WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 969 - Kenneth Lonergan

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

Kenneth Lonergan doesn’t think there’s a real difference between comedy and drama, at least not in the way he writes and directs. The playwright-screenwriter-director talks with Marc about the lie of sentimentality, how ideas collapse when he’s writing and new ideas emerge, and why he hopes to get to 95% satisfaction with his work (he’s gotten to about 90% so far). That work includes Manchester By The Sea, Margaret, You Can Count On Me, and plays like The Waverly Gallery, which is now on Broadway. This episode is sponsored by Loop Jewelry, Screen Dive from 20th Century Fox, YouTube Music, and Stamps.com. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Lock the gates! all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucksters what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast uh how's it going are you all right this is it this is the week the beginning of the holiday season. This is where we've already weighed whether maybe some of you still are on the fence. I don't know. We've already weighed whether or not we're going to have people over. We're going to have family over. We're going to go see our families. We're not going to see our families. We're going to go to a thing at someone else's house. We don't really like that much, but we don't have any other plans and we can put up with it for a night. They're okay people, but we don't really hang out with them any other time.

But it's nice to be around other people with families and whatnot. If we're not going to go see our family, maybe you're doing that thing. Or maybe you're just having a quiet night at home, avoiding the entire Thanksgiving event and situation. Maybe you do that. You just have like a sandwich, maybe a soda, and you kind of relish in the fact that you've turned your back on this family and national tradition, but yet you still watch the dog show the next day because that's something to be excited about. Huh? The grooming, right? All those different shapes of dogs, purebreds. That's exciting. The parade, not great. Anyways, I guess my point is, how are you fortifying your mind and heart in preparation for, yeah, I don't want to say confrontation. Maybe some of you are just can't wait. You can't wait to get to mom and dad's house or grandma's house, or maybe you've got

kids and they're excited to see grandma, even though you don't really like her that much. I don't know what your situation, but I know it's on your mind. It's on my mind, but I'm focusing on food. Today on the show, I talked to Kenneth Lonergan. Kenneth Lonergan is a playwright and screenwriter. You might know him from winning an Academy Award for Manchester by the Sea. He also did the film Margaret, wrote and directed that, and You Can Count on Me was his film. Several plays.

I just saw one of them in New York that's been revived, I think. I don't know if it's called a revival, if it's just put up again. Is it still a revival if it's not old as hell? But the Waverly Gallery, which he wrote in 2000, is now up in New York. It's got Elaine May in it.

Joan Allen is in it. Michael Cera is in it. Great writer. And I was a little intimidated. I always assume I'm going to be outgunned intellectually by people who write theater. I don't know why that is. I guess I have a place in my heart and in my mind that is threatened by people that have the wherewithal to write plays.

I guess I put a lot of stock in the possibility of theater and what it can do. And I find that some plays are more abstract. Those are the ones that always get me. I think it was early on when I started reading or seeing Sam Shepard plays where I'm like, where the fuck does this come from? But I'm still sort of intimidated and nervous when I talk to playwrights. But Kenneth Lonergan and myself had a great conversation. He came to the hotel in New York and we sat there and listened to sirens through the window and talked about New York and about plays and about all kinds of stuff. There's actually a interesting thing happened after after the conversation. Maybe I'll remember to tell you what that was.

There's a Black Friday sale at PodSwag.comcom which is where you can get all wtf merch i want to make sure you know this it's 40 off the entire site this friday so you can get discounts on items from lots of your favorite podcasts go to pod swag.com that's p-o-d-s-w-a-g.com to check out everything that's there or go right to pod swag.com slash WTF and get a new Draplin WTF shirt or some of the new signed posters or a signed copy of waiting for the punch. It's all 40% off this Friday, November 22nd. And I did put those posters in those hand-screened, uh, giant posters from my Phoenix show. Just got those over there. Just signed a bunch of books. So yeah, do that.

So how are you preparing? What's going on? Thanksgiving's coming up. I think I'll do a dispatch from Florida. I haven't gone down there in a couple of years because I've been shooting generally. GLOW is not going to start shooting until after Thanksgiving this year. So I get to go down and I generally cook

and I'm making some changes this year. It's a big choice. It's a big decision. How will they be received? The changes to the menu that I'm going to incorporate. And this is, I do think pretty heavily about it, about the food because I haven't been eating much. It's time to start eating again, by the way. I'm glad I waited till Thanksgiving and I waited till the beginning of the glow season, the shooting. I took off a bunch of weight. I took off like, Jesus, as of today, probably around 15 pounds. And most of it was just in preparing to start shooting again because those pants that I wear on glow, the one pair of pants, I think we're integrating a second pair perhaps this season, but they get a little snug towards the end of the shooting there's just food all around i eat shit

all the time over there do i try not to but then you end up eating yeah i'll just have that they have a half a donut you know what i'll have a quarter of donut and then you know loop back around i'll get that other quarter and if no one ate that other half maybe i'll eat that eating a donut in that way can be a it can take a half a day. But so I'm ready to go eat Thanksgiving. I know you're probably just wondering, well, how are you changing your menu, Mark? What is it that you're doing? I'll tell you.

The big change is that I generally do a sweet potato thing, just a standard kind of like streusel topped sweet, sweet potato thing. That's almost like a dessert. But I think I'm, I think that's out. I think it's out. And I know some of you are going to be like, why would you remove that? I'm like, because there's a healthier and more interesting way to eat sweet, squashy sort of sweet potato-y kind of shit. And I've come up with up with this recipe that I believe I invented. And I'm going to share this with you because it's simple. If you take that, how do you say it? Kambocha?

Is it Kambocha squash? Kabocha maybe? You know, the squash, it looks like a pumpkin that doesn't, that's fighting, turning yellow. It's kind of, kabocha, I believe is a squash. It doesn't matter. Do you want me to tell you the recipe? Do you want me to tell it to you? Because this is what I'm doing.

I'm sharing a recipe with you. That's something friends do. So you take the kabocha, you cut it up, you gut it, you take all the seeds out, you clean all the stringy shit out of it, and then you slice it into little triangles. I don't make them too thin. I like them maybe two and a half inches on one side and then up to the point. And then what I do, I'm telling you, it's good. Get some ghee, get some clarified butter, make it so it's liquidy, and then put it in a little bowl and then just coat each piece of the kabocha squash with the ghee and then sprinkle all of it with garam masala, which is an Indian spice. It's got usually like cumin, coriander, some cardamom, cloves, black pepper, cinnamon, sometimes nutmeg. And there's different versions

of it, but just do the ghee and do the garam masala and then salt them up and then roast them until they brown a bit. And that's it. It's like all those, like half of those spices, half of the Indian spices just happen to be Thanksgiving spices. So you're kind of sneaking in something exotic with something that is also well-founded in the tradition of hackneyed Turkey Day stuff. Am I making too much out of it? Do you think that maybe my obsession with this squash as I head to Florida

in the next couple of days to cook might be masking some of the other feelings I might be having about going down to Thanksgiving and seeing my mom, my brother's coming down and flying him down. We haven't been together with my mother in a long time for Thanksgiving, my cousins, time passing, in a long time for Thanksgiving, my cousins, time passing, people getting older. And it's Florida too. By the end of the week, it could be underwater or there could be chaos in the streets over some predicament. Florida is a chaotic place that is sadly trending red, but that red will be put out by the slow sinking of the state because of a denial that it's happening and that we have anything to do with it. Water in the streets in Florida. But I'm telling you, the squash, the squash is going to be the shit.

Don't be afraid to eat the skin. Don't be afraid to eat the skin in life. Quick email. This one was funny. I like to try to help out. You know what I mean? I'm not perfect in any way, but if I can help out, that's nice. Marin drops F-bomb in my meeting. That's the subject line. Good day, Mark. I drive to work every day and listen to your podcast as I snake through the shitty Sydney traffic that inevitably happens in the central business district where I work.

I finished listening to the Curve Vial episode and the Busy Phillips episode began to play. As I pulled into my garage, it was only six minutes and 56 seconds into it before I jumped out of my car and went up to my office. I was in my weekly sales meeting with all my offices across Australia on a video conference call and had my phone on the boardroom table as I was expecting an important call about a contract. So it was within eyesight with the ringer switched off. Just as my colleague in Melbourne was speaking, all that was heard from Sidney was who gives a fuck followed by I fuck up the lead. Who gives a shit? Yes. For some inexplicable reason, your podcast started playing

on my phone by itself on speaker. What was creepy is that the phone was untouched for 30 minutes and some poltergeist shit went down as I scrambled embarrassingly to stop this tirade being confused as my own as I am Canadian and to an untrained ear. People around the other offices may have actually thought it was me swearing. Coincidentally, you did actually say what I was feeling about my weekly meeting. So thanks for that. After the meeting, my colleagues in Sydney asked what the podcast was and I told them WTF. You might actually get three more signups. Well, I wasn't fired and people saw the humor in what happened. Thanks for breaking up the monotonous Monday meeting dread with a well-timed F-bomb. Cheers, Justin. Glad to help out, Justin.

Glad to help out. There's one other one here. Big ask. Hello, I have a huge request to ask of Mark Maron. I would be super grateful if whoever reads this could pass along my message to him. Well, I'm reading it. My mom is a huge fan of the WTF podcast.

She has a Boomer Lives mug that she proudly displays as her main coffee mug, and she's the one usually telling me about a new great episode. She's been having some medical issues lately with her shoulder involving multiple surgeries, and she's really bummed out about it because her recovery is not going well. This all being said, my huge request is this. I was wondering if there was any way I could buy some merch as a present and have Mark sign it to her. She's going in for further surgery in December and she's been in a really sad place for a while. And I just know that something like this would really help her spirits. I know this is a huge ask. And Mark, if you read this, thanks for even considering. Sincerely, Phil. Yeah, we can work that out, Phil. But then you got to buy it and you got to send it to me. And it's a long process.

So I then said, what's her name to Phil? And he said, thanks for the reply. Her name is Rosanna. And I don't want to mention last names. But Rosanna with the shoulder issues. It's going to be all right. All right. It's hard to bounce back when you're older.

Takes time. But you're lucky it's just a shoulder and not an organ or a brain or, uh, or losing a foot. Is that, did that help Rosanna? Okay. All right. So Kenny Lonergan, Kenneth Lonergan. I don't think I know him well enough to call him Kenny, but I think some people call him Kenny. Kenneth Lonergan. We talked in my hotel room in New York. We had a nice conversation and I before I talked to him I made sure to catch up on some stuff I never watched Margaret and and I know it was sort of a a movie that um got mixed response and he I knew there was some sort of

I don't know if it was controversy but uh but it was a difficult movie on a lot of levels i talked to him about it but i watched it i thought it was a pretty stunning film and what is what's my point about this okay i'll tell you kenneth and i had one of those conversations after the mics went off that i wish it was on but we were talking about uh we talked about margaret during the interview but then afterwards because elaine may is in his play, Elaine May, who is in the very influential and famous comedy team, Nichols and May, but also went on to write many movies. Elaine May directed The Heartbreak Kid. And I brought up The Heartbreak Kid after we turned the mics off, which is a great movie, one of my favorite movies with Charles Grodin,

Sybil Shepard, Eddie Albert. And I just watched Margaret, but we talked about The Heartbreak Kid being one of the great movies that really rides the line appropriately between tragedy and comedy in a way that's just painful

and beautiful. It's a stunning movie. And then I asked him, you know, whatever happened, because Elaine May's daughter was in The Heartbreak Kid, and I'm like, whatever happened to her? And he was like, she's in Margaret. And I'm him, you know, whatever happened, because Elaine May's daughter was in the Heartbreak Kid. And I'm like, whatever happened to her?

And he was like, she's in Margaret. And I'm like, who? And she played a part in Margaret that was devastating. Her name's Jeannie Berlin. And I had no idea what happened to her. And I just watched her in a three-hour movie be a genius. And it was so thrilling, really. I just love moments like that.

But sadly, we didn't have that conversation on the mics but kudos and respect to the Heartbreak Kid anyways I'm trying to introduce Kenneth Lonergan Elaine May's a genius Elaine May's great in his play okay so this is me talking to Kenneth Lonergan in a hotel room in New York City his play

The Waverly Gallery is now on Broadway with Elaine May, Joan Allen, Lucas Hedges, David Cromer, and Michael Cera. It's playing at the Golden Theater through the end of January. Okay? Listen to us talk. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So, no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats.

But iced tea and ice cream? Yes. We can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost, almost anything. Order now. product availability may vary by region see app for details it's a night for the whole family be a part of kids night when the toronto rock take on the colorado mammoth at a special 5 p.m start time on saturday march 9th at first ontario center in hamilton the first 5 000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley construction.

Punch your ticket to kids night on Saturday, March 9th at 5 PM in rock city at Toronto rock.com. Fuck. Nice to see you. We've never met before. Ever? No, I don't think so. I feel like, I don't know why. I guess I feel I could see you. We've never met before. Ever? No, I don't think so. I feel like, I don't know why.

I guess I feel I could know you. I don't know why that happens sometimes with people. Maybe we have common friends. It's possible. I don't know. I've talked to people in your movies. I've talked to Casey. Yeah.

You know, for the movie. Yeah. I might have seen you at a word show of some kind. It's possible. Yeah. There were a lot of them last two years ago. No kidding, right? Oh, yeah.

To start, like, I saw the play, the older play that is up again, Waverly Gallery, last night. Oh, yeah. Now, when something like that is redone, how much do you have to do with it? Depends completely on the production. But this one, I was there a lot. Yeah. I mean, I didn't direct it.la noiga bauer directed it but um i was there a lot you know very involved in the casting and the whole process you know if you're the playwright you can do as much as as you want

if you're around they're like yeah let him come yeah they like to have you around if you're a pain in the ass which i try not to be And what was different about staging at this time? Well, it's different when it's a, you know, the first time it was staged in 2000, and, you know, the first time you ever do a play, it's a little more, maybe you're a little more precious about how it's done, and, you know, it's like the big deal. This is a big deal

too but i don't know you just i i sorry i guess you're just more possibly a little less flexible yeah if you're the writer but i mean you have to be flexible anyway because it's a cast and the director and right it doesn't work big sets bigger sets well now yeah no now there's bigger sets no because it's on broadway now it was on off-Broadway before. So originally, was it just one set? It was one set with a turntable at the very end. It's a hard... When I wrote the play, I wasn't really thinking too clearly about the sets.

It's a little awkward, the way the set goes, because it goes back and forth between two locations until the middle of the second act, and then there's suddenly a hallway, and then there's suddenly a new apartment that we haven't seen. Right. And it doesn't sound like a big problem, but it can be, because you have to...

In a smaller theater. In a smaller theater. Even in the bigger theater, that's still hard to solve, because if you have one set, you've got this big space that you don't use until the last scene. If you don't do that, then you have to figure out a way to introduce it in the middle of the action. Also, it's a continuous thing.

They go from the hallway into the final apartment, and you have to figure out. It's a design challenge because it's not elegantly thought out by the writer. That guy. Yeah. Now, it's very autobiographical. Yeah, it is. And you grew up here in New York. Yeah, yeah, it is. And you grew up here in New York. Yeah, yeah.

And that, like, because I grew up with some of that same Jewish history. Where did you grow up? I grew up in New Mexico, but my family's from Jersey. So I had a communist great aunt in Fort Lee. Oh, yeah.

I had, you know, I had my grandma Goldie in New Jersey. Yeah. My grandma Eleanor in Bayonne, Asbury Park. But I just find that whole generation, that history, that somebody that has that proximity to the Nazis and to that kind of stuff, they're almost all gone. Yeah, they're pretty much gone now. I guess there's a few hanging on, but my grandmother was born in 1903, and she was in her late 80s, in the late 80s. Yeah, I mean, she'd be 115 now, so yeah, they're pretty much gone.

And it's sort of this amazing gift to have. I guess we're really the last generation of grandkids that were able to talk about that. And even the way that the set is designed with that type of art, there's something very specific about that sort of progressive old school Jewish experience. Yeah. That really reads. And Elaine May did a great job with it. Yeah, she's amazing. And the whole thing, you know, then she's my grandmother and the character in the play is from a very particular demographic she grew up in brooklyn

her parents were immigrants she uh but then she quickly came to manhattan and greenwich village and was lived a kind of a bohemian lifestyle she was she was a soft american communist she was interested in the art scene she was mostly mostly interested in socializing uh and uh and but she was very politically active was a member of the american labor party and did all sorts of went to lots of meetings with people like dashiell hammett and yeah lived around the corner from eleanor roosevelt after after fdr died and uh used to see her walking her dog in the park and she kind of knew everybody. Yeah. And really kind of exemplified the Greenwich Village scene in the 40s and 50s. Do you still live in the city?

Yeah, I do. I live in Soho now. Do you find, like, are you experiencing, because some of that, there was some nostalgia involved in looking at the way they projected some of the film pieces onto the set. Yeah. Does your heart sort of break for what was the city?

Yeah, it does. I mean, it's very much so. And I mean, the city's never stayed. It's always been in flux. It's always changing. That's part of the play. Yeah, it is part of the play. And it's hard to miss New York City in the 1970s.

It was such a sewer. But it now seems to me to be kind of getting back to that. It's dirtier. It's noisier. The construction's gone insane. It's horrible. And the whole city's been taken over by these buildings and all these construction projects. The subway's a disaster.

It's really gotten... The infrastructure's breaking down. The infrastructure is a disaster. But am I wrong in noticing that? It feels like I don't really know who the people are here anymore. Well, I don't feel quite that way. I feel like it's still the same balance. There's still a balance of native New Yorkers, people who come in from the outside, and then commuters who come in and out.

But not as many can live here. No, it's much more expensive to live here. Yeah, no, it is. I mean, my grandmother wasn't wealthy, but she bought a building. You know, she always had some money because her father was pretty well off. And they bought a building on Washington Place in 1940, I don't think, for a lot of money. And she was a landlady to, you know, a small eight-unit apartment building. What happened to the building?

It's been sold. And now they're redoing it. I'm sure, you know, it's been under construction for about a year and a half, maybe two years, and they know it's going to be some $20 million single residence palace. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, those people.

Where are they coming from? I don't know. I think a lot of them are foreign. I think the building was sold to a German corporation of some kind, and I don't know who they sold it to. I don't know who could afford those rents. You look at the apartments for sale in New York City, it's like $20 million, $7 million for a little one.

I mean, it's really gone crazy. I can't ever tell, because I spent time here. I lived here for many years, and I can't tell if I'm being old and sort of like, well, back in the day it was this or that, and the people were different but it just feels like the the tone of the city has gotten uh it not i don't know maybe it's because there seemed to be a more vital art scene i don't know where you came up in uh playwriting i'm here i mean i i think this art scene is i think everything that's in it is still here except

for the middle-income people who are able to live in Manhattan, which is a huge difference. But, I mean, to me, it's the physical. I mean, we're listening to sirens right now. You never don't hear sirens anymore. You never don't hear construction. You never— Jackhammers. It took me 40 minutes to get here, to get 40 blocks.

Yeah. There's no way to get around. Subway's broken. The streets are clogged. And all this construction creates more and more traffic problems. And will create traffic problems when it's done. Because people have to go somewhere. They're not going to stop making people.

And they're not going to stop making cars. No. And they're not going to stop building these buildings. It's literally like the face of greed. These fucking buildings. i just hate them i did i don't know what fills them every time i'm in a hotel like this and i just look across the way yeah i have people working during the week i'm sort of like oh my god what's happening a lot of them go bust i mean nyu for instance is building this enormous you know they keep building and

building and building in the village and they can't and they just it's they just the people who are i don't know a lot about it but like the people who get the contracts and provide the contracts are making a fortune the school is not able to put enough students in these dorms right and it's not a it's not a money-making proposition in the end except for the people who skim off the top when it's when they're being built so that's kind of who's taken over the city. So they're just empty buildings? Yeah, I think so. Ghost vessels.

But it's not for the people who live here. Right. And New York has never been entirely for the people who live here. But now it's just there's no sense of public life at all. It's more like it's kind of like the whole city is like a big fuck you to the people who are here because you cannot get around. Yeah. And it's just, and I've lived here my whole life.

And, you know, part of living in New York, as you know, is always complaining about how different it is and how it's gotten worse. But it really, really is. So it's the same evolution that's in the play. Kind of, yeah. Except now, you know, what it's turning into, it lacks any real character. Yeah. And these neighborhoods, you know, I used to live in the village and now live in Soho.

Bleeker Street, even during the big changes in the 60s and 70s, was still local businesses that had been there for a long time. In the last 10, 15 years, they've been wiped out. Ralph Lauren and all these designer stores. And now they're all shut because not even Ralph Lauren could pay those rents. So you can just buy online. Yeah, so Bleaker Street, they wipe out the local businesses

and then they collapse under the weight of their own expenses. And then they don't, they're certainly not going to sell those spaces to local businesses anymore. So what does the future hold? More of this, I think. It's like, I mean, honestly, you walk this i think it's like it i mean honestly you

walk around here it's like a dystopian society it's the whole country i know you cannot believe what's out there just getting to the theater i live a pretty you know exalted lifestyle compared to most people you know yeah super rich but anyone who's you know doing well is doing better than everybody else and my god you get just going back and forth to work is like it's like a marathon of garbage noise and and honking horns we still we haven't we've been here for 10 minutes we haven't heard the siren stop once well i'm trying to like figure i was like i watched uh i watched margaret last night because i hadn't seen it i've seen the other movies and i've seen the the one play but i don't get to the theater a lot because i hadn't seen it i've seen the other movies and i've seen the one play but i don't get to the theater a lot because i don't live here and uh you know when i was watching

the play and realizing that you know you're half jewish half irish yeah and i found that there was sort of a like i could see a balance in the writing you know that that in the sense that you know you seem to be existentially irish and intellectually jewish well i don't i wouldn't know about that no but i mean there it's not the the message because of the character that elaine may plays your grandmother you know is is is naturally sort of buoyant and engaged yeah and intelligent and charming and funny even in in the middle of her losing her mind, there's sort of a comedy there.

There's a pace to it. Yeah. Right? And with Michael Cera as well. There is a deliberate sense of comedy there, but there is no escaping the bleakness. No, there really isn't. And I guess that's an honest way to look at life,

but it seems fundamentally Irish to me. Oh, I see. Yeah, I guess so um shoulder it well you know i think the play is supposed to be a little somewhat of an argument against sentimentality we all go through these difficult and terrible things not all day long and not every day and not every year but when you do it's it's uh i't know, I think it's worthwhile to be frank about it. Yeah. But also, like, I feel like,

but the interesting thing about, there was never an argument in the play, and even when you wrote it, it seems that even at that time, there was sort of a natural sort of, let's put her in a home. You know? Yeah, they didn't, I mean, it didn't work that way.

And in the play, in my life, my mom just didn't want to put my grandmother in a home. And she also, it's a little hard, you know, the problem with all elderly people who are not doing well is that you have this terrible, you can't leave them alone. Most of the time they don't live in the same family, Most of the time they don't live in the same family, most of the time they don't live in the same house as the rest of the family. It's difficult to take care of them at home,

especially if you don't have the income to pay for help. If it's a working family, you can't leave them alone at home. You move them with you, it's very much of a strain. And then the alternative is to put them in a nursing home and anyone who thinks that anyone enjoys that is just fooling themselves so and very few people are out of it to the point where they don't know where they are right so it's a terrible dilemma and my mom solved it by taking the burden onto herself but on the other hand she couldn't have done that if she didn't have the income to pay for help just cannot no single person can take care of a someone who's demented and wandering around all day long it's not possible so it's not sentimental but it is

you know sort of responsible and loyal and with a certain amount of love that this is done and an incredible amount of tolerance and patience yeah that's yeah i mean that's a lot of people do it i mean a lot of people figure out a way they move back home to take care of their parents they then sometimes they just can't you know that's not because they don't love them as much they just don't have the capacity to care for them properly but also in the in the in the character that represents you and and in terms of the the what's his name daniel like you were able to at the end you know process this stuff that you can hold both memories in your mind. You have that how she ended and who she was. Yeah. It's one continuum and to make sure you remember the other part. It may not be sentimental,

but it's necessary. Yeah, I think it's, I hope it's the opposite of sentimental. I mean, to me, sentimentality is a way to avoid real emotion. It's kind of looking at yourself having the emotion rather than looking at the situation that that that that is difficult and i think it's a a way to soft pedal just to make it more tolerable you have this sort of sweetsy saccharine yeah bullshit yeah uh it's all okay in the end it's her time you know all that crap nobody nobody nobody thinks it's their time you know nobody wants to go people hold on to very very little yeah uh because it's worth being alive and they not to quote myself but people really want to hang around and be functioning and have a life and it's kind of easy for people who are for those of us who are not in the hot seat to

to kind of at some point let them go and this is life. But if you're, if you're the one who's on your way out, it's not something you want to do. And I think there's a certain amount of respect you can give to, you can try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who's really going through something you're not and try to behave towards them as you would like someone to behave towards you when you're in trouble. Is it sort of an aesthetic mission of yours to completely make sure that sentimentality is put in its place? Yeah, I just hate it. I think it's such a lie. It's such a filthy lie. And I think it makes people feel isolated.

More sirens. More sirens. There's something about... It's also incredibly self-centered, I guess. If you explore it the way you just did with me there, it's just that it's something we do to relieve ourselves from a certain amount of emotional responsibility. Yeah, and it's a lie, you know?

It's a lie that everything's okay. And I don't believe in rubbing people's noses in the fact that everything's not okay, but there's something about the common experience of things going badly. I've had a lot of people, to my surprise, come up to me back then when we first did the play, and now just say,

that was really rough, but there's something good about seeing your experience reflected back to you accurately. You don't feel so alone. A lot of times when people, especially in this culture, when people are in trouble, everybody's been in trouble, but you're kind of pushed off to the side. You're relegated to a role in the margins. It's not really woven into the way we live to take care of each other.

And people do privately, but it's not a communal experience and not maybe it shouldn't be but uh there's something that's very isolating about you have your friends and your family hopefully but there's something you're not it's almost as if you're not you're a downer and you're not in life with everybody else and of course you are anyway, so I think there's something valuable in just being frank about it and there's something valuable about just in itself just trying to be truthful. I thought out loud about the fact that I think that

most of us are built to shoulder or to sort of at least be able to show up for other people in a fairly present and honest way without it collapsing us. But it seems that because of the pace of technology and and emotional selfishness that people dismiss people but i do think that you know we're naturally able to to sort of show up for people that in the worst of situations and it takes less than you think definitely and people really look out for each other in a really great way innately and that's something you see in this city it's like at the beginning of margaret even with that

horrible accident in new york i mean there's going to be a hundred people trying to help out without a second delay no i think that's true and i think it's very it's a really good thing and that's partly what the play is about too it's how you know but i don't think i think it's you know both as a play and in life you know this also works better dramatically but you know the if you don't sugarcoat how rough the experience is you're giving more value to the effort people make to to deal with it right see it's a balance yeah there's a balance and it you know adversity does often bring out the best in people you have a friend in the hospital just walking through those grimy little halls and seeing all the open doors with all the relatives sitting in these chairs and uh you know it's depressing to

see people sick you know and yeah and in so much trouble but it's very it's kind of uh i don't know what the right word is whether it's comforting or warming or inspiring. There's something beautiful about all those families sitting around, visiting and just sitting there and trying to help out. I just feel like life at its best is rough enough. And so the fact that it's so easy to make it worse is a real problem. And, you know, the fact that people you know i don't know if it's anybody's fault you know they're not multiple generational homes here anymore um

i was talking to somebody you know i had a friend who's passed away now who's when she was older she said to me if i could i'd move to ireland because it's charming to be old in ireland and i met a I met a woman from Africa last night who was talking to me we were talking about the play and she said we were having a similar discussion the one we're having now and she said to me you know in Africa people like to get old because they have all the authority everyone waits to get old so that they can be in charge and be the most respected person in the room and be the most uh just the person in the room who everyone looks to and it's completely different and so when people get ill there's

this huge support system because you're the most yeah just because you're you're you're if you're the oldest person you're the person at the at the top of the and you have the most wisdom you're the most wisdom or even if you you just have some respect because you're older and it's it's it's um it's sort of the opposite here it is kind of the opposite you just you just pushed off to these communities that are you know all all older people which is a sort of a false community to live in everyone's the same age um uh you're put in assisted living facilities nursing homes uh you're just not involved in life in the same way your past is erased in a way yeah and your past is erased and it's really valuable for everyone it's it's really interesting and it's valuable it's it's enriching of of you know to know what happened before you were here really informs your intelligence

and your insight about what's happening now. People who have no sense of the past don't have a very accurate sense of the present. They think this is it. This is all that anyone ever, you know, when they have ideas, they think they're the first ones to have them.

When they're morals, they think they're the, they're, they've, they've hit the pinnacle of morality because they happen to be alive now and they don't realize that in 10, 20 years everyone's going to be looking back at them appalled at their behavior.

At morals in general. Yeah. And it's just, there's also like different colors from the past. I mean, it's a tremendous, it's just a stupendous amount of stuff like the cultures and the personalities and the way people walked and talked and dressed

and the music they listened to and the ways they thought and the ways they addressed problems it's this incredible treasure trove of of anything you might want to look for and also thought too that you know in balancing that the honesty of the the comedic element of somebody becoming repetitious or or losing is a real thing and i and i and i I think that it's an interesting line to sort of ride that there is humor in it. And there has to be humor in it. Yeah. Or how would you even deal with it? You have to.

You know, it's been said many times, you've got to laugh. It's like there's – and also, people are just funny, you know. There are no joke zones in life, plenty of them. But in normal life, they're not that common. There's usually somewhere, there's something funny happening somewhere. Always. You know, almost always. Yeah, and laughter, because I do stand-up, there's different qualities of laughter.

You know, there's laughter that should be crying, which is a fine, valid laugh. There's laughter because people are shocked and uncomfortable and then there's the nice sort of turn of phrase laughter yeah they're impressed with the you know but they're it serves a lot of different purposes i prefer the laughter that could be crying myself yeah i like most of it i don't i there's a nervous laughter which i don't like but you get used to like when you do what what I do, you get used to, after a while, like younger writers or directors are like, why are they laughing at that line?

And I don't like it when people laugh when something bad happens, like they have a nervous reaction. But I know they're doing it because they're having some kind of emotional reaction, and you kind of get used to it. It's a little bit of a weird thing. But like the most dreadful thing will happen in the play and some one person will go like and you're like what the fuck are you laughing about that's that's the one that should be crying that's the one that yeah like i i don't know how to process sadness and you know and i'm uncomfortable and this is challenging and you know i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and laugh for a

second it's involuntary. Yeah. I don't like aggressive laughing. I don't like when people laugh to prove they're not in it or to prove that you're no better to prove. Yeah. I think it's mostly. Morning radio laughing.

Or to show off to their friends. Yeah. Yeah. That's another one I don't care for. Yeah. Fake laughs. Yeah. The three films you made, not big laughs.

I think I've heard some hearty laughs at those when there's when there's in a group you those those movies get laughs but you're not going for laughs sometimes i mean sure uh i try to i mean i think there's i don't i say i never think there's any difference really between comedy and and drama i think it's all the same thing in a way. It's, you know, almost more than two sides of the same coin. I just, like, I think, you know, one thing that I think comedians tend to do when they do serious work is they drop their sense of humor completely and they become quite grim and dull. You know, when they do serious roles, they're just kind of trying to prove

to everyone that they're not only funny yeah and i find actually uncomfortable and totally insecure yeah but they think they're they think their gift is not worth as much as they don't think they don't think so much of what they can really do and i don't think there's much and i get a lot of real life value from comedians through comedy and i don't think it's in any way a less valid way to react to react to life or to to uh channel your experience through your own perceptions and your own ability to to to put it back out in the world in some interesting way that no one else can and i don't i don't know why i mean i do know i think i know why they do it but i think they're mistaken because why they do what why do they drop their I think I know why they do it, but I think they're mistaken because.

Why they do what? Why do they drop their senses of humor? Not why they do serious roles. Why they do serious roles so utterly humorlessly. Can you give me an example? Oh, I don't like to trash anybody specific. I'm not a. Well, I mean, it's a rare occurrence that like that, that comedians act in serious roles.

It doesn't happen all that much. No. And I've noticed. Some like to do it and they kind of flip back and forth and you're just dying for them to be serious well okay i'll give you an example um because uh like when woody allen did his first serious movie it was called interiors right and he's his balance is now shifted so he does his calm his his sense of humor is laced through even his more serious films but But that first movie he did, which did have some good things in it, only Maureen Stapleton had any sense of humor

in the entire film, and the rest of them were just grim, looking out the window, bleak, humorless, and it was kind of dead because of that. Yeah. But he had to find the balance. He did have to find the balance, but his first instinct when he did a serious movie,

part of his energy went into proving he didn't just have to be funny. And I think it's when he did a serious movie, part of his energy went into proving he was, didn't just have to be funny. And I think it's a sort of a, there's no need for that. Like, yeah, it's not,

it's not something you need to turn away from to, to demonstrate. Most of the time, I think like when people are doing some form of art or anything really to, to make a statement, a defensive statement in some way, it never quite works because nobody else is having no one else really is bothering to think no one's thinking oh he's

only funny yeah you know only he is and it's made him insecure somehow in that example yeah where he had to prove himself in some other way kind of yeah and he's not the only one i just pick it because it was a long time ago what i've noticed about about comedic people uh in acting is some of them they're so deeply funny that they can't rid themselves of it yeah and then you get what you're talking about you get uh someone who is so dug in comedically that even when he's doing a serious role there's that essence yeah that that enables them to either through your recognition of their past work or just who they are that that they're still kind of funny somehow. Yeah, sometimes.

I mean, and there's some actors who can go back and forth. And there's lots and lots of actors who have no sense of humor. They're no good in comedies. They do the same thing in a funny way. It's the inverse. They're really good, serious actors. And then they do a comedy, and they drop their whole sense of reality, and they just kind of mug and wink and overdo it. And they're terrible yeah because they don't think that's they they somehow whatever insight they

have into human behavior drops out because they're trying to be funny with a capital f just like comic actors who are too grim are trying to be serious with a capital s right well i guess the reason i bring it up in terms like obviously there's funny parts in the movies that are very serious that you've written but i mean knowing that you wrote analyze this which which is like i love it yeah it's a movie i watch repeatedly yeah i've never seen it but but you were right i wrote straight up yes the comedy yes but again you try to you've never seen it i've never seen it it was because it was rewritten it's just a stupid it's a stupid uh i don't know who i'm trying to i mean it's a funny because i'm i'm very the jane rosenthal who produced the film is a really good friend of mine she's been very good to me it was just rewritten it was one of my first hollywood experiences and i wasn't surprised at

all because i knew what i was getting into but it it's been rewritten. It was rewritten by 14 people. Really? It's not really a word of mine left in it except the title. The idea behind it is mine. Originally, the kind of humor that's in it is mine. So I take some credit for it, but it was just rewritten totally out of my... Oh, so I can't even hang any of it on you?

No, not really. No, but I've seen bits of it, and it does seem very funny to me. But yeah, I mean, even when you're writing straight-up comedy, even if it's something, look, even like the Marx Brothers, who don't have a serious moment in the whole film, there is something, there is a genuine emotion in those films, and the emotion to me is how much they like screwing around

and how much they like mayhem and how much they, and they really like it. And that's a real reaction to the world. You you know they don't like anything too stuffy they don't like and it's not they're not just out there to knock down you know social pretensions they really just like they just love to be insane and stupid yeah silly and they're really good at it and that's to me a genuine feeling that comes strictly through their being funny and it's just as valuable a reaction to the world as anybody else's so if you turned your sort of has your because you know they obviously reeled you in to do a couple big hollywood comedies that analyze this and that and and i guess bullwinkle yeah well

that was an assignment i mean you got to make a living so right and you just are you have you turned your back on that? No. I mean, I still do rewrite work. I haven't lately in the last couple of years, but up until two years ago, that's how I make a living for the most part is being a script doctor

because I haven't made a lot of money off my own movies because the more money that gets put into a film project the less creative control you have right now i probably would have more than than 10 years ago but um so i've tried to keep those things separate so they give you they give you scripts to to give it a little yeah or you get an assignment yeah you always get fired yeah so you can't get too precious about you can't get too attached to the material when they give it to you are they sort of like can you make this a little more real sometimes they'll say like sometimes they'll say can you make it more funny sometimes they'll say the characters are no good sometimes they'll say both uh usually when i do a rewrite they

are after better dialogue and better characterizations and then i and then i do my best and then they fire me and someone else rewrites it intellectually though when when somebody says that about a character like when because where'd you come up at what theater did you come up in at the playwright where did you start writing uh i started writing in high school um theater yeah i had a really good theater program in uh my high school and uh school. And I was interested in writing plays in ninth grade. And I really liked it. And that's what I always wanted to do.

And then I went to NYU, the dramatic writing program at NYU. But I only went there because I thought the homework would be easy. Because I was already writing a lot anyway. And my parents wanted me to get a degree. And I didn't care about that so much. Both your parents were professionals? Well, my father was a internist and a geriatrician he was a doctor doctor my mom and stepfather are psychoanalysts wow yeah it's uh and you have

brothers and sisters well yeah i have this large extended family you do yeah and being in the household with psychoanalysts uh it would because you know yeah i my first wife was a kid of a psychiatrist and they sort of get a bad rap sometimes as oddballs but yeah my parents are not oddballs particularly at all i would say and you know they don't practice at home what did you feel but what did you feel you got out of that that would have been different than other people i i don't know self-investigation no i i think you know there's a general interest in the house and personalities and different kinds of people and but i can't say that doesn't exist in other kinds of homes but that certainly existed in my home um is that what because it seems that in order to be

someone interested in creating theater you'd have to have those interests. Yeah, for sure. But who knows? I mean, I'm the only person with a professional artistic bent in my whole family. I have three step-siblings, a brother, a half-brother, and adopted sisters. And my adopted sister is a storyteller and writes. But the rest of them are doctors and lawyers like that. And maybe they're just afraid i don't think so but everyone's in you know i have two brothers play the piano and

everyone's got artistic interests so it's different when you're doing it for a living right so you start writing in high school and you go to nyu when when did when did you start uh producing uh plays after that i joined a theater company called naked angels which is which was a bunch of actors and writers coming out of nyu who was in that that i know oh probably a lot of them have fisher stevens um rob morrow nancy travis matthew broderick robbie bates uh joe mantello uh these are a lot of these are theater people um yeah joe mantello yeah a lot of yeah and they all did okay for themselves so when's your naming that was a situation where you'd write and you'd workshop yeah that was like they had a little space on 17th street and uh they would do we'd do like uh one acts and

sketches and evenings of short pieces and you know some full productions and it was a great place to to be you know there were a lot of young theater companies in the late 80s and 90s um and you know like atlantic theater which is a really nice theater went on to become a legit off-broadway that's mammoth's place yes he he was involved in starting and he and he still has a relationship with them it's weird i talked to him and i uh yeah i heard that interview it was really good i thought it was challenging because like i find him in a fascinating guy but i don't love his approach to actors no i don't either i think it's i think it was challenging because I find him a fascinating guy, but I don't love his approach to actors. No, I don't either. I think it's a misstep. It's very strange to me. I mean, again, it's the way he works and there are many things that are great about him,

but I don't understand the idea that only the writer comes up with characters, only the writer has a point of view about the people in the show and that everyone should just say the lines flat i don't i don't understand that at all and i don't think it works i don't either and he's another one i think i mean again i don't like to talk badly about people who are alive and working say critically but critically speaking or you know well i mean who asked but i mean i think he had an incredible talent for dialogue probably better than anyone's and i think he took it a bit for granted like it didn't mean that much. And he started to explore other areas, I think, because he just thought anyone can write dialogue, or if you can write dialogue,

it's just a gift, and it's not worth that much. And I don't agree. I think he had a tremendous insight into the culture, into people's behavior, into all the things he's interested in. And it was through his incredible ear. And I think it's something that's worth cultivating and hanging on to although not you know it's not my business to tell anyone what to do and i and i guarantee i would imagine he's not the kind of guy who's going to take any advice no of course not he's got his own stuff he wants to do and more power to him yeah but your dialogue is you also have the gift for it but it's so dramatically different yeah well i'm not you know one i'm not really trying to make a point i'm trying to i'm trying to i don't have a i don't really have a an agenda

to push i don't i don't mean that he does but i mean i trying to i think what i try to do what a lot of people try to do is explore a certain, you know, look at different aspects of things that I'm interested in or that I might have an insight in that somebody else, because they're not me, might not have. And I, you know, I don't feel like it's my job to answer questions or to decide how people should do things or just, I don't know how the world should go or what people should do. to decide how people should do things or just, I don't know how the world should go or what people should do. And I have my opinions and I'm sure they seep into my work, but I mostly think it's a question of

part of what you do is look at patterns that you happen to see because you're the only one looking at things from your point of view. And if you can get those, if you can find some of the patterns and connections in life that are interesting to

you and that you have some insight about and get them into a into a dramatic form that's that's something worth doing it's fun to do too well that's i think that's what i was trying to come around to in terms of your evolution is that when somebody says that there's a problem with a character yeah i mean when you approach a character or were you exploring a character because like margaret is is a genius movie and as a character study of a teenage girl yeah that that like because it's so fresh in my mind and like i'd heard about it and i i didn't see it and i and i knew there was some sort of problem with the movie yeah that you had a problem with it yeah well there were a lot there's a long editing struggle i'm very happy with the way the movie turned out if you watch the extended edition i don't know which one you watch there's two there's a theatrical release and then there's

the longer extended edition which is much better i've watched the one on itunes i don't know which one that is i hope it was they're both they're both available well they're both long one's really long but it moves much faster it doesn't feel as long i hope i don't know if i watched the right one well i don't either but uh but but my my question is is that we have something like that where you have this teenage girl as this character you know who who has you know conflicts that are not unnecessarily unusual outside of you know cradling a dying woman right in her in her arms at the beginning of the show and outside of that you know divorce you know daddy issues whatever yeah but in in order to

support or to to build around this character and the behavior like like i just like what is the what is the process of of of taking that character building it out and then surrounding it what you surrounded it with. How does that start to construct itself? Well, that, that was a, an interesting, really fun to write. And I, I think I just started out with this girl who had, my first idea,

which didn't really make it into the final film quite. It did, but, but in a very adjusted form was this girl who, you know, she causes and is right there for this terrible accident which in which a woman is killed and a street a bus accident and she uh the first idea i had was that this this bad terrible thing happens that she felt it's very traumatizing she's also partly responsible for and she lies to protect herself and also the bus driver just on the spur of the moment. And then she, my first idea was that she would then go to all these adults and ask them

what to do. And none of them would have an answer for her. And that idea, when I tried to write it, turned, collapsed. Because I, you know, if you really think, you know, I try really hard to think what would really happen if this was real. And I thought, well, of course adults would have advice for her. Like, they might not have the right advice which is where i where when it ended up she she she they didn't nobody had a solution that really was work was was complete because there is no solution that's that's complete and that's what she goes through and then that slowly built into this idea of um I don't know how, but it,

it built into this idea of living in a city where everyone is somewhat connected and everyone is not. And just the, the simple idea of like, we're sitting here and there's, you know, probably five, 10,000 people walking around very near us.

And they're all having a very different experience from the one we're having. And some of them are going through really serious things and some of them are playing frisbee and it's it's i just got very interested especially in a city like this where everyone's in such close proximity that's how you shot it that these scenes were yeah you see like she's a person among people whether it's in an audience or walking down the street or or anything that there was a lot of focus put directorially on on like you know there are all these people on everybody else yeah and part and then but i could one reason this film was so much fun to write and to shoot uh i wish it had been as much fun to edit but that got into political struggles with

the studio and the producer but um was that you know it's a little hard to describe you you you have you know verner herzog says his ideas are like burglars who come into his house he doesn't really feel responsible for them they just occur to him and he doesn't know where they come from and um i feel that way when things are going well you kind of have you have you have quote unquote have an idea, but it's like this idea interests you, and it's almost the way another movie would interest you, but it doesn't exist, and you have this impulse.

You want to put it on paper. You want to put it out there and make it. You want to create it. You want to give it some shape. And then if you have an idea that's really exciting and interesting to you to me i'll just talk about myself uh then you try to follow the trail of what your interest is without even necessarily knowing what it is and you have other ideas that strike you as as right and then you have ideas that strike you as wrong and you don't always know why but if you kind of trust that there's something inside you that's trying to get out and you try

to listen to those signals you try not to try to listen to when you're bored and when you don't think it's any good and you try to listen to when you're interested and intrigued and when and then you find all later on you find all these themes cropping up or not and or all these storylines or all these ideas that are that are connected to each other. So one of the things in that film is the whole idea when you're a teenager, your life is very serious and dramatic, and part of it is very sincere and deeply felt, and part of it is this big show you're putting on

because you sort of feel like you're in the middle of a TV movie. At the same time, teenagers are very passionate. They're not inured to life they're just discovering it and um elaine may actually said to me you know this girl is trying to write this terrible and just you know this injustice that she's caused and that nobody else is that you know she goes to the police she goes to these lawyers and she can't get anyone to acknowledge that that what she did and what this bus driver did is something that should be recognized as a terrible thing and dealt with in some form of justice.

And she struggles very hard to find some kind of... Anyway, so then Elaine May said to me, she said, only a teenage girl could think she could affect the world that much. Didn't you have a teenager at the time you were writing it? No, I have one now. Oh. Not quite as vigorously anti-parent

as the character in the film, but it's, you know, that's, again, it's one of the areas the film looks at is the way kids can be so, you know, your first move into independence is to decide your parents are hypocrites and phonies and shallow, and eventually you kind of circle back

and realize they're just grown-up kids and they're just trying to figure things out the way you are and that you're no better than they are, really, unless there's something unusually wrong with them. When you're trying to solve problems of character, do you realize these nuances specifically? Yeah. I mean, part of it is instinctive and part of it is following this hidden trail right part of it

is once you once the trail is revealed to you you then follow it up more consciously um but a lot of that there's a sort of a half conscious state you get into when you're writing and and the really smart insightful part of everyone is not necessarily the part that's on the surface you know people you know there there's something that connects you to other people or to your own ideas that's a that's a bit more unconscious and i think you know i kind of like to compare it to an athlete like when they're really in the zone they're not thinking about every you know a basketball player who's playing really brilliantly is not thinking about every shot he's not thinking about where the ball

is going he's just in some kind of groove that nobody understands and when you're writing well and acting well and playing music well i think you get into a similar groove and no one really knows what that is it's not it's not magic it's a very powerful and consistent side of being a human being but nobody quite knows what it is but it's also like within the craft that you've chosen that you know you keep trying these things out and you put things on stage and you process it. Sure. And when you don't, when it's not happening, it's really awkward. And you're trying to like, you know, you have a great scene and scene A is great.

Scene C is great. Scene B sucks. And you're just like, how the fuck do I get from A to C without fucking everything up? And then it becomes like math, emotional math. A little bit. But part of it is thinking, well, what really would happen if scene A was real, really true? What would happen after that? And would they, in fact, go into the, would they go get a cup of coffee? No, they're fighting too much. If I write this big fight scene, in order for them to then have a cup of coffee, as I've written in scene B, something has to change. I may have skipped a scene. There may be a scene where they reconcile or they have an appointment. Something concrete has to happen to get you from one point to the next if it doesn't make logical sense the first time you write it.

So it must be easier to think about that when somebody sends you an already thing. You didn't write the original and you're looking at these characters and then you can just say things like what this like as as an observer yeah it's a little easier to do it with someone else's and sometimes i think it'd be better to kind of uh adopt that kind of uh journeyman attitude towards my own work it might come a little more easily like if you're able to catch from the first draft a little less precious about it and not trying to dig so deep all the time because it doesn't always work. Sometimes your more

shallow characteristics carry you through better. Let's talk about a little bit about directing about Manchester by the Sea. You've done these three movies and they're very specific. I can't remember where You Can Count On Me takes place. It's a small town in upstate New York. the Sea, you've done these three movies and they're very specific. I can't remember where You Can Count on Me takes place.

It's a small town in upstate New York. And then in Margaret That's Here, in the city, and then like Manchester by the Sea was, and I spent a lot of time in New England. I started comedy there, went to college there. It's a very specific type of life in person. Yeah, it sure is so why there i mean when does it you know what is the seed of that well that was a little arbitrary that was more like an assignment which you're given something and then you just dive in and that you dive into that point um that idea

the idea of the film was matt damons and john krasinski's and they they came to me with this idea they wanted me to write a script from and it was their first idea was this story takes place in manchester by the sea where i'd never been uh it's a small town north of boston just next to gloucester um gloucester and uh i said sure they said put it anywhere you want I said that sounds good to me so it was it was a sort of a backwards well but then it became mine very quickly but it was a kind of a backwards process I started with a place and then I learned more about that place I'd been in Gloucester a few times and I have some relatives in Massachusetts so it wasn't totally

alien to me but there was a certain amount of research so what was the story they said to you that this guy causes the death of his kids in a horrible accident run with it yeah they said well their idea was it's kind of he's kind of a town character and he accidentally his daughter he's taking care of his daughter and she chokes to death while he's out

putting out the trash she's in a high chair which is pretty grim and then he leaves town. And then when his brother dies, he comes back to take care of his teenage, his young nephew, and they form a relationship. And it's kind of his redemption is to come back and take care of his nephew. So that was the bare bones. Now I threw out quite a lot of that. And I actually made the accident that happened worse than what they had imagined. And I tried for a while to write him as a town character, and it didn't at all so i so i had to switch out his personality completely

before i could go forward this town myth then he's a town notorious in the town for having having done this horrible thing been somewhat responsible for this another film where there's a accident the main character is responsible for but this was worse then i it's not totally dissimilar there's a certain some i thought it was a really good idea right away and then there was a certain amount of material that i that they had suggested that i didn't didn't do anything for me so i but i had this assignment i had to write it and i i needed the job at the time and i liked the idea and I love Matt and I, I like John who I don't know as well. And I really wanted to do this.

So I kept fishing around until I found other material that, that connected to their idea, which I liked as much as if it had been my idea. Fishing in your head. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, well,

I don't like the main characters I've written. He's very flat. I don't, he doesn't do anything for me. I don't really see who he is. I don't. And, and, but I had written a brother character for him who I really did like,

who seemed like a real guy in my head. And to me, he was a real person. So I got rid of the main guy and I switched the brother to being the main character just in my head. And then I was like, okay, then I felt like I had something more robust to work with. And then I gave him a different, yet a different brother. And then I had a little family that i believed in and i was able to proceed um it's kind of like you're following clues that are coming up for your own mind and that's something i've over the years that's if i have any kind of technique that's my that's what i try to do is follow my interest and if if i like character of lee instead of the character of John, who it started out as, then I know that's going to yield something valuable. I just find it so interesting that, like, you know, in specific, I guess my, it's not really a question, but I just, I don't know how it happens. Maybe it's just an acute empathy or perception of human nature but you

know the the codependent relationship of the brother with the heart condition with that woman and and her character you know is a very specific and i think a very disturbing and real thing that you know does and and that just happens for you in your mind or do you like you because like it seems psychologically sound yeah and you know and also also casey's character you know with alcohol you know that there there's something about that yeah well i hope it is i mean i it's it's certainly supposed to be yeah it is yeah i mean but that's what's interesting i mean i've had people saying lots of nice things to me and one thing nice thing people say is i like how your characters are not good or bad and my feeling is first thank you and

then second like who do you know who is all good or all bad like i don't i don't know anyone who's like yeah there's some really rotten people in the world but even they have friends and relatives who think they have shitty friends or shitty relatives or they're nice to their dog you know i mean that it doesn't exist someone who is like in the movies. There's no person sitting back cackling. Yeah, it's sentimental to think a villain knows he's a villain. He doesn't. You know, the most villainous people in the world think they're right.

Yeah. Or they're aware that they don't care about anybody else and they think that's fine. We have a president. Yeah. But he's sure he's right about everything everyone is that's what's so maddening also not just this is not just to be cycle you know it's more dramatic to have two people who think they're right arguing with each other when i see a movie and the villain is cackling that with glee you know laughing because he's so evil i'm like this doesn't do anything for me it's not it's weak right he's not real it's much more frustrating to deal with somebody else's alternate reality

than it is to deal with someone who agrees with you that that they're no good yeah uh and so it makes for better drama i think and when you're directing what do you how do you as a writer you know what is what's your approach to directing? Because you're pretty straight ahead and it's beautiful and you do have an appreciation, obviously, of the environment, but is it there to service the writing and the characters in a basic way or do you approach direction with some sort of craft in your head? My whole goal was to make it as vivid and lifelike as possible um whatever the story may be that's that's what i

enjoy doing so i'm you know to me the environment is really it's such a presence everywhere you go like the room we're in now or just my drive up here just when when we go out into this noisy horror outside i don't know what the hell's going on out there it's just well it's just daily life now but like or but if you get in a car and drive an hour you're suddenly in the some you're out of new york there's a sky opens up you could be in one of these depressed little towns in new york in new york state you could be in the hamptons where it's very zhuzhi yeah uh and it's just suddenly different and the environment really seeps into everything and i'm really you know for some whatever reason i'm always really interested in the physical environment uh that that the characters are in so that's one way to kind of

bring the material to life also you know life is very specific there's no real such thing as a generality in the world everything is very concrete and specific so sometimes so my way into these stories is to be as specific as possible um means doing a certain amount of research uh and thinking as accurately and vividly as you can about the people and what's happening in the room between them um and some of it you comes to you as if by magic even though it isn't and some of it you have to work on and figure out and kind of plod through till you come up with something that you like and what's your approach to you know actors pretty much the same you know i have an idea of the story that i think works because i wouldn't have considered the script finished until I do. And then when we're working on the scenes,

you kind of tell them your version and hope they can use that as a jumping off point. And most of the time they can. And then there are things that I know are happening in the scene that if they don't pick up on, I will point out to them. And then there are always things that they know that I never thought of. And that's the fun of working with actors, is that they bring so much to it, so much more to it than I could. So it's fully collaborative in your mind. Very much so. Yeah.

I mean, without them, there's nothing. And it's one thing to imagine all these things happening and all these people, and it's another thing to actually embody them and become them. And what they have to do is is tremendously difficult and interesting and i just try to you know like for instance if there's a couple and i've written them as insulting each other and they're meant to get along well uh sometimes people who are not naturally sarcastic and mean like i am will make a little smile after they insult their their imaginary spouse or brother or sister or parent right in a scene and i will say listen i think you're close enough that you don't have to make you don't have to make it clear that

it's a joke you've known you've known each other for 10 years and when you kid around there's no need to soften it by by smiling and me, that suggests a greater intimacy. And that's something that anyone can understand. And they'll stop smiling, and something will spark between them that wasn't there before. So that's the kind of thing I might say. And then other times, if it's going well, I don't say anything. And Casey wasn't the original guy? No.

Matt Damon was going to play the lead, and then his schedule got too tight, and we could have either delayed for two years or gone ahead with Casey, and Matt and I both agreed Casey was a great idea if Matt couldn't do it, so we offered it to Casey, and luckily he was able to do it. It's kind of hard to imagine in any other way. They're both great actors.

Yeah, that's the funny thing that happens. You write it, and you can put various people in it in your head and then when someone really comes and embodies it you it's hard to imagine anybody else doing it when you're shooting that those scenes like i'm sure the one scene that you probably talked a lot about was that scene with michelle williams and when they when they first see each other after all those years yeah i mean when you're on set and you see that thing unfold it had to it's great you know more than anything you could have ever imagined yeah it is and they're just you know they're just both so good and they i think about it so much it's a great scene and

you know i i like the writing in the scene but the performances are what makes it and it's just really they're so alive and the situation is so painful and they're so they're trying so hard to again you know i think the scene would have been less good if one of them you know one thing people like to write a lot is fights arguments you watch tv and they're and they're always aren't or any movie you know they always start out they're snapping each other they're always arguing and i'm like and it's just easy to write a fight scene and i and and i think that it that people don't fight that much or that openly in real life. They do, of course, but they do a lot of other things, too. These two characters are really trying to be nice to each other,

but they're at terrible odds and they can't connect. She's desperate to connect and he's desperate not to, so they can't. But another thing that's happening is they're both very conscious of not trying to hurt each other. And I think that's kind of what makes the scene so strong because they're both, the way they both perform it is so, there's the conflict between what they want to do and how they're trying not to wound each other

and doing it is impossible to sustain. He eventually has to walk away. I think it's great. I love how they do it. And it's very exciting on the set to watch that happening. How many times did you have to do it? We did a few takes. We had two cameras.

Yeah. We scheduled it for half a day because we knew it was a big scene. That's a long time for a movie like that. And we did, I think we probably did about five takes. So you'd have one, you'd have Kate over Michelle's shoulders shooting Casey, and then also two shot at the same time, and then the reverse. See, now I feel bad for what I said about comedy earlier, because I realize that when you say that there's not that much difference

or any difference between drama and comedy is that in a piece of work that if there are laughs in something like you do, they're earned and they're completely within context. Where you write something like Analyze This or whatever, you know, you're writing jokes. But when I think about the relationship between Casey's character and, you know, his brother's son. Yeah. There's a lot of comedy there yeah there is and it's but it comes yeah i i hope that there is yeah no definitely but like you look at somebody like scorsese yeah who writes you know who who makes these films about these very violent extreme but he loves extremity and behavior and his his movies are incredibly funny there's people are

so far out even if they're even if they're these ruthless murderers right it's really funny somehow because he's so enamored of extreme behavior you look at stanley kubrick whose movies are not thought of as being particularly funny except for like dr strangelove which is a flat-out comedy he's got this incredible sense of humor i don't know what it is it's a sense of irony or just this strange like i don't know but so a. It's a sense of irony or just this strange, like, I don't know. But so a lot of people do this, you know, Pedro Almodovar, the great Spanish director, movies are incredibly funny and incredibly moving. And there's just, it doesn't, it's, it's not that thing where it's funny and then there's a serious scene and then

it goes back to being funny. It's all woven in together. It's not shtick. No. Which is what was, which is sort of makes sense that, you know, that, that analyze this got so far away from you because there are scenes in there that are so sticky that I have to respect them as schtick. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with schtick. I love it.

It's, it's, it's great. I mean, my, but like, look at a show like the Honeymooners, which is the single greatest television show ever, in my opinion. And it's really funny, but there's a real, their relationships in it are very real and it's really funny but there's a real their relationships in it are very real and it's not character the characters are great and they're really believable even though it is essentially a sitcom and uh i think it all it all goes together very well uh so what was your experience with the you know in terms of where you're at now and what you can do with, with the accolades you have won Academy Awards, not nothing.

No, but, uh, but in terms of like, I'm curious about the experience, what held up Margaret so long? It's a very long story. It's not very interesting,

but it was essentially, um, it was a very difficult movie to edit. It would have been any way it was. It's a very different kind of movie. It's a very unusual structure, and the length is, it really needed to be longer than it was contracted for. And that was the fulc to them at the right length or that it would be good at the right length. They wanted me to get it in on schedule at the right length, which was two and a half hours, and have me be happy with it. And I tried really hard to do all three things, and I couldn't. And I was able to keep it on schedule. There was a series of contracted extensions, but that sounds stupid because it took five years to do but it was all

mutually agreed upon delays um and it just got it just built up from there we didn't trust each other we didn't like each other they didn't give me the leeway i needed to complete the film because they didn't trust me and i couldn't understand that they that that wasn't something they wanted to do because my feeling was if they just leave me alone, I would get it done and it would be really good. The one thing they didn't want to do was leave me alone. They tried everything but that. And even after we'd been fighting for two years, they'd say, what can we do?

I'd say, leave me alone. And they'd say, why would it be different now? I said, because you've never tried it. Yeah. And so it just, nobody would back down. It was impossible, as it turned out, to give the film to them at the length they wanted and have it be any good. I didn't know that when I started. They thought I was conspiring the whole time to give it to them at a longer length.

It wasn't. And it just built on from there. And there are many chapters to that story. I would take all that. But you're happy with the director's cut? I'm very happy with the extended version. It's still not exactly what I would have wanted. There's some music there that I don't like.

There's some edits there that I don't like. It's much, much better than the other version. It's much closer to what I wanted. It's about, I'd say, about 80% of what it should be, and usually I like to get up to 90, 95%. So Manchester by the sea is a 95 90 90 i think it i think it's about 10 minutes that could come out of it and there's a couple of things in it that i don't love but mostly i think it's really pretty much why are those things in it

because you lose it's hard to you know you have you have to you have to finish it you know you can't keep tinkering with it first of all you, you can't, if you keep, there's a point at which you get to where your fixes start to make it worse. And you don't understand why, but once that happens, it's really time to lock it down. It was further along in earlier cuts than I realized. I spent about six months making really minute changes

that didn't make it better. And then after that six months, you have to release it. There's a release date. You can't keep screwing around with it forever. And you're not confident that your fixes are going to make it any better. So that 10% is inexplicable to you in the sense that you don't know what the solution is. No. Well, that's an acceptance.

Yeah. Yeah. That it's out of your hands. It's out of your hands to a certain degree. When it was in your hands. Yeah. It's the same with writing a script like you you can see where it needs work you keep working on it and then at some point the balance tips and you see that you're making it worse so you have to stop even though some of it's still not satisfactory so there's no get there's no being satisfied no i'm very sad i'm i think i'm more satisfied with most

of my work than most of my friends who do the same thing. I'm, you know, I'm really happy with, you can count on me, I'm really happy with Manchester. A little, I have a couple of little quibbles with it. You can count on me, I have two quibbles with it exactly. There's just two scenes that I'm not crazy about. I cut one scene that I should have kept in and I changed one shot that I should have left the way it was. But you don't wake up at night thinking. No, but I'm always annoyed when I watch it. When it comes on.

Yeah, but I'm very happy with my plays. I don't think they're perfect, but I think they're mostly really good, and I like the way they've been performed, so I'm pretty satisfied. I'd love to see a production of Lobby Hero, but I haven't. Yeah, it was a really good one last year. Yeah, I don't think it's possibly completely satisfied, especially over time when you get a lobby hero, but I haven't. Yeah, it was a really good one last year. Yeah, I don't think it's possibly completely satisfied, especially over time when you get a little better, hopefully, at your job or you're a different person.

And it's just, you know, working on this stuff is like a question of stepping in and stepping back. And eventually, you know, you're up close working on it and then you step back to look at the whole thing and you see it a little differently. But at some point as you get older, you accept what you've done and you can see that that's where you were in your life

and that those issues, has it ever happened where you've had issues with something and you realize, well, no, it actually is okay. Yeah, many times. Yeah, you kind of, these details start to loom very large in your mind and then you realize, all the time. I mean, that's partly why it's difficult to edit

because your mood changes so you look at one scene you're like this is a disaster or you're worried someone else is going to think it's a disaster and then you look at it a week later and you're like oh it's fine or but as a playwright yeah i mean if you wanted to you could go in and in this new production of the waverly garrulery you, you could change it. Yeah, you can. I mean, there are three or four things I would cut from this script, but I'm not that confident I'm right. And part of that's because you're different when you're really connected to it to the point where you're able to work on it. And it may be superstition and it may be wrong,

but I have, for most of my working life, tried to respect what I was doing at the time and understand that I couldn't do it now. Just because I was at a different place psychologically. I was really in the groove of whatever that project was. And I maybe don't know as much now about it as I did then. The feelings are different. The feelings are different and the insight is different. And I have a different view of it because now it's's different it's not something i'm working on by myself other people have been involved other people have seen it it has it's it's sort of

it's become a different animal and what was your involvement with uh with gangs in new york that was a really good time for me i i uh they had been through three writers the last guy who worked on it his name was Hossein Amini who's a really good writer and he was only able to come in and do some patchwork on it and then he had to go off and they asked me to come at the very last minute and rewrite some of the characters and dialogue and

I'd just gotten married they flew my wife and I to Rome, my wife and me to Rome and we lived in Rome for three months and I went to the studio in Chinatown every day and worked with Scorsese and Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio, and it was really fun. I love period stuff. I'm really interested in the Civil War.

The whole set was just incredible to be on. It was blocks and blocks and blocks of this reconstruction of 19th century New York City slums. It was just incredible, and we just had a really good time everybody else was freaking out about the movie and i was having a blast yeah it's like uh exciting yeah it was really exciting yeah i now in in those moments because i'm i'm shooting i have a very small part in the joker movie so yeah so i'm going over this first time i've met de niro yeah of course and i'm doing a scene with him for like third 40 seconds it's cool

but it's like it's something else yeah yeah but like like even in watching them work i mean was something planted in your brain about that process and about working with actors and about directing or were you just so thrilled to be there that you didn't really weren't looking at it that way no a little of both i mean you can't help but absorb what's happening around you. You know, this was a big, big movie. And to watch him, Marty, like, I call him Marty. Everyone calls him Marty. I'm not showing off. I haven't seen him for a while, but we got to be pretty friendly.

Yeah, he's been really, really good to me. And I just, I love him. But he, to watch him manipulate all the elements of this enormous production and to keep his eye on it and to not just the production but the people and the you know the whole thing and to design these shots i didn't get to see him working with the actors too much because he would basically go off and talk to them quietly so i didn't never knew what he was saying to them but um kind of watch him riding the performances from the monitor in the editing room later, and it was fascinating.

And just watching the different way the actors approach the parts and the process of doing the rewrites was interesting. How so? Well, I'd mostly done rewrites. I'd never done rewrites on the set. I was rewriting about two weeks ahead of the schedule, which was pretty intense. And he just had this really good system.

I'd meet with him and the actor involved, and we'd all talk about the scene and what was wrong with it and what they wanted. Was Daniel Day-Lewis in character all the time? He did that voice all the time. Yeah. But he seemed to me to be very nice, and the character isn't very nice. Right. on the weekends he dropped the accent and he told me later that he

he had two you know i don't know if his first second son had been born yet but he had a kid at home and he didn't want to come home and be this sinister bill the butcher which he would have done before he had children so he said it was the first role he ever did just put his wife through that yeah i'll just put it exactly just wife through it. So anyway, so we'd sit there and we'd talk about the scene and then I'd go off. I'd show it to Marty. When Marty and I were happy, we'd show it to the actor and then everyone, it was just sort of a very good system of circulating everyone's notes until everyone was happy. So where's your, what areas of your brain are sparking now in terms of what you're writing now where

you're headed uh well i have a screenplay i'm interested in and i'm trying to get off the ground and i have a play an original screenplay i have a play that i would really like to write i have no idea if i can or not um and uh because it's very it would be quite a challenge to try to put it together it's a if i ever to put it together. If I ever write it, it's a historical piece. What period? Fourth century. I don't know what that is. It's the late Roman Empire.

It's the fourth century A.D., and I don't have any idea how to put it on a stage, and I probably won't be able to do it, but it's a period I've gotten really interested in lately why I don't know I was always interested in history I was always interested in Roman history among many other periods like medieval history like 19th century history like you're gonna write in that dialogue you can't write dialogue from in you can't write I can't write fourth century Latin or Greek, so no. But that's one of the problems is how do they talk? Yeah.

One of the many, many problems. I don't think I can do it, but I'm learning a lot about the period. What kind of human story can you place then that you can't place now? Oh, well, it's a totally different world. It's like saying what kind of human story can you place in the deep south that you can't place in Soviet Russia soviet russia i mean it's that you can like they place shakespeare in all kinds of different environments sure maybe it maybe it has to be done in a modern way i really have no idea uh-huh it's very i mean i don't even

want to say it's early in the process because i don't know if there's going to be a process and where's what world is the screenplay well i you know the truth is i'm a little uncomfortable talking about stuff i haven't written because I don't want to talk it away. Yeah, right. That happens, right? It does happen. You keep talking about it. It's like it's done in your head.

There's nothing left to do. Yeah. So what do you do during the day? Just write? I try to write. I do crossword puzzles. I read. Yeah.

Do you freak out? Sometimes. Yeah? In an internal way. How are you handling the world? It's horrible. I don't know. I don't know what to do about it.

I think about it a lot. I'm probably not as active about it as some people. I don't know what to do about it. It's pretty bad. It's a little hard to know how bad it is. That's one scary thing about it. Because I have a friend who we had an argument, a pretty casual argument, because I said, I'm not so sure, he said, this is the worst administration, this is the worst presidential crisis we've ever had,

and I said, I'm not sure that's true. It's happening to us right now. I don't know how bad it's going to get. It's very bad now, but I don't know if this is going to, you know, if you think about if you had been, you know, if we had been alive and grown up in 1969-70, the world looked pretty grim then. We had this terrible war. The whole country was a series of assassinations, terrible problems, riots every summer, bombs going off everywhere. It must have looked like a complete collapse to people at the time. And he said that he didn't agree. He didn't think nixon was as bad

as trump and i don't know if he's right or not we're not in a war we're not in a major war there's all these small there's all these smaller horrible conflicts all over the globe we're not in a big major war uh we're not in the middle of an economic crisis we're not having riots and race riots and all kinds of other rights we don't have we don't have the police gunning down union workers. There's a lot that's not happening that has happened. It doesn't mean that it's not going to get very bad, but I don't know. And the other thing is I was going to say,

you also look at the most extreme example you can think of, the rise of the Nazis and their consolidation of power. You say, why didn't the Jews leave as soon as Hitler came to power? Well, they didn't know how bad it was going to get. It happens in increments. So you don't really know what we're up against yet. And some people... So you're saying it's going to be hard to know when to leave?

It's hard to know what to do or how... I mean, I think the thing to do is to agitate and try to vote vote out the right rabid conservative cynics that are in power now and you've got to try to find some way to find some kind of civilized accommodation with all the people who violently disagree with each other i don't know how to do any of that but and it's got to be done but i in terms of just prognosticating about how bad things are going to get or how bad this is in the big picture i don't really know it's quite bad but as an artist like right there what you said like you know like it would seem that on on some level it doesn't necessarily seem that this is your starting point for for creativity but you know bridging the gap between you know these ideological

tribes yeah seems to be rich territory and and obviously a lot of people talk about it yeah and and i guess some people would say well i'm going to to confront that or or explore it through characters and that's not the way your brain works you know you can only write about what you can write about you might want to write about lots of things but i'm not you know there's some things you're better at and some things you do more naturally and I don't know you like to think that any kind of connection that people make through fiction with other people is valuable even if it's just to give people I mean and I don't I think there's a value in entertainment you know people some people think it's a narcotic and I

suppose it is but I think there's some you know people need to have something to watch on TV when they come home or to read about or to go to the movies or to go to a play. Arguably too much. You know, I know, but it's not something you'd want to do without. And I, you want people to think and have a real experience, at least I do, when they go to see my work uh and i don't know how i do think there's some value in trying to understand somebody whose point of view is totally different from yours i don't know that you get that a lot in entertainment i think you get a lot of you know where's where's the right wing point of view in the entertainment world it simply doesn't exist and i'm'm not... Some fallen stars on Twitter

who people assume have gone bad. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I often wonder, I've wondered for many years, way before Trump, what had this idea of putting on a really right-wing oriented play in New York City

and seeing how tolerant all my tolerant friends were to another ideology. Like a totally jingoistic play? I don't know, just something that presented a conservative point of view as reasonably as possible.

And I know they'd go insane. So I think there's a lot of stretching that needs to be done on both sides. I do think you're right. I think there's a tribalistic aspect. I mean, frankly, none of us want Trump to do well at anything. We just want him gone because he's so awful. So I would bet that most of my friends, including us, I assume you have the same, since you're in show business,

I assume you have a similar political ideology. But the fact is I get a little depressed when I read how good the economy is because I don't think about all the benefits that are accruing for people. I think it's going to make him more popular. The bad one is winning. That's a really unhealthy attitude. He would agree with you. It is unhealthy.

People on the left are every bit as knee-jerk and regimented in their thinking as people on the right. They're not as disciplined and they're not as focused and they don't have a long-term view that they engage that's correct and i we try and we hope that our values are better but so do people on the right i

don't i'm not a relativist i don't think it's all the same thing but um you know people on the right can't understand why how we can feel that we're moral when we're against every single thing that that he does but to us i think it's not a quite he's not something that should be tolerated he's a he's he's a he's he's a very very bad guy it's a pathological liar i mean i don't have to go into all right for this audience especially i don't have to go into the whole story but so how tolerant are you how tolerant should you be of mccarthyism not at all is the argument but then you're accused of picking on everything poor old joe mccarthyism not at all is the argument but then you're accused of picking on everything poor old joe mccarthy says but he was a self-serving climbing liar

he didn't even believe anything he was saying yeah so but so none of that conversation that you just we just had you know including uh putting on this this uh this play this uh play that's empathetic and sensitive to a conservative viewpoint, engages you enough to rise to the occasion? I think about it all the time. As I say, you can only write what you can write about. I have not seen very many plays, movies, or read very many books that have a specific political message that they're trying to convey that are any good right to me i think that's journalism essays speeches conversation

people i'm not here to make a point because if i'm making a point through the medium of a drama yeah or a comedy unless i'm very clever I have a really good point to make, I'm essentially using the people in the story as puppets to disguise the fact that I'm putting forth some kind of particular ideology. Right, I understand that. And if I have something to say that's a declarative sentence, I'm better off just saying it instead of spending two hours pretending some other people are saying making up a shallow character

well it's great talking to you man oh you too thanks a lot yeah thanks for doing it my pleasure that was good i enjoyed talking to that man. Again, his play, The Waverly Gallery, with Elaine May and others, is playing at the Golden Theater through the end of January. Guitar, sure. Boomer lives! Discover the timeless elegance of Cozy, where furniture meets innovation. Designed in Canada, the sofa collections are not just elegant, they're modular, designed to adapt and evolve with your life. Reconfigure them anytime for a fresh look or a new space.

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