Written Interview: Tony Kushner (“Lincoln”)

From the WGA website:

The new film Lincoln draws its considerable dramatic power from the moral, existential dilemmas that churn at America’s core. It’s unlike any film legendary director Steven Spielberg has made both because of its singular title character and its screenwriter, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and progressive intellect Tony Kushner.

Kushner’s script draws most significantly from historian Doris Kerns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and focuses on the muddy political process into which Lincoln waded to pass the 13th Amendment ending slavery in America. In addition to employing every seamy tactic of political persuasion, Lincoln must also directly forestall nascent peace overtures from the Confederacy to ensure passage of the amendment.

So here we see a haunted, but endlessly avuncular Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who, already ravaged by the deadliest war in American history, must knowingly put more blood on his hands to reach an end that will both justify all those who have died and pave a real, lasting future for a fragile Union.

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Kushner is most famous for his two-part play Angels in America, about the AIDS crisis during 1980s Reagan America, and he’s worked with Spielberg once before on the film Munich. On the day after the Presidential election, during an in-depth conversation with the Writers Guild of America, West Web site, he illuminated his six-year odyssey writing Lincoln, Spielberg’s genius for narrative, and how the story this film centers on is still playing out in America today.

An excerpt:

What aspects of this film’s story resonate most relevantly to what’s happening now in America for you?

I’ve been working on this film for six years now, but I was working on the third draft of it on election night 2008. And so I’ve been working on it pretty much non-stop through the Obama presidency, and it’s been a great way to look at American politics, to watch things unfolding through a kind of Lincoln lens. Because, maybe more than at any other point in American history it seems that the Lincoln administration is an example of what happens when an extremely talented, progressive centrist in the White House joins forces with an activist left in Congress. Really astonishing things start to happen in the country and transformations of historical significance begin to become possible.

I feel like we’ve been watching another version of that unfolding in the White House for four years, and there are some lessons that we have to draw from thinking about Lincoln. The cynicism about government — I mean, on the right, government has become a dirty word [and] people on the left sort of don’t want to get too close to it [either] — we think it’s unlikely to produce anything of value. A reinvestment from the progressive community in the possibilities of radical transformation through electoral democracy would be a really great and timely thing.

But I didn’t write the film — and I know Steven didn’t make the film — as a kind of political message, so [I’m] always a little bit nervous to answer that question. But it feels like it’s a good moment for the movie to be coming out, in a sense, because it explores how dirty the democratic process is and how gritty and clumsy and sometimes downright unappealing, but that good things can happen as a result.

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You seem to have made pains in the script to illuminate the blood on Lincoln’s hands in as stark a manner as possible rather than romanticizing anything. You take people right to the precipice of the moral abyss with this decision.

I’m really glad that you got that and that you felt that in the movie. It’s a really important part of the story. One of the Confederate commissioners says it in the scene at the end of the film when he finally meets with him on the boat.

You can look at the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery as being an absolute triumph of democracy. In the Gettysburg Address, [Lincoln] presents this terrible, bloody war as a kind of a testing of a proposition, you know? “We are met on the battlefield… engaged in a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” I mean he literally lays it out as like a science experiment.

They now raised the estimate of the number of deaths from the 600,000 that we thought it was for most of the first 150 years after the war, [to] 750,000–800,000. In a nation of 30 million people, that’s a lot of people dying on the battlefield.

It’s unbelievable.

Yeah, it’s beyond belief. And you know, the commander in chief on the Union side is this guy who literally couldn’t bear to swat a fly. I mean he was an enormously gentle, non-violent man who became a great military president and did… terrible things. That’s, it seems to me, the motion of democracy and progress. It’s both glorious and affirming of the best things of the human spirit. As a species we haven’t seemed to figure out yet how to advance without holocaust, without massacre, without horror. That seems to me to be a central dialectic, and it’s nowhere more powerfully evident than in the American Civil War and, specifically, in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

For more of the interview, go here.