By Philip Berk
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: playwright, screenwriter and director John Patrick Shanley, who helmed Joe Versus The Volcano, Doubt and Wild Mountain Thyme.
Yes, yes, he won a Best Screenplay Oscar for the much-loved Moonstruck, and he boasts a raft of acclaimed plays (Danny And The Deep Blue Sea, Doubt: A Parable, Outside Mullingar and many more), but yes, John Patrick Shanley is still an Unsung Auteur. Like many others who have featured in the Unsung Auteurs column (Paul Newman, Jack Cardiff, James B. Harris and several others), Shanley is far better known for something other than directing, with his work as a playwright and screenwriter (Alive, Congo, Five Corners) far outshining his efforts behind the camera. Sure, Shanley only has three films to his credit as a director, but they are all rich and fascinating films in their own way.
Shanley’s made his directorial debut with Joe Vs. The Volcano in 1990. Though much maligned, the film is certainly brave and ambitious, and tells the tale of a man (Tom Hanks) on a bizarre suicide quest who finds himself interrupted by true love. “I had a tough time at Warner Bros. making that picture,” Shanley told FilmInk in 2008 of the comedy, which also starred Meg Ryan. “They went to war with me while I was making the film. I had shown them all the storyboards in pre-production. I shot exactly what I said I was going to shoot. Then while we were shooting, they said, ‘What’s this?’ They became very irate and concerned and intrusive. I had this constant push-and-pull with them. When the whole thing was over, I went home to New York, and my hometown newspaper, The New York Times, hated the film. I’m like, ‘Jeez, I don’t want to do this again very soon.’ It took a while to recover. I felt ungrounded. I’m first and foremost a writer, and I wanted to write something true. I felt that in being uprooted from my home and having this enormous experience making this film, I lost my way. I really had to go home and find myself again. It took quite a while. During that time, I adopted children, and I also got advanced glaucoma, which required five rounds of surgery. I went blind for a while. The confluence of those factors all added up and convinced me that I shouldn’t direct another film for a long time.”
Joe Vs. The Volcano was a box office failure, and obviously something of a creative Waterloo for Shanley, but it’s also curiously dark and strange, and speaks of a filmmaker with a true sense of vision. Shanley did indeed take a long time to make another movie, but he finally got there in 2008 with Doubt, and adaptation of his play. “Not long after I did Joe Vs. The Volcano, [producer] Scott Rudin came to me and said, ‘I want to do a film with you’ and I said no,” Shanley explained. “Then after all these years, he came to me again and said, ‘You know, we should do this film’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I think we should’.”
That film was Doubt, Shanley’s next directorial effort after more plays and screenplays. On the strength of this austere, haunting work, you’d expect the writer/director to be forceful and intense, but John Patrick Shanley is anything but. His gentle charm suggests someone who might have written a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rodgers musical of the thirties rather than a highly acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning play and film such as this. A powerful drama about a nun (Meryl Streep) who accuses a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of sexual abuse – and the issues of power and deceit that spring from that – the film is tough, keenly intelligent, and thematically rich. The performances (Amy Adams also stars), unsurprisingly, are staggering, and the film received several Oscar nominations.
The Meryl Streep role was played to acclaim by renowned stage actress Cherry Jones in the theatre, but Shanley felt a need to create his own version of the play, which had been directed for the stage by Doug Hughes. “He did a great job, and I had a great respect for Doug, but I felt a little weird,” Shanley explained to FilmInk. “I felt strange taking his work and calling it my own, because he’d worked with these actors and helped them develop very specific interpretations of their characters. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. I didn’t want to go out and recapture past glories. I wanted a fresh take on this. I knew that I had to put my stamp on it. I had to be able to say, ‘This is mine, and this is what I think and what I’m expressing. This is my aesthetic’. That’s where I was coming from.”
Despite having a ripped-from-the-headlines plot, Doubt is not drawn from any one particular case. “They’re based on many people,” Shanley told FilmInk of the film’s characters, who indulge in self-motivated plays for power throughout the film. “When I was a kid, I lived in a street corner society. I always gravitated to the person on the fringe. There would be all these people who were powerful in a group, and then there would be some boy or girl on the edge of that street corner society who was not accepted. When you have power, you become boring and stupid. When you see the group from the outside, you’re more canny.”
The obvious question: did John Patrick Shanley ever find himself in doubt while making the film? “Every day,” he joked. “Each day, you’re striving for excellence. You watch people in the cast doing a take, and you ask yourself, ‘Did I get this right? Did I let it slip away?’ I wrote the script, and I thought, ‘Can people talk this much in a feature film and will anybody care?’ Then I thought, ‘Well, they talked a lot in Moonstruck, and that worked out’. I’m very interested in trying to write and direct a movie that allows people to have a rich and interesting experience where they can talk in an intelligent way. My great fear is to be bored at dinner. I want to be able to sit down with people and have an interesting conversation. I don’t have to agree with them. They don’t have to agree with me.”
Though Doubt was warmly received and performed solidly at the box office, Shanley had another long sabbatical from behind the camera, not directing again until 2020 with Wild Mountain Thyme, a lyrical romance about two lovers (Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan) who get caught up in a complex land dispute between their respective families. Making the most of its gorgeous Irish locations and boasting the same kind of rapid-fire dialogue and character dynamics that made Moonstruck such a delight, Wild Mountain Thyme didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it’s an utter delight from beginning to end, and it certainly makes one hope that John Patrick Shanley would tear himself away from his beloved stage a little more often…
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
