'The Last King of Scotland' award-winning director Kevin Macdonald talks to RTÉ.ie's Taragh Loughrey-Grant about 'State of Play'. The film is a newspaper thriller starring Russell Crowe as a journalist who tries to help his friend, a troubled Senator played by Ben Affleck. Macdonald talks about the film, the original TV series, his leading actors plus his view on the future of newspapers and online news.
Read the review of 'State of Play' here
Taragh Loughrey-Grant: What was it about the 2003 TV series 'State of Play' that inspired you to create a film adaptation?
Kevin Macdonald: The reason I wanted to do it is because I love journalistic films because they tend to give you an opportunity to have fun, articulate, witty characters, which I love and they can be quite eccentric characters. It's not like your doing a cop drama or a detective drama where you don't have the same opportunity for eccentricity and you get the same verbal wit, that's one thing. The other thing is that what's going on with newspapers V's online, if you want to put it like that is a fascinating subject and quite an important one and dear to my own heart.
I think there's no point in making a copy of the series, which was so great so what I wanted to try to do, and you'll obviously be the judge of whether I succeeded, was to create something slightly different, to make the characters slightly different and make it have some relevance to today because its old now the series, its five or six years.
TLG: 'State of Play' portrays the serious investigative news journalist as a dying breed…
KMacd: A dying breed because of the internet really and obviously time marches forward, progress can't be stopped. The internet has meant that advertising has migrated; there are hardly any classifieds in newspapers any more because they're all online. If people have a car to sell for example they sell it online, they don't go to the newspaper.
Young people read their news online; they expect to get their news for free. Whereas with newspapers it's a paper technology, it's an analogue old-fashioned technology. If you look at the end of 'State of Play' it looks like Victorian technology, so lumbering and unreliable, so newspapers are suffering. In order to cut costs, they have to make their journalists more efficient, journalists are having to spend less time on a story, less time to research and less time to go wrong. In the old days they could spend days and go 'Oh, there's no story here' now you have to find a story and that dictates a certain type of journalism.
The thing with newspapers is that they are a filter, we're relying on the editors of that paper to be a filter and to tell you that this is worth reading about, this is quality and this is quite reliable. Of course we all know that newspapers aren't always reliable, if you're reading a tabloid paper you don't expect it to be terribly reliable but for the broad sheet paper or with TV news or with radio news you're expecting it to be somewhat reliable and that's because its coming from a particular source that you trust.
With online that's different because you don't know where this is coming from. There isn't one overarching individual or institution selecting the news. A lot of people object to the fact that there might be a few conduits for news or a few conduits for entertainment and feel that its much more democratic to feel there are many different conduits and for people to be able to choose but ultimately that choice gets very confusing and the difference between what's important and what's not important becomes very confusing.
TLG: There are however a number of established, respected websites where people go for reliable, informative news and culture, including our own www.RTÉ.ie
KMacd: Absolutely. Another is also The Guardian website for example and the BBC, which is something apart because it's funded by a license fee. I don't know about RTÉ?
TLG: RTÉ is funded by a license fee but the website, RTÉ.ie is not.
KMacd: Right. Any institution that's relying on advertising is suffering. You can't hold-back progress but the thing you need to work out and I'm not being a Luditte but what I'm saying is that people have to realise what's at stake, what they're going to loose and to try to retain what is valuable [about newspapers] on the internet.
What needs to happen is that you need to have websites like The Guardian websites but it's not profitable and is funded by the newspaper. What's happening is that The Guardian is doing sort of okay in its circulation and sort of okay in terms of its advertising and they need to find a way to migrate to the web and they need to find a way to make that work for them. They need to find a way to pay the journalists well because that's what it comes down to. It doesn't matter what the medium is, whether it's online or newspapers, it's whether the journalists have the time and the necessary authority to do their job.
TLG: Am I correct in saying that you originally wanted to be a journalist?
KMacd: I did, I had a romantic ideas of being a 'truth teller', like Ben Affleck says to Russell Crowe in the film.
TLG: What was it that influenced that desire?
KMacd: I don’t know...I like writing, I like reading and I always had a romantic notion of journalism which is one of the reasons I wanted to make this film because I love films set in the world of journalism.
The idea that stimulated me the most is that say you have a country like Ireland and all the main newspapers go out of business or get reduced to being local news rags and don't have the power or the resources to finance proper journalism it means your corrupt politician is going to have a hay day. It means there'll be no one there to ask the awkward questions when they give some money to their brother-in-law, they'll be able to cover that up.
TLG: Which journalism films are you a fan of?
KMacd: I'm a fan of all of them...well I'm not sure about 'The Pelican Brief' but I love things like 'His Girl Friday' in the 40's, I love 'Missing', 'The Parallax View' and 'All the Presidents Men', which of course is the great influence on this film. You can't make a journalistic, thriller in Washington DC about politics and journalism without being influenced by that film.
TLG: You changed the sex of the editor from Bill Nighy's character in the TV series to Helen Mirren's character in the film, why so?
KMacd: I was trying to reinvent the story and reinvent and the character as part of that. I always had Bill Nighy in mind when I was thinking of the editor and I always had his voice in my head and that was a curse. I even thought about just going with the flow and I spoke to him about it and he was up for it but it goes against the very principle of why remake it, you're not trying to copy the original. He took it on good grace and I just woke up one morning and thought lets just make it a woman.
That created an interesting dynamic, you've got Russell Crowe's character and the two most important people in his life are women, professionally. One is his mentee [played by Rachel McAdams] but who catches him out in his hypocrisy and the other is his boss [editor, played by Helen Mirren]. And I like the idea that these two women don't exist in terms of their relationships to their men, they're not sexualised, it's tough and professional.
They're attractive and flirtatious and they'll use this as Rachel McAdams says in the film "I'd to go on two dates" with some "sweaty guy called Vic" to get inside news on a story. It's an interesting way to go for these characters and quite modern. One of the interesting things about Russell's character is that he's decided that he doesn't want to have a long-term relationship with a woman.
Russell came up with an idea to wear a pink Breast Cancer Awareness armband while we were shooting. And I asked him 'Why are you wearing that' and he said 'Because I imagine the character's mother died of breast cancer'. That made total sense because that would explain why he is afraid of having a long-term girlfriend or getting married. He's scared of that commitment because he's scared he'll loose them again.
TLG: If Russell had come up with an idea that you didn't like, is he the kind of actor that would accept your decision?
KMacd: I think so. There's a lot of discussion that goes on and a lot of it can be abrasive and I think you have to reach a stage where you say 'Okay it's not that important, if you want to do that, okay' or if it is important then you have to say that it can't be done. And as a director you have to stick to your guns.
TLG: How did you create his Irish-American character, Cal McAffrey and were you wary of character clichés?
KMacd: When you're an outsider and going into a culture like America, it's easier to stay away from any clichés because you're not really aware of what they are. I would imagine that some of the clichés of Irish-American's are some of the character traits that we have! He obviously drinks quite a lot, he listens to music from Newfoundland, with a highly Irish influence, sort of Pogue's music at the beginning, which came about by totally accidentally by the way.
That whole opening scene, when he is in the car with a camera and we put on the music and Russell started singing along and I thought lets film this. I had a look at the footage and we thought let's use this as the opening sequence.
TLG: Are you a fan of 'The Wire' and if so, do you see much correlation between the newspapers/media debate in the final Season and in 'State of Play'.
KMacd: I am a huge fan of 'The Wire' but I didn't see the final Season. It was just starting as we began to shoot and I saw the first one [episode] and I thought I shouldn't watch it as I thought I don't want this to influence me and since then I haven't had a chance to catch-up although I have the Box set, which I will watch. Obviously its very similar terrain.
TLG: What can you tell us about your next film 'The Eagle of the Ninth', starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell?
KMacd: It's based on a book that I loved as a teenager written by Rosemary Sutcliffe. It’s a cowboy movie set in the Highlands of Scotland in the second century about the relationship between a Roman and his slave, their friendship. It’s a kind of intimate epic.
