Blind faith

Playwright and filmmaker John Patrick Shanley is the first to admit that it's not success that makes you stronger. 'I'm afraid adversity is the great teacher,' he says. And he should know. Several years ago, Shanley suffered from advanced glaucoma. He went blind in one eye, then the other, and underwent five rounds of surgery before his sight was restored. 'I said to my doctor who did the surgery, 'Well, 100 years ago I would've gone blind'. And he said, 'Ten years ago you would've gone blind'.' How much this miraculous tale fed into the creation of Doubt, Shanley's 2005 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which he has now adapted and directed for the screen, is tough to say. Set in 1964 in a Catholic school in New York's Bronx district, Doubt is a story about the dangers of moral certainty. Although we never find out whether he is guilty or not, it concerns what happens when a priest (played in the film by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is accused by the mother superior (Meryl Streep) of abusing a pupil. Shanley claims he never set out to add another voice to the litany of those condemning the Catholic Church for not policing its own. Pointing out such scandals occurred due to an 'utter lack of vigilance', Shanley says people were unwilling to believe a priest was capable of abuse, in what he calls 'cultural blindness'. And, not unlike his own sight problems, it was a phenomenon that had a nasty habit of recurring. He was reminded of society's blind spots when writing the original play of Doubt during the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. 'Again there was this kind of certitude and blindness,' he says. 'I found myself living in an era of extreme advocacy, of people yelling at each other and everybody being in very entrenched positions, not really listening to anybody else. It was all about power, and true discourse had fallen by the wayside. 'Then anybody that expressed the idea of being in doubt about something was perceived to be weak. I thought doubt was a hallmark of wisdom and an active and ongoing enterprise, and that dogma was a dead end.' Shanley is primarily interested in notions of hierarchy and authority - themes he also explored in Defiance, his 2005 play about racial unrest on a military base. 'If somebody tells me to do something and I have to do it, I'm like, 'Where do you get the authority to tell me what to do?' Not necessarily because I'm objecting ... I'd simply like to know. So in the Catholic Church, it's, 'I get it from the Pope and he gets it from God'. And in the military, they get it from the president of the United States, who gets it from the people. 'And that's like a snake eating its own tail. But it's worth looking at what people do as a result of buying into that ... it reveals a lot about a culture,' he says. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, Shanley admits he was fascinated examining it during a time when it was on the brink of irreversible change. 'You could hear a noise coming from over the hill and it was the 1960s,' he recalls. 'It was going to blow away everything - a cultural hurricane that was going to take all the things that seemed eternal and change them in a short period of time. So the nuns in these habits that looked like they'd been around since Victorian times were going to be out of those habits in two or three years. The mass was going to go from Latin to English. The neighbourhood people, their clothing, the way the children comported themselves, the music ... every aspect was going to change.' Now 58, the silver-haired Shanley, dressed in jeans and a blue-and-black lumberjack shirt, still seems attached to his blue-collar origins. His mother was a telephone operator, his father a meat-packer, and he was raised in the Parkchester neighbourhood of the Bronx, near where Doubt is set. Partly educated by the Sisters of Charity, the nuns that inspired those in the film, Shanley was hardly a model pupil. Thrown out of kindergarten, he was later expelled from the Cardinal Spellman High School. It was only when a priest who believed in him arranged for Shanley to attended a prep school in New Hampshire that he was able to complete his education. After enlisting in the marines during the Vietnam war, he studied educational theatre at New York University. By 1978, when he was 28, his career as an off-Broadway playwright began in earnest, with a production of Saturday Night at the War. While his career evolved steadily over the next three decades (he now has more than 20 plays to his name), his moment as a filmmaker arrived in 1987, when a series of his scripts were produced in quick succession, including Norman Jewison's Moonstruck. That film won him an Oscar for Best Screenplay, and Shanley followed it up with his directorial debut in the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan vehicle Joe Versus The Volcano in 1990. But he was feeling burned out. 'When I did Joe Versus The Volcano, I was living in a hotel out here [in Los Angeles] for 10 months, which is antithetical to my nature,' he says. 'I had been working very hard for a very long time - probably 15 years - writing play after play, film after film, and I felt I had lost my way. I felt I needed to go home and find my home again and find something to write about that meant something to me. And that took a while.' Returning to the east coast, he adopted two children and devoted his life to raising them before suffering his glaucoma attack. During that time he wrote some screenplays - notably 1993's true-life plane crash tale, Alive, and Congo, a 1995 jungle adventure film. But it wasn't until producer Scott Rudin, who had been involved in the stage production of Doubt, suggested he adapt his play for the screen, that Shanley felt he was physically and mentally ready to return to directing, 18 years after Joe Versus The Volcano. Shanley was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes for Doubt, just as he was for Moonstruck 22 years ago. The film is also in the running for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. If Shanley's own life is improving, he's equally optimistic about the future of his country. The Bush years are over, and it's as if his fellow countrymen have had their vision restored, much like himself. 'Now there's a gentle swing to a quieter kind of conversation,' he says. 'That's what this new administration is beginning to look like - they're like, 'We need to sober up and talk to each other and admit there's a lot we don't know.'' With all the questions it raises, the debate it sparks and the answers it deliberately fails to provide, Doubt may prove to be one of the most important cinematic works of the decade. Doubt opens on February 5