John Patrick Shanley is from The Bronx. His plays include Prodigal Son, Outside Mullingar (Tony nomination), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, Italian-American Reconciliation, Welcome to the Moon, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance, and Beggars in the House of Plenty. His theatrical work is performed extensively across the United States and around the world. For his play, Doubt, he received both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the arena of screenwriting, he has ten films to his credit, most recently Wild Mountain Thyme, with Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, and Christopher Walken. His film of Doubt, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, which he also directed, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Live From Baghdad for HBO (Emmy nomination). For his script of Moonstruck he received both the Writers Guild of America Award and an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2009, The Writers Guild of America awarded Mr. Shanley the Lifetime Achievement In Writing.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

A lot of your plays and screenplays are set in place in The Bronx. How does The Bronx inspire you?

JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY

You grow up wherever you grow up. And there are things there, and there are other things that are not there, and the things that are not there, you can imagine. And I did a lot of imagining in the Bronx because there were a lot of things that I gravitated toward that just weren't there: the fantastic, The Thief of Baghdad, magic, beautiful clothes, beautiful places, the exoticism of that. And then at another later point, I thought, I am missing my whole life from my work. I am writing about all these things that are not my life. Because I think everything that I actually saw and heard and felt is so ordinary that it's not worth repeating. And I think most of us feel that way, and we're dead wrong. That in fact, those things are gold. Those are the things that we actually have to write about. And you can write about anything when you start with those things and embrace them. Embrace your own life.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You recently gave a speech sharing your memories in honor of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

SHANLEY

I knew Philip Seymour Hoffman for several years. We went on vacation together. He produced a play of mine. Before we did Doubt, we worked in the same theater company together, and he was, you know, very committed to excellence. And so he could become impatient with anybody who was not committed to excellence, and that could make him a volatile person to deal with. Phil cared. He cared a great deal. And he worked really hard.

They're very committed. Like with Viola Davis. Viola had done a decent amount of big work before Doubt, but she was not recognized yet. And she was careful. You know, she certainly wasn't throwing weight around. She was, I'm the new kid on the block, and I'm just here to work and be serious and do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And pretty much that's what I was doing too, you know, because I've got Meryl Streep, I've got Philip Hoffman, who I was friends with, but Phil's not an easy guy to be friends with or was not easy to be friends with. He's a very prickly person prone to getting pissed off about things that you might not expect. And then Amy Adams was somebody who, you know, tried to get along with everybody and Phil would say like, "You just want everybody to like you." So, you know, you're in the middle of that group, and you just, you don't want to put yourself in a position where you're trying to prove something. You have to let them...they're very, very smart people, and they're going to figure out whatever it is that you're doing. They're going to figure out whether you are in any way trying to handle that. And that's not going to go well. And so I didn't do that.

Meryl is very, very smart and very focused and, in a sense, very private. Her work, you know, she isn't going to talk a great deal about her secrets, the secrets of her character. She's going to carry them with her.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

That's interesting what you’ve shared about the editing process and the writing you do when you’re young. It’s like you're saying that the editing process at that age is, in a way, by virtue of your limited experience, like there's maybe only one option for you. There’s only way you know how to do it. And then as you build up your repertoire, it's like, Wow, there's so many ways this could go.

It's really important to be grateful for what we have and what we're given, but also for what we don't have as artists, this sense of longing. And then you have to create those worlds in your imagination. I was watching a documentary made from footage from the sixties in post-war Italy. And the poverty. There were kids playing in the alleys with a chair and pretending it was a donkey. And I remember not having a lot of toys as a child, but the worlds you can imagine. For those kids, what they're imagining. For them, it's not a chair, it's a means of transport to other worlds.

SHANLEY

If they believe it. I believe it. You can't get trapped in your head when you're a playwright, or probably any kind of real artist. You have to find your center, which involves your spirit and your emotions, and some intellect.

I think that that is a problem that we're enduring, experiencing now in film and theater. It's because of the politicization of media that you see like if you're going to cast a part of a guy with one leg, you have to hire a guy with one leg. And that's exactly what theater isn't. Theater is you take a pot from your kitchen and put it on your head and say, "I'm the King of England!" And if you believe it, I'll believe it. And that frees all the one-legged people to be Fred Astaire, to do whatever they want. If they believe it, I'll believe it. So that kind of literalism is, I think, inhibiting to everyone.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Your play and your screenplay Doubt focuses on the church. In your interviews, you mentioned the conversations that you want to evoke in Doubt and how important that is to you.

SHANLEY

And so there's always that element of doubt. It's like, I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to tell you everything I know, but I don't know everything. And that little area creates a vibration that can run very deep because you can have that about your entire spiritual experience of life where you go on, I think this, I feel this, or I believe this, but I don't, I don't ultimately really know. And if you are very invested, the way Sister Aloysius (the older nun) is in her faith and her worldview and how she operates. For her to admit that she has doubt is an earthquake under the whole culture. And it's something that I think the whole culture has experienced.  

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And you’ve written Outside Mullingar, and Ireland has its own musical language. But you're very rooted in New York in your writing and in your voice. How do you feel that New York has influenced your imagination?

SHANLEY

I'm New York to the soles of my feet, and more specifically, The Bronx. I was formed in The Bronx. I lived there till I was 19. Then I went into the Marine Corps, and I came up against really something that I feel has really been lost when they stopped drafting people. I came up against everybody in the country, mostly poor people of every persuasion from Virginia to DC to wherever. And we lived together in an open barracks, like 90 of us in double-decker bunks for a year. And that is gold. It's irreplaceable. Not simply as an artist, but as a citizen of a given country, you really come to realize we're all in this together. And you see all of the prejudices play out in a kind of healthily violent way. People just punch each other in the face. So, this is back then. Now, apparently, it's much more civilized. I'm not sure I'm in favor of that, but back then, people said Marines said the most awful things to each other imaginable, of a racist nature, and of every other kind of nature. And you know, the shape of your head, anything.

And then fists were thrown and somehow the world didn't come to an end. Then everybody calmed down, and they went back to their bunks and read their comic books or whatever they were going to do, and went to bed. And we got up the next day, and we worked together. That's a big lesson in how to get along, how to live, and how to live with people you don't necessarily agree with.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As you think about the future, what for you is the importance of the arts? And what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?

SHANLEY

It's sort of like Shangri-La in that book Lost Horizon that described this place where every once in a while the world is affected by an enormous calamity. And when those times happen, they invented a place in Tibet called Shangri-La where they kept all world culture safe so that when the calamity was over, they could come out again. And I think that actually is always true. That there are enough people who deeply care about world culture that they go to enormous lengths to preserve it during times when it is undervalued by the world at large. 

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Skylar D’Andrea  with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Skylar D’Andrea and Sam Myers.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).