Interview (Written): David Simon

It still ranks as perhaps the very best nonfiction book I’ve ever read: “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets”. Written by then Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, he would go on to become one of the most important forces in quality TV with notable series including Homicide, The Wire, and Treme.

During Season 5 of The Wire, Simon got to know actor-writer-director Tom McCarthy who starred as the corrupt journalist Scott Templeton. Vulture interviews Simon about McCarthy’s newest movie Spotlight. Here is a trailer for the film:

Some excerpts from the interview:

Tom told me he got into journalism from working with you on The Wire. Did he consult with you for Spotlight?
Tom told me when he started on the project that he was getting ready to do something on journalism and he wanted to sit down, and we sort of made plans to get together and talk about it. He didn’t need me. I mean, I heard he was shooting when he was already shooting. We shared a couple of emails, but we never actually had a long conversation about it. What he did do was report the hell out of a story about reporting. Once he got inside the heads of the people on the Spotlight team and at the Globe, he had all the material he needed, and he understood it implicitly. It’s such a great movie but, again, for me it’s probably journalism porn, in a way.

What I love is that you really get a sense of the immense amount of work that goes into investigative reporting. You feel the work.
And the purpose, and the reason that people do this, the reason that smart people say good-bye to, you know, a lawyer’s salary and a stockbroker’s salary. You choose knowing that the hours are going to miserable, and that right now, actually, because the revenue stream is so awful, that job security is going to be ambiguous at best, and you’re never going to make what you’re worth. But when it’s done well, there’s real meaning in it.

Did you and Tom have long conversations about journalism when he was on The Wire?
I didn’t give him the whole plotline in advance because I didn’t want to have him telescope his performance in any way. I wanted him to act without the burden of knowing the future, which is always an unreasonable thing if you’re an actor. But I said, “Your character’s going to do some things that are increasingly less ethical … The secret to your performance, and I know you’ll get it, is that your character thinks that he’s the good guy. He thinks he’s right, and that what he values is best — at least until the confrontation with McNulty at the end — and you’re able to compartmentalize very carefully what your sins are and the reasons you’re doing them.”

That’s a note that you give to all characters that are about to go down a bad road, but he internalized it beautifully. What I loved most about his performance was how passionate he got when he started getting accused of ethical lapses, how genuinely righteous, how unfair it all seemed, as he played it. You know, when he hurls the notepad, furious that somebody would even think that he betrayed the ethics.

But that was the case. The pond of journalism was shrinking, and rewards, such as they are, accrued to those who can turn heads with a byline or two. So I saw it a lot. It’s funny — you’d ask other reporters coming from other papers, and they’d go, “Oh my God, let me tell you about this guy.” It’s a profession that doesn’t police itself particularly well. It’s kind of like doctors always protect doctors, lawyers protect lawyers, journalists have every incentive to maintain the credibility of their newsrooms at all costs.

But Spotlight is effectively a rallying cry for traditional print investigative reporting.
Absolutely. For doing it well. And to be fair, I think everyone was paying attention to the fabulist that gets away in the last season of The Wire, but that season we bookended with two very good pieces of journalism. In the first, the city editor discovers something in a City Council agenda that is a real conflict of interest, and they report the hell out of it, and he writes that to the front page. That’s the first thing you see happen. And the last thing is a very honest piece of narrative journalism about Bubbles.

So we weren’t being unaffectionate with journalism. We just made poor Tom carry the weight of conscience. The critique there was, “You guys are very focused on the prize culture, you’re very focused on getting into the best papers, on the self-promotion of the game.” And especially now, with all the buyouts and everything being threatened — the entire industry being threatened — it’s a smaller pond, and everyone’s even more worried and even more hungry. So we were critiquing a newspaper that was no longer really attentive to the problems of its city. In contrast, Spotlight harkens back to a moment where a newspaper sat up, took notice of a problem in its city, and surrounded it with real conviction and ethical fervor. They’re both the same argument, in some ways; one’s just being made in the best-possible example, and the other using the worst.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

The Spotlight movie website here.