No Doubt About It!

[Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series on the forthcoming film version of Doubt. For interviews with the film’s cast, including Meryl Streep, click here.]

Even if you’ve seen the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt on stage — either on Broadway or on tour — the soon-to-be-released film version of this tale of a nun who is convinced that her parish priest is a pedophile is a very different experience, due to the work of adapter and director John Patrick Shanley (who wrote the play) and his hand-chosen cast led by Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn, Amy Adams as Sister James, and Viola Davis as Mrs. Miller.

Shanley is no stranger to screenwriting — he earned an Oscar for Moonstruck — but found that turning his play into a film was a difficult task. “I got to page 50 of the screenplay, and I hated every single page,” he says with a laugh. “That has never happened to me before, and it was just horrible. Then I got to Father Flynn’s sermon about gossip, the one with the feathers and the pillows, and I thought, well I can make that cinematic. [The scene now includes actress Marylouise Burke as the woman mentioned in the sermon.] And once I got that scene to work, I went back to page one and I started to solve all the problems in a micro way, to open up the film as it needed to be, so it didn’t feel claustrophobic. But I knew being cinematic didn’t mean, we’ll just put these people on a bus.”

The “opening up” is extremely prominent from the film’s first scene, as Flynn is giving his sermon about doubt to a packed church, and we first spy Sister Aloysius as she walks up the church’s aisle, chastising unruly children. “I realized I had to put in a major entrance for her so that you saw two people coming up, getting ready for battle, because that’s what this move is about,” he says. “It’s not about the church — in fact, I kept having the production designer remove all the crucifixes — and I’m not particularly interested in pedophilia as a subject. I am interested in the idea of doubt and the ramifications of living with that.”

The film marks Shanley’s first directorial effort since the much-maligned 1990 film Joe Versus the Volcano, but he didn’t hesitate when the film’s producer, Scott Rudin, suggested he take on the task. “I just felt it was inevitable, and I was finding that I was ready to do another film,” he says. “But I felt that we really need a few weeks of rehearsal, because so much of the material is very dense and with significant amounts of blocking — such as the scene where they’re having tea in Sister Aloysius’ office and the final confrontation — that it would ruin a whole day of shooting if we had just done it then and there for the first time. I think it would have been a disaster, and in the end, everyone is very happy we had that process.”

As Shanley notes, his primary cast “had real stage chops,” so they were comfortable with the rehearsal. But given that two of the show’s original cast members, Cherry Jones and Adriane Lenox, won Tony Awards, and it’s other pair, Brian O’Byrne and Heather Goldenhersh, received Tony nominations, why did he choose new actors? “Doug Hughes directed the play — and he did it very well — but I had no desire to lift his work and call it my own or take his cast and try to replicate what had been done on stage. That never works. I was very interested in finding talented people who would bring something to the movie and do something totally different. I know there’s not a molecule in common between Phil and Brian, and Meryl and Cherry are totally different creatures.”

The casting process, however, started with a phone call. “Scott called and asked me who I wanted to play Sister Aloysius, and I said ‘Meryl Streep,’ and he said ‘Me too.’ So he called her and we arranged to have lunch. I had the screenplay with me and we were talking about the movie, and I told her that one of the characters in the film was going to be the wind, and she said ‘oh, I love the wind.” And I thought nobody loves the wind, she wants to do this movie.”

Adams wasn’t his first choice for Sister James; Natalie Portman was originally offered the role. “She kept saying she was interested but there was a problem, and I finally nailed down the problem — she basically didn’t understand the idea of celibacy,” says Shanley. “So Amy went out of her way to come to New York City and let it be known why she was there — which was to get this part.”

Hoffman, on the other hand, was on the top of Shanley’s wish list. “I said I was thinking of Philip for Father Flynn, and Meryl said, ‘great, he’s like my brother,'” he notes. “I knew I had to put somebody up against her who would make her sweat, because if I didn’t, I knew she would wipe the floor with him. And I wanted someone who I didn’t know what he would do, who would surprise me — because anything that would surprise me would surprise Meryl, and she needed that. And that’s what happened. She was extremely competitive with him in the room. Before a take, she would be muttering that she was going to kick his ass — and they really went at each other. And we ended up with these very complex, multicolored scenes. Phil is truly one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met who has chosen to become an actor.”