By Liz Briggs
If you’re a writer, you cannot and must not miss this interview.
John Patrick Shanley is a fascinating interviewee. Born to write, he started at 10 years old, influenced by Edgar Alan Poe (I think I was still reading Enid Blyton at this age!). He suffered extreme poverty, and surprised us by revealing he was a member of the Marine Corps. When John left the Corps, he wrote play after play, all of which were unsuccessful and left him with no money to live on. He finally broke through with Welcome to the Moon when he just “surrendered” and wrote his truth. He was disappointed that this is what the audience loved and wanted, but he had to accept it and build on it.
On the issue of writers writing what they know, John references Alive, a movie based on the 1972 plane crash in The Andes. After the film came out, the real life survivors were impressed by his empathy and depiction of their ordeal. While John was never in a plane in the Andes, he tapped into his own experience with desperation and starvation as a struggling writer and that truth was what they saw and felt on screen.
Moving on to Five Corners, John reveals that a starting point for it was him thinking of images from his youth that were interesting and cinematic (an excellent writing prompt if we ever heard one). He recounts the time he saw a group of guys stealing penguins from a zoo, taking them to a party, then beating them to death at the end. To him, this demonstrated how magic and horror live side by side in life. John called on his past again for his Pulitzer winning play Doubt, A Parable. Coming from an Catholic background, he was taught by the Sisters of Charity in the Bronx for eight years. He learnt of all the scandals a while after, however his experience gave him the idea for the play. As we all know, this work was later adapted to the screen with the contribution of icons Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
When asked for his top tips as a writer and how to keep an audience engaged, John asked us to remember that “the camera is the audience.” When filming Doubt, he had to deal with pages of dialogue among four people all dressed in black – not the most cinematic situation. But he used other elements in the scene, added conflict with sounds from outside, the tea being brought in and other small moments to create tension.
There were so many lessons in this session, it’s impossible to list them all. However I think the last one we all need to hear is about writing and turning it into a habit. John says he just writes. It’s not always films, sometimes he writes poems, little stories. It may not always be good but “you have to get through the bad writing to get to the good.”
Posted by a member of the London Screenwriters’ Festival team.
