“I always start with a sense of place and the place becomes more and more important as the story develops,” he said.“In the case of this movie, I didn’t know all that much about the area in the beginning and I did a lot of research and I called up the library a lot and the Chamber of Commerce and I asked how long it takes to drive from here to there or whether they have funeral parlors in Manchester or not, and whether the police would be from Manchester or whether there would be a bigger city nearer by where the police would come. Some of the answers I got turned out to be wrong which was interesting so we had to adjust. Its fun and it also gives you so much material.”
Through a flashback we view something that one can only describe as unfathomably heartbreaking, Affleck’s character sits in an interview room at the police station, gutted, going through the chain of tragic events that led him there. This may seems minor, but the devil is in the details for Lonergan
“I asked the police department who would interview [Affleck],” he said.” What I had been told on the phone by someone in the department was actually slight misinformation. It turns out you have a detective from the Manchester Police Force, you have the Chief of Police who doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, but he is there in a uniform with the glasses, and he was the real Chief of Police although he is now retired. He’s a really good guy and he’s a really good actor too. There was a fire marshal that would come out of town too. Just knowing that you have the right guys in the room and two of them would know Casey’s character personally — you can feel the material for the scene becoming a bit enriched from those specifics and at that point it is irreversible and you can’t place the movie anywhere else. And that is just one little detail and there is a lot more obviously.”
“In the case of ‘Margaret’ I know the city so well because I grew up here so that it’s a little different,” Lonergan continued.“There are many things that for years I thought would be great to put in a movie about New York City. When I knew that I was going to make a movie about New York City there were ways that I always wanted to shoot it. Particularly, I wanted to shoot it at night so that it looks [how] the city looks at night, to me. Not with huge blue lights lighting up twenty blocks, which we couldn’t have afforded anyway. But we had very specific discussions in that film about how to light the actors so you can see their faces at night and the streets and traffic lights would look pretty much as they do to the naked eye. That’s all really fun to do and it pays off in multiple dividends all over the place, it feeds the plot, it feeds the characters, it feeds the interactions, it feeds the general atmosphere of the film which, of course, is really important.”
The quotidian is made striking in Lonergan’s films and he spoke about the importance of including the day-to-day moments and tiny textural details that happen to all of us. When asked how they serve the narrative, Lonergan responded, “Because they are dramatic in real life. If you are trying to make your point and someone keeps interrupting you and if you lose your car keys or your car and its freezing cold and your nephew is arguing with you or your Uncle is arguing with you it makes it that much more unpleasant and difficult. I find the details of ordinary life to be quite daunting.”
“But I also think when someone dies you have to make funeral arrangements,” he continued. “You don’t just start crying and end up at the funeral. If you are in charge you have to be responsible, you have to do all these things and that is part of daily life and anyone who has ever been to a lawyer or a doctor knows that those are not like breezy experiences that you sail through or are not like two exchanges like you see on TV, very good TV sometimes, but it’s a different way of telling a story. You are sitting there. You’re very emotional. You’re given professional advice and you only understand half of it. You have to use your judgment then you find out whether it was good or bad a year later when you either get sued and lose all your money, or you die, or get better and win the lawsuit. And it’s really not in your hands a lot of the time and some people are very good at this. I am not. I think it if it makes you emotional in real life, it’s worth making characters emotional in the story.”
A unique discussion toward the end of the evening regarding masculinity was broached by Lippy and that it is endemic in the main character, his brother and his son to certain degree.
“We Upper West side liberal softies are a lot tougher than the surface…. [pause]… No we’re really not,” the director assured the group to laughs from the audience. “All I could say about that is that I find those kinds of [salt-of-the-earth] men very impressive and I sort of envy them sometimes and I wish I could fix a car or a boat or fish or do any of those things that they all do skillfully. Those are not easy things, building a house is not an easy thing to do, so I find people who can do things that I can’t to be very interesting and impressive. I wasn’t thinking in terms of masculinity or not. Again it’s a capital-letter subject that I don’t really think in those terms but I think it’s interesting to explore different sides of life, but partly you are always exploring your own boring self and partly you are putting down and writing about what you see out in the world.”
“Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan” continues at the Museum of the Moving Image. “Manchester By The Sea” opens on November 25th.
