Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan on making the fest's must-see hit: "I'm always interested in stories about people who love each other"
If you’ve seen writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s work before — the handful of films and half-dozen one-acts and plays he’s penned to date — you understand why he’s racked up numerous theater awards, Oscar nods and a Pulitzer nomination. And if you’re lucky enough to meet Lonergan, you’ll understand where that singular voice comes from. Sitting in a crowded Sundance Film Festival lodge off of Main Street, the shaggy, bespectacled 53-year-old director of You Can Count on Me and Margaret acts like a Kenneth Lonergan character.acts like a Kenneth Lonergan character. Within seconds of meeting an interviewer, he’ll jokingly call him an asshole and then affectionately pat him on the arm. He stumbles through answers only to suddenly, passionately verve into eloquence and righteousness. He comes off as simultaneously happy, Eeyorish-ly sad, and constantly radiating a deep sense of empathy. Most of all, he seems genuinely surprised to hear that he’s just made a masterpiece.
Immediately establishing itself as the must-see film at this year’s festival, Manchester by the Sea follows a Boston-based handyman named Lee (Casey Affleck) who goes about his daily chores with a sense of quiet desperation. A phone call summons him back to the seaside town of his youth that gives the movie its name, with unexpected news: His brother (Friday Night Lights‘ Kyle Chandler) has passed away. When he gets there, he discovers that his sibling’s will names him as the guardian of his surly teen nephew (Lucas Hedges, in a starmaking role). A series of flashbacks reveal that Lee and the boy have long had a tight bond — and that this reluctant surrogate parent has an old-wounds history that makes returning to the old neighborhood impossible to contemplate.
“I don’t like the fact that, nowadays, it feels like it’s not permissible to leave something unresolved,” Lonergan says. “I mean, what the fuck is closure? Some people never get that. Some people live with their trauma for years. I’m not interested in rubbing people’s faces in suffering, or in saying, ‘These are the tough facts of life that I know and you don’t!’ But I don’t like this lie that everybody gets over things that easily. Some people can’t get over something major that’s happened to them at all; why can’t they have a movie too? Why can’t there be one film about somebody who doesn’t magically bounce back?”
The genesis for Manchester originally started with actor John Krasinski (The Office) and Beantown native Matt Damon, who’d starred in a production of a Lonergan play over a decade ago and had appeared in the director’s sophomore feature, Margaret (2011). The duo had been kicking around an idea about an emotionally crippled jack-of-all-trades for a while when they approached Lonergan to help them flesh it out. “They came to me with the idea,” the filmmaker confirms. “I think Matt was going to direct and John was going to star in it; they wanted me to write the script. They eventually had to go off and do other things, but I really liked the initial idea. So I kept working on it for three years. The original draft was just written straight through; it wasn’t until I had the notion of presenting the relationships through flashbacks that it began to open up.”
Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is certainly not the cheeriest start to the new year but it will make you want to hug people afterwards. A quiet, delicate portrayal of grief and survival, the story follows Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a testy, troubled handyman who returns to his self-exiled Massachusetts home town after his brother (Kyle Chandler) dies. In his will, his brother has asked for Lee to become guardian of his teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges), a relationship that catches them both off guard.
But there’s more grief to come and, in time, we learn why Lee has become such an obstructive loner. Returning to his past means confronting a horrific family tragedy and its unravelling – too spoilery to detail here – packs the biggest emotional punch. Director and screenplay writer Lonergan, however, isn’t concerned that he’s just made the most harrowing film you’re likely to see all year. “You can’t get through life without something happening to you that you can’t stand, and there’s nothing wrong with putting that in a story,” he says, confidently.
His confidence is justified. Manchester by the Sea is up for five Golden Globes this week – all the big ones, including best director and best screenplay, as well as topping the 2017 Oscar predictions. Lonergan is no stranger to success. In his 20s he made a brief living writing commercials, then wrote a celebrated 1996 play, This Is Our Youth, about directionless young adults, and penned a couple of screenplays (Analyze This and The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle). His directorial debut, meanwhile, 2000’s You Can Count On Me, was a small-town drama with big feelings, and got two Oscar nominations, including one for Lonergan’s screenplay.
His knack for wry observation and unshowy naturalism won endless plaudits but then, in 2005, it got ugly. His next film, Margaret, was a gloriously talky endeavour about a teenager navigating a complex adult world of messy morals, determined to find some judicial balance after she indirectly causes a bus driver to kill a pedestrian. A producer demanded it come in at under 150 minutes; Lonergan wanted it longer. Legal wranglings and re-edits saw it delayed for years with Lonergan’s preferred cut finally arriving on DVD in 2012.
“I lost all my money and got into serious debt,” he says now. “I had always bet on myself and it had always turned out all right in the end, and this for a long time didn’t look like it was gonna turn out well at all. There was definitely a victory to be gathered from the ashes, but there were a lot of ashes first.”
In 2011, however, came a lifeline. Actor and film-maker John Krasinski (best known as Jim in the The Office’s US version) and his friend Matt Damon came up with the germ of the idea for Manchester by the Sea and went to Lonergan to help write the script. Damon intended to direct and star but scheduling conflicts got in the way; eventually Damon told Lonergan he should direct it himself. The actor has since said that one of the reasons he did so was because he and others were worried about Lonergan, and wanted to get him writing and earning money again.
“Yeah, well,” says Lonergan, not entirely on board with that perspective. “I know he was worried about me, and I was glad, I had had a hard time. But I also wrote a play in 2009 [The Starry Messenger] and I wrote and directed a play in 2011/12 [Medieval Play]. I did need money because I was pretty badly in debt at the time. This was not a hugely high-paying job,” he says of Manchester by the Sea, “but I really liked the idea for the story and I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”
With Damon unable to star in the film, Lonergan cast Affleck, whose performance as Lee is a searing portrait of a man who’s willingly closed himself off. His relationship with Patrick is a tender, twisting one, a unique bond that pushes against Lee’s determination to keep the world at bay. Yet Lonergan keeps it grounded: there’s no Hollywood ending here, no easy tidying up of life’s mess. His stories offer not easy resolutions but they do offer catharsis. Michelle Williams, who plays Lee’s ex-wife Randi, has said that Lonergan himself was crying on set after some of the heavier scenes. At screenings of the film, people have told him it has given them relief.
“They’ll say, ‘This is very similar to what happened to my father,’ or, ‘We went through this,’” says Lonergan. “I approached the subject with a certain amount of trepidation because it is so much more serious than anything I’ve had to live through, and I wanted to be respectful of the material; even though it’s imaginary, it’s not imaginary to some people. So I’ve been very gratified when people who have endured something like this have felt good about the film.”
Why does he think it’s reached out to them? “Without being immodest, what I think works for people is it is at least an attempt at being truthful. It doesn’t pretend that you can get over something like this [tragedy]. It’s not riddled with lies, like so much of the sentimental crap that you see in films and television. There’s a vast experience of people that really suffer and don’t know what to do with it. There’s something refreshing and sustaining about [seeing that reflected in film] because you don’t feel like you’re alone.”
For all its misery, though, Manchester by the Sea isn’t merely a gloom-watch. It’s raw and real and at points almost unbearable; some of the moments between Affleck and Michelle Williams are likely to give you a minor breakdown. But the film is also uplifting. As we wrap up our interview, Lonergan says he wants to emphasise that the film’s not “just a dirge, because nobody needs to watch that. Lee’s having a hard time getting through his life but he’s still very funny.” Really, the film is about the endurance of the human spirit, the pleasure of other people’s company and, crucially, moving forward.
“The idea, I hope, is we’re all in this together,” says Lonergan of Lee and Patrick’s bond and how they navigate their way through loss. “It’s one thing to stay in a hole by yourself, but once someone else gets in the hole with you, you have to deal with them and it’s a good thing.”
He sighs, mocking himself from getting heavy again, and laughs: “Well, I’m glad we solved all that!”
Manchester By The Sea is released in the UK on 13 January