Thomas McCarthy has popped up in a host of films, but it's as a director and screenwriter that he's really making his name, writes DONALD CLARKE
WHILE FLASHIER operators hog the limelight, Thomas McCarthy has steadily emerged as a formidable director. You will know him from The Station Agent, a gorgeous, knotty little 2003 comedy, and from The Visitor, a drama of loneliness that earned Richard Jenkins an Oscar nomination.
Win Win, his latest picture, might just be his best yet. The reliable Paul Giamatti plays a lawyer in McCarthy’s home state of New Jersey, who is coping badly with the recession. Debts are accumulating, but clients are increasingly hard to find. His life changes when he encounters a mildly delinquent teenager – grandson of a client – who is a fine wrestler. Giamatti’s character, who helps to coach the local school’s wrestling team, takes him in and a solid friendship develops.
American film-makers have not found the recession a particularly fecund subject. What convinced McCarthy he could make a watchable, good-hearted drama from such downbeat material?
“Well, look, it’s definitely set in these times and a bit of that is always going on,” he says. “We will be dealing with the effects of the collapse in five and 10 years’ time. I wondered how people will justify the actions they took now.”
The hero, a good man, makes a morally dubious move in the opening act. But the film seems very forgiving of him.
“That’s the part of New Jersey where I grew up,” he says. “In that part of the world a lot of your neighbours work on Wall Street. There’s been a lot of finger pointing. But these people are still your neighbours. There comes a point when you have to stop pointing fingers and take personal responsibility.”
McCarthy, who spends as much time acting as directing, almost ended up in business. He was studying business at Boston College when one of his lecturers realised that the lad was in the wrong line. After some deliberation, McCarthy switched to philosophy. A trim man with conservative spectacles and an old-school haircut, McCarthy looks like an academic. Where did it all go wrong?
“I don’t know what compelled me,” he says. “I had nothing to do with the arts. I auditioned for a comedy improv act. I was then doing sketch comedy and I don’t really distinguish that from acting. After a while, I realised that’s what I wanted to do and I auditioned for Yale where I first met Paul Giamatti.”
Yale School of Drama is, perhaps, the most prestigious acting college in the US. Graduates include actresses Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and director Elia Kazan.
McCarthy quickly built a career as a solid supporting player. He has quietly worked his way through significant – if unshowy – roles in such films as Syriana, Meet the Parents, The Lovely Bonesand Fair Game. So, he's not one of those performers who moved into film-making because he couldn't find acting work.
One wonders where he finds the time. In between shooting The Visitorand Win Win,he took a role in Roland Emmerich's disaster movie 2012.It's hard to think of a film more different from those he has directed.
“I know nothing about that type of film-making,” he says. “Working with Roland and his people, you are really beside experts. I watch everyone. If I am not acting, I am in my trailer writing. It’s great fun to watch and learn . . . If it wasn’t fun, I wouldn’t do it.”
Some observers might assume he acts to finance his directorial career. “No. Not at all,” he says. “I act because I love it. When it can pay me well that’s all the better. I have had to turn down really interesting projects because I couldn’t find the time. Being able to schedule things is the problem. I still love acting because this is how I started. But also I get to work with so many experts and I can then bring that into my own work.”
McCarthy also seems to have a capacity for charming the money men. The Station Agent, starring Peter Dinklage as an angry man relocating to rural New Jersey, could not be confused with 2012,but it didn't look like a cheap movie either. McCarthy started out shooting amateur actors on a second-hand camera.
"There is a trick to it," he says. "It takes dogged perseverance. That's the trick. We had The Station Agentkicking round for two years before we secured private finance. But since then, the films have come together fairly easily. If you have a success behind you that really helps."
Having secured an Oscar nomination, The Visitorgained McCarthy new levels of respectability. Win Winthus came together with a decent degree of speed.
The film makes gestures towards the recession, but it can also be seen as a sports movie. The version of wrestling that is popular in American schools has never really taken off here, however.
“Yes, I’m really intrigued to see how it goes down there,” he says. “I am aware that there is no real tradition of wrestling in Europe or in Ireland. But I was a really keen wrestler at school and I really wanted to make something about the sport. In fact that, rather than the recession, was really the seed of the project.”
McCarthy got lucky in casting his juvenile lead. Alex Shaffer, who plays Giamatti’s young friend, is a talented wrestler.
Having grown up with the sport, McCarthy was adamant that the holds would look authentic and the grappling would seem believably sweaty.
“I had him come in and watched him wrestle,” he says. “Still we had to work hard with him on the acting – tag-teaming, really – so he could hold his own against the likes of Paul. That was pretty hard work.”
As well as acting and his booming life as an auteur, McCarthy is also a screenwriter. He was one of the scribes on Pixar's recent, magnificent Up. One foundation of that animation house's greatness is its dedication to good writing. Nothing moves forward until the script is polished to the point where John Lasseter can see his face in it.
“It’s the same job writing for animation as it is writing for anything else,” he says. “They focus on the story right from the first day. Somebody else is concerned with the visuals and I just work on that.
“It’s so important. I now get sent a lot of pitches for animation. The idea always seems really cool. But there’s no story. It is an amazing thing. Every week or two you’ll see a film that cost $100 million [€71 million] and, as likely as not, the script plays as if it’s been knocked together in an afternoon. Yes, I know. It’s amazing. I should know. I’ve appeared in enough of those films.” Rise above it McCarthy.
