Interview [Written]: Thomas McCarthy (“Million Dollar Arm”)

TheWrap interview with Thomas McCarthy whose screenwriting credits include The Station Agent, The Visitor, Up, and Win Win. His latest: Million Dollar Arm.

This story jumps around from L.A. to India and moves all around India and back, so did you block it out section by section, to break down the screenplay to digestible bits?
That was one of the most difficult things, was finding how we could condense it to a two-hour movie, or however long it is now. I think what’s really exciting about this movie, it’s structurally kind of inventive, just the fact that we start in L.A., go to India, then go back to L.A. There’s a lot of stories within stories in this particular one.

That was really the difficult thing, trying to crack that, saying, “OK, how do I make this make sense so the audience is with us on this journey?” When he comes back from India, this whole new adventure starts, which is working with these three young men, and it almost becomes a whole new story in some ways. I think threading and integrating that story into the bigger story, and finding the framework to make this barstool story work well as a script, was in many ways the most challenging aspect.

Was there any key that made you realize how to do it?
No, it was writing fat and realizing what mattered most and what didn’t. Look, every section could almost be its own movie. And you never wanted to lose India because it was such an important part of J.B.’s personal journey, and where these men came from. And it was so elemental to the story, and visually and cinematically it was an amazing place to include in the film. We were all determined to do that. I think Craig did a terrific job of even taking the script that we had and really finding what mattered most to the story.

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Your leads tend to be either isolated or guys who make some moral compromises, a little unsociable. But they’re not antiheroes, which TV and film do so often now. What’s the difference?
I’m a big believer in the gray area, that there’s not black or white, or good and bad, there’s everything in between. A lot of good people make bad choices and good people make bad choices, quite honestly. I’m working on another project now where maybe one of the worst characters of the story does the most right thing in a lot of ways. I almost can’t reconcile the idea of this guy, and I wanted to ask him, why did you do the right thing, of everyone else out there? We don’t even know what his motivations are. To me, that is where it gets really interesting.

That’s why I rarely have traditional bad guys in my movies, or traditional antagonists in my movies: it’s usually a little tough to pinpoint. I don’t think J.B. is a bad guy, I think he’s like a lot of young men who are struggling to find his place, really ambitious, and their dreams aren’t happening and they’re looking for satisfaction and looking for a lot of these things in a lot of wrong places. Validation is maybe a better word than satisfaction, but both. And I just find that really interesting, and I think, look, this is based on a real story, so I’m basing it on my notes and interviewing this guy and hearing him talk about himself and his life, so some of that was already done for me.

Here is the trailer for Million Dollar Arm:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

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