Anthony McCarten Reveals His Secret to Writing Scripts That Win Actors Oscars

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Photo Source: Peter Mountain

Anthony McCarten, the three-time Academy Award–nominated screenwriter known for “The Theory of Everything,” “Darkest Hour,” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” uses the word “aspect” literally. Where a less careful speaker might wield the noun in reference to some casual characteristic, McCarten means it in precise measurements—the affect that a pair of glasses might lend to someone’s face, or the musicality, jazz or classical, with which a character speaks. When McCarten muses that “it’s the aspects of a person I respond to deeply,” he says so with the studied dedication of a writer busy deciphering wrinkles and parsing out pores.

“To use the analogy of painting—and these are paintings, not photographs,” he explains of writing his films, “you choose an aspect of each character that reveals someone’s essence, and by magnifying those tiny details, you can say something about an individual that may have missed other people, that may have missed the public at large.”

McCarten, whose 2019 feature “The Two Popes” is up for four Golden Globes and is well placed for a few Oscar nominations, talks of painting and portraiture a lot, especially if you ask him about screenwriting. It’s a useful analogy, particularly for a writer who prefers to bury himself in the homework of another’s life and whose talent for historical portraiture has earned Eddie Redmayne, Gary Oldman, and Rami Malek each a best actor Academy Award.

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For McCarten, the pursuit of truth in writing and filmmaking is most exhilaratingly embattled where historical memory meets artistic license—and audiences have tended to agree, from his portrayal of Stephen Hawking to Winston Churchill, Freddie Mercury, and now Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI. “It’s crowd-friendly to have big ideas,” he says with a laugh.

“The historical record is like a road washed out in intervals; it’s in those intervals where you have to speculate, and you have to do it responsibly,” McCarten says of the equal draw and challenge of writing such films. “How do you do it responsibly? It comes back to that first task, which is: Know your subject. So, it starts with research. I learn as much as I can, and I think that’s the first order of business if you want to make a portrait lifelike, to be one with a subject who would recognize themself in that portraiture.” “I often say,” he further considers, “that it’s easy to invent too much in the realm of a historical biography, but you can also make the mistake of inventing too little. History is a lousy filmmaker, and you’ve got to responsibly pursue the truth. You’re in its service, in that quite often you have to part ways with literal fact and pursue some emotional truth that you may view as entirely authentic.” “Of course,” he continues, “all these ‘mistakes’ are done judiciously; they’re done knowingly, and you have to choose the lesser of two evils, because it has to be an entertaining drama.”

It’s that dedication to character and good storytelling that might just win him—and Jonathan Pryce, who brilliantly plays the rising Francis alongside Anthony Hopkins’ abdicating Benedict in “The Two Popes,” an intimate debate-play of a movie forged between two men with whom the greatest modern theological question of the Catholic Church rested—an Oscar. Is there a technique to it? “It’s hard to say,” McCarten responds, reluctant to give any name to a craft he insists happens successfully and only “when subconscious desires and stirrings make themselves manifest in your work and interest about the subject.”

READ: Jonathan Pryce on Present-Day Acting Culture, Theater, and Disliking Strasberg

“I like to provide high-caliber language for actors to say,” the screenwriter concedes. “In all the cases, it’s not just the architecture of the movie that gets them the Oscars. Actors need stuff to say and do and express that is somehow profound and moving and stirs the soul, that affects you at a soul level. And if audiences laugh and cry and think with an actor, and share their journey, then people are inclined to look at that performance and want to applaud it.

“Noël Coward, when asked why he was so successful, said he wrote the lines that actors would kill to say, and there’s something in that,” McCarten, ever a student of British theater, concludes. “I really believe in language. For me, good dialogue is the best special effect in movies. It should be exciting; you should be hurling popcorn into your mouth when the dialogue’s good enough. It’s my equivalent of a car chase.” 

This story originally appeared in the Jan. 2 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.

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