Ken­neth Lon­er­gan: ​‘A good idea is like hav­ing a day­dream that you write down’

An army of cinephiles amassed in 2011 to defend the hon­our of Ken­neth Lon­er­gan, whose incred­i­ble film Mar­garet had been dumped by its dis­trib­u­tor. So it’s almost too sweet that he returned in 2016 with a film that has become a major play­er in the award sea­son flur­ry: Man­ches­ter by the Sea. The film sees a man named Lee Chan­dler, played by Casey Affleck, forced to return to the loca­tion of the title to face some demons from his past.

LWLies: Why is Lee Chan­dler a guy instead of a woman?

Lon­er­gan: It just came in nat­u­ral­ly. I don’t think in terms of, ​‘I want to write a sto­ry about a man or a woman’, I think of once the char­ac­ter presents him­self or her­self, there he or she is. The idea of the sto­ry was brought to me by John Krasin­s­ki and Matt Damon and it was a man. I liked the idea of the sto­ry and it nev­er crossed my mind to make him a woman because by the time he was a char­ac­ter, there he was.

Is it very dif­fer­ent to write for men and women?

No I don’t think it’s any dif­fer­ent at all, any dif­fer­ent from writ­ing one char­ac­ter or his broth­er, nephew, friend, uncle, boss.

So writ­ing for Michelle Williams’ char­ac­ter in this film, there was no dif­fer­ent impulse that came to you?

No. I think the require­ment for me is to have a vivid pic­ture in my mind of a human being and, if I don’t have that, I have to thrash around until I find it. Once I’ve found it it doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence whether it’s a man or a woman or child or an adult. As long as I can see and hear the per­son in my mind then I’m in good shape, I can write down what they say and then I can think of them like a human being like any oth­er. When I don’t have a good idea I have to do a bit more work, but when it’s going well it’s like hav­ing a sort of day­dream that you write down.

Does the cast­ing of actors have any impact on the for­mu­la­tion on the character?

Some­times. I actu­al­ly thought Matt was going to be play­ing this part while I was writ­ing the script so I had him in mind phys­i­cal­ly. But, you know, I’ve been doing this for a while now. I’ve only made three movies, but I’ve writ­ten a num­ber of films and I’ve writ­ten a num­ber of plays so you get very used to the idea that when one actor becomes unavail­able or it doesn’t work out for some rea­son, it’s very easy for me to switch off the image of the actor as mar­ried to the char­ac­ter and put some­one else in their place.

If it’s a play, once the play is per­formed, or once the film is made, espe­cial­ly when it’s a film, which is unlike­ly to be remade, espe­cial­ly by me, then the imag­i­nary fig­ure that I had in my head imme­di­ate­ly becomes very close­ly wed­ded to the actor who he or she por­trays. When I think of the char­ac­ters in You Can Count On Me, I don’t think of imag­i­nary char­ac­ters, I think of Mark Ruf­fa­lo and Lau­ra Lin­ney. And it’s the same for this film, I think that the actors always become the char­ac­ters once they’ve gone through all the effort of the performance.

Do you see any kind of con­nec­tion between Lee Chan­dler and Lisa Cohen from Mar­garet, and do you see your work as hav­ing a kind of con­nec­tiv­i­ty to it?

I do when I look back at it, I don’t when I’m writ­ing it. I try not to think of any­thing beyond believ­ing in the real­i­ty that I’m invent­ing. I don’t actu­al­ly see many sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two char­ac­ters you men­tioned, but I mean I’m clear­ly only one per­son with my inter­ests and the lim­its of my imag­i­na­tion, so there’s sim­i­lar­i­ties between many of the char­ac­ters that I’ve made up. But I try as hard as I can to make peo­ple believe that it’s real. So if they’re real then it means they don’t have any oth­er rela­tion­ship to oth­er fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, whether I made them up or some­one else did.

Do you see Man­ches­ter by the Sea as a ghost story?

The genre of ghost sto­ries has no res­o­nance for me what­so­ev­er, but I can see why you might think that. Lee is not real­ly haunt­ed by ghosts, he’s car­ry­ing around a bur­den from his past.

Why don’t you like ghost stories?

I don’t know, I was just nev­er that inter­est­ed in them. I don’t know why. I like ​‘Ham­let’. I like the The Ghost and Mrs Muir, some­what. I don’t know, I nev­er found them that inter­est­ing, I don’t know why.

Does it extend to all kind of fan­ta­sy genre, or is it just very specif­i­cal­ly the idea of ghosts?

Yeah there are cer­tain gen­res that just don’t grab my inter­est. Ghost sto­ries are one, although there are some excep­tions. Hor­ror movies? I don’t care for them. They scare me too much. I like sus­pense­ful movies and I love fan­ta­sy and sci­ence fic­tion, so it’s not the unre­al­i­ty involved. I’m not that inter­est­ed in mur­der mys­ter­ies, with some excep­tions. I don’t know why, I have noth­ing against them, they’re just not for me.

The film con­tains a key flash­back sequence at about the half-way point. How do you feel about the term flashback?

It doesn’t both­er me. It’s out of fash­ion now, but I don’t care about that. They’re flash­backs, but the truth is they’re specif­i­cal­ly mem­o­ries. They’re not flash­backs to tell the audi­ence what hap­pened as much as they are a look into his mind and what he’s think­ing about. Of course there’s a cer­tain amount of sus­pense, I think, that’s built up in won­der­ing what’s wrong with him. He’s very pecu­liar in the way he behaves at the begin­ning of the film. In fact he’s rather strange all through the film because he’s so rigid­ly try­ing to keep every­one else at bay. And you learn why this is, but you learn it as he’s remem­ber­ing it, and that’s the guide for when we go into the past