ScreenWize

It took Tom McCarthy a while to figure out what he wanted to do in life. After starting a business studies degree, he switched to philosophy. But that wasn’t quite right either - although it inspired him to start writing. Then in his mid-twenties McCarthy discovered acting. After working for a few years in sketch comedy he went to Yale to study the craft formally. He’s clearly never looked back and has – over the last few years - worked with directors like Peter Jackson (The Lovely Bones), George Clooney (Good Night and Good Luck), Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers) and has just landed a role in Roland Emmerich’s epic disaster movie 2012.

Yet acting is clearly not enough to fully challenge McCarthy’s talents. After writing stage plays at Yale, he decided to turn to screenwriting. By the time he was finished his first script, he’d decided to direct the film himself. “There was no planning or real thought about my career path,” he says. “I felt so out of place just becoming an actor. I didn’t know any actors; I didn’t come from an artistic family, and so becoming an actor was new to me. I was always writing – and I thought well maybe I’ll write a screenplay. So I started with The Station Agent and about half way through I thought this is pretty cool, maybe I’ll direct it. I was just stumbling along.”

The Station Agent, released in 2004 was a huge independent hit, and won McCarthy a number of awards for his writing. It’s a story about Fin McBride, a lonely man with dwarfism who inherits a disused railway station in rural New Jersey. He moves there to be alone, but ends up finding unexpected friends. Like McCarthy, Fin stumbles along, an awkward character in a world full of surprises.

Four years on, McCarthy has just released his second feature film – The Visitor, and it shares some similar traits with The Station Agent. There’s a lonely protagonist – the bored academic Walter - at the centre of things. He too finds unexpected friendship when he discovers an illegal immigrant couple living in his little used New York apartment. There’s also a similar overriding sense of humanity and decency – this time as Walter is exposed to the shocking world of detention centres and illegal immigrants – issues that will make clear connections with Australian audiences.

Even though it would be easy to see The Visitor as a political film, that’s not how it came to fruition. McCarthy explains his writing process: “I start with characters and I get a clear idea about them and then I start to bring them together and work out their relationship – and decide how deep it is. And inevitably there’s a theme or two I want to explore and slowly these things start to merge. It takes a long time and I wish I could write quicker, but there’s something gained by taking that time. It’s organic and hopefully I end up with something that we haven’t seen before.”

Walter, the character at the centre of The Visitor is played by Richard Jenkins – a little known name but a well-known face in film and television. (He plays the ghostly Nathaniel Fisher in Six Feet Under). McCarthy explains how he made the connection between Walter and Richard Jenkins: “Walter’s a character that I’ve had in mind for some time: an aging professor who is rudderless, void of passion or action. And the actor, Richard Jenkins, is someone I really wanted to work with. He has such a wonderful everyman quality about him. As a writer I’m interested in characters that fall between the cracks, who don’t pop right out of a crowd. Richard is the perfect fit. Let’s be honest, he’s not a classic leading man in many peoples eyes, but that is exactly what makes his performance so believable and so compelling.”

McCarthy is as interested in developing a visual style as a director as he is finding his own voice in his screenwriting. He rates amongst his influences Ingmar Bergman, and the influential Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. “If I had to point to a guy I admire, it would be Ozu” says McCarthy. “There’s a stillness to his frame and a patience to his story-telling, and he finds life in the cracks which is interesting.” Ozu - who made films from the 1930s to the 1960’s - was famous for breaking many of the traditional Hollywood “rules” of filmmaking, and steadily limited the amount of camera movement in his films as he got older. Another influence for McCarthy on The Visitor was Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation. “It’s a film we looked at a lot for this movie, and if you look at the main characters in the two films, they’re not that different.”

Despite the success of both The Station Agent, and The Visitor McCarthy isn’t about to stop being an actor. “I enjoy it far too much” he says with a huge laugh, “and working on a disaster movie like Roland Emmerich’s 2012, I get to see a director who does things so wildly different from me.” I suspect – given that Emmerich made Independence Day and The Day after Tomorrow – that he means that the camera will be moving around a little bit.

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon