And I love being here.

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And what do you make of Oxford and the people that you've met here?

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Because, you know, you've been living here in the, uh, province lodgings.

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You've been in and around college, in eating breakfast, in hotel, eating lunch, in fact, doing lots of eating.

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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.

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It's just full of beautiful and interesting things and a great variety for me.

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It's, uh, everyone's extremely friendly, and I love talking to people from all the different disciplines.

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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,

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and I don't get much chance to hear about them from friendly expert interlocutors.

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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.

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I love talking to the professors here, even though you're not called professors.

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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.

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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.

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Tell us a little bit about how those have gone and you know some of your observations on the week.

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Well, those have been also delightful. The students are very intense and interested and and friendly and welcoming.

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And I've really enjoyed that. You know, in those sessions I do most of the talking.

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So I don't know how that part of it is.

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But, uh, when they start asking questions and wanting to know about all sorts of aspects of writing for the performing arts that,

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you know, they ask questions about acting and producing and writing and getting your screenplay produced somehow.

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And and it's and not only that, but many of the students who came to the workshops are not primarily,

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uh, in the arts, but quite a few who are there purely out of sheer interest, which is always nice.

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Also, it's not so many of the questions were so beautifully phrased.

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The students are so eloquent and so well spoken, and that's very refreshing and, uh, encouraging for thoughts of the future.

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I know you did a Q&A with me last night in the Nunciature auditorium, and there's some really, really interesting observations.

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Very much so. And in those observations, you know, you talked a lot about your interest in specificity.

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Yes. Could you say a bit more about that? Yes.

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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.

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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,

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very good acting teacher and not, I don't know, not mystical and find your truth or anything like that,

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but just practical, practical training and acting. And, uh, there was a big sign in the main classroom which said, be specific.

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There is also a famous saying, I don't remember who, but it says God is in the details.

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And so there's something about the specificity of what you're inventing that carries you along in a way nothing else does.

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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.

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And I think that covers almost everything you can think of, uh, in the arts that, that really has it has real resonance.

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Um, even, for instance, the Impressionists, they were less interested in the details of the physical objects they were painting,

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but they were focussed entirely on the details of the light, you know.

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Um, which looking at painting before the Impressionist, they many beautiful paintings and many painters who did all sorts of things with light.

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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.

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And so what's interesting when you talk about detail and specificity is that it can be it.

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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.

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Uh, and as a. Creative person or as a writer director.

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It just yields wonderful results when you're an actor to have to be.

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It's an acting school dictum, but actors have to be very specific.

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If you're walking into a room, you're walking into a room from somewhere, from some situation in,

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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.

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Because in real life, there's no there's not really any such thing as generality.

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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.

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And so instead of being upset, your character is putting on an act, or the actor is.

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At the same time, there's a lot of, uh, inspiration, whatever that means.

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Or you have an intuition about what something feels like or what something is like,

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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,

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even if you don't know where it's coming from, is likely coming from somewhere concrete and specific.

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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.

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Actually, in a bit of detail last night, were you talking about Manchester?

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Yes, so I did, um, I did. I'm from New York City.

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I knew the area North Shore of Boston, very slightly.

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I'd been there a few times.

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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.

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There's a teenage character who plays hockey.

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As it happens, I learned that the hockey rink is not in Manchester, but it's in the neighbouring town, Rockport.

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And so there's a there's an important part of the film where the main character,

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played by Casey Affleck, has to get to the kid to give him the news that his father's passed away.

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And just those little details help feed scenes and make me think of other scenes.

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Um, because I hadn't known that, I thought he could just drive up and find the kid and give him the news,

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but in fact, he has to make a call to the principal of the high school his to find out where he is.

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The principal asks him how, uh, his brother is has just died, so he doesn't want to discuss that.

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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.

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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.

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You say, what happened? Where are they? What should I do? You ask a lot of questions.

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My favourite example is also hospital one on television and films.

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Very often you hear there'll be a scene where someone says, I'm afraid, I'm afraid it's cancer.

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She's got six months to live. And then the character bursts into tears quite naturally, and that's the end of the scene.

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But in real life, that's not how it goes. They give you tremendous amount of detail.

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The doctors and you ask a lot of questions. You say, well, what they got?

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What do you mean? Is there any chance where's the best place to go, you ask?

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Lots and lots of questions. And that's because you you need to know the answers.

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You don't just jump to the general feeling of tragedy.

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, but at the same time, keeping the momentum of the, uh, action.

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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.

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Uh, but so you have to economise and you have to do short cuts.

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But that creates an interesting challenge because, say, jump a week ahead,

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unless I have an intuition about it and it doesn't matter that much, it's much better to know what happened.

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At least I know what happens in the week that wasn't in the story.

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Um, that can be very important. Or it can be an uneventful week and not so.

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And that came up in one of the questions, didn't it, yesterday about how you play with time.

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Well that's different I had well that's not a no. It's related. So the film has a lot of flashbacks.

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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.

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And that was I didn't get to answer that question so well yesterday, but the flashbacks, the editor,

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Jennifer Lamb, and I did have no dissolves and no, no, no, no visual clues that they are flashbacks.

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I mean, we cut them in as if they were part of the action, and I wasn't sure that was going to work.

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And she very much encouraged it because she said he's she said it's kind of it's two stories at once.

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He's living his present life, but he's also the past.

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Life is so much on his mind and in his heart that it's always there.

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So it makes sense to her and me that that the flashbacks would be sort of indiscriminate,

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especially as he gets closer and closer to the town where all these terrible things happened.

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Um, and so I've been told that the, the first 1 or 2 flashbacks are a bit confusing to the audience.

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We both figured the audience would catch up pretty quickly. And they do again talking about specificity.

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If that if the tragedy happened five years ago and we're here and the film starts now,

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let's say I need to at least be able to tell the actors what happened in between.

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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.

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Uh, need to fill in the gaps in order to feel like they have a foundation from which to perform.

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Um, yeah. Just coming back to act as I was describing your approach is quite generous in the sense that,

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you know, within the, uh, guardrails you actually give actors,

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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.

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And I think I'm not alone in finding that quite interesting.

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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,

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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.

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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,

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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.

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More, uh, narcissistic actors who might be truthful in their own behaviour but don't really care about what's going on around them,

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don't really mind that so much.

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But actors who are interested in the interaction between themselves and the other characters and who are interested in the overall story,

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which some actors are, some actors aren't.

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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.

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If you don't give the material to the actors, you're, I don't know what you're doing in the performing arts.

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Um, and of course, you want them to be telling the story that you wrote, but it becomes their story at some point.

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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.

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When you're doing the scenes, an actor in a play has complete control over the show.

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Once the show is up and running, you know, director might come in once in a while, but the actors are running everything.

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And that's not the case in film, because once they're done shooting, a lot of other things happen.

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But when they're performing, it's their scene and it's their movie.

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And if you don't give over to that, I think you're missing out on something. Yeah.

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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.

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Yeah, and I'm fascinated by that because, you know, you've got the raw material.

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You. Yeah. And then you really play around with it a lot.

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And who plays around with it came through from what you were saying last night to tell us a bit about that.

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Well, I mean, it's you and the editor and depending on the relationship,

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it's the same as the relationship with any of the other creative people in the film actors, designers and the editor.

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But that's a very intense relationship.

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You sit with the editor for many, many weeks, there's nobody else there, and you sort of find the film together again.

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The three movies I've done have stuck pretty closely to the structure of the screenplays very closely.

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Um, a lot of people reshape the entire film in the editing, and that can work beautifully, too.

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And then I was saying last night, someone like Hitchcock doesn't change anything.

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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.

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Genius as he was. But it's funny. You can do anything you want in the editing, really.

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You can change your performance. You can build up a performance if you have.

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Someone has been having trouble with the performance and they have only a few takes that are working,

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you can select those takes and suddenly their performance is wonderful.

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If you had some reason to it, you could easily make someone look very bad by using all their bad takes.

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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.

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Yeah. Say there's no no particular expression on their face.

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If you put a melodic classical music piece that gives you one mood, you put rock and roll under there,

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it gives you a completely different mood, and you haven't changed anything in the performance or the shot.

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So music is immensely, uh, powerful in influencing the tone of a scene.

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And we also talked about the importance of funding and, you know,

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the outcomes that funders sometimes want, and particularly, you know, what's happening with streaming.

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Yeah. No, I mean, these are, you know, really subtle or maybe not so subtle changes.

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Um, what's the role of, you know, funders in influencing films these days?

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Um, well, I think it's probably about the same as always. You know, it's very much based on a financial model.

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If you're in movies, you're making a lot of money.

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They're liable to give you more autonomy in your life, and you're able to demand more in your contract.

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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.

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And depending on who you're working with,

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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.

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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,

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the less control your apt to have, because the more anxious the financing entity is about what's going to happen to their money.

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So in terms of the streamers, it's a little unclear what the difference is.

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I've heard that a lot of the streaming services, it's also television, which is different.

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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.

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So that's doesn't really affect the production and the what's happening there.

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That's pretty much as always.

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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,

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they're much less likely to meddle with it than a film production company is,

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or a movie studio is that they tend to give the writers and the executive producers real control over the material.

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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.

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So last night you had lots of students and non-students want to be screenwriters.

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Hanging off your every word are those who were there, for better or for worse and surely for those who weren't there.

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You know, what's your advice? I mean, you shared some quite important advice, I think.

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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,

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not wait for anyone to hire you. And especially nowadays, it's easy to do it, much easier to do that.

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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.

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And the important part of that being the experience of actually making the film, um,

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and you can also raise a little money and get better equipment than an iPhone and get sound equipment,

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and you can do it quite well, you know, you can make a pretty good short film and even a longer film.

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So I think that's both good for you creatively. And also, it may sound odd, but professionally,

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because anybody could be watching your film and run into two years later and say, oh, I like that film.

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And then they're like, they're more than you're not just an anonymous person.

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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,

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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.

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That's just the way it is. It's not exactly a meritocracy, but very few businesses are strictly meritocracy.

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Show business certainly is not. But there's room. There's room for a meritocracy.

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But it's not the only solution in which we're all swimming.

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So to anybody listening, you know, just make those films on your iPhone.

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I mean, it's a bit like playing an instrument, isn't it? Or painting.

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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,

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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.

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I think it's good to have formed little writers groups and read things to each other.

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I strongly recommend not being a little cautious about who you listen to, even when you're starting out.

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Young writers tend to want to show their work to everybody and get a lot of feedback.

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I don't know that that's necessarily a good idea because, okay, it's an interesting point.

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Well, because most people someone might have a very insightful reaction, even let's say a very intelligent,

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insightful person might react to your material and see where it's working, where it isn't.

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But the next thing is that they have to be able to express that to you in a utilitarian way.

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So if you say if you say this scene seems boring to me,

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maybe the scene is boring or the scene doesn't work, but the fact is the scene should be there.

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But what's missing is that there's a character behaving in some way that that is false,

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and you need to think about what they would really be doing, and then the scene will come to life.

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Now that's a very hard thing to analyse and a hard thing to express.

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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.

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That part was so lousy and they've got their friends voice in their head instead of their own.

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That said, it's very hard to do anything without bouncing it off other people,

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but I think you have to be a little bit conservative about how many people you listen

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to and how many people you show it to until you're sure of what you're doing.

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And that's really important advice. Can you've been really generous with your time this week,

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shared really important insights from your own experience and approach to making art and and and work.

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What happens when you leave Oxford? Well, that's a good question.

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I'm not sure I'm going to either London, Dublin or home, and I'll decide that in the next couple of hours.

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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.

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Uh, and I'm, I'm feeling. More like doing that than anything else.

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And when you're in an exciting other country, it's hard to sit down and make yourself work.

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Well, we've really enjoyed you being here and contributing to the Worcester community, and we look forward to welcoming you back.

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And thank you for listening.

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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.

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Thank you. Thank you.