“Our first job is to make an entertaining film, but secondly, when we can have an impact like this, it’s pretty gratifying,” said Spotlight director Tom McCarthy during a recent interview with The Santa Barbara Independent. Nominated for five Academy Awards, McCarthy has achieved both objectives with this enthralling film, which follows a team of Boston Globe reporters that uncovers a sex-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church in 2002. Amiable and thoughtful, McCarthy answered a few questions ahead of his appearance at the SBIFF, where he will receive an award for Outstanding Directors of the Year.
How hard was it to get Spotlight made? We kept joking that we weren’t greenlit until we wrapped. And there was a lot of truth in that. I think in this particular marketplace, it’s always difficult to get something like Spotlight made … the subject matter, having an ensemble [cast]. Even when we had all the pieces in place, we were never certain. There were a lot of times we thought we were dead. Especially down at the stretch. We were running out of time, and the window on shooting and actors was tough. Fortunately, we pulled it off.
The team spent several years investigating the story, and you had to get all that information in your heads relatively quickly. That must have been a challenge. Well, keep in mind that everything they had reported on we had access to, but we didn’t have access to the investigation. So we could read what they reported pretty easily, though that took time, but understanding how they got there, that’s what we had to ask the questions about, and the only way we could do that was by going back again and again and again.