Tom McCarthy, director of the 2016 Best Picture winner 'Spotlight,' says the film hasn't achieved the institutional reform within the Catholic Church that he hoped for nearly a decade after its release. Speaking to Variety on Saturday night at the New York Film Festival, McCarthy reflected on the legacy of the film, which starred Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo and dramatized the Boston Globe's investigation into the Church's systemic cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests.
"I've heard from a lot of people who saw the movie. A lot of people who felt understood after the movie was released," McCarthy said. "Has it caused a lot of change within the Catholic Church? In my opinion, not really. Not enough. It's not enough until every child is safe, as far as I'm concerned. And that's a zero sum game. So, I would like to see more change."
McCarthy's latest film, 'A Statement,' premiered at the festival and stars Paul Rudd leading an ensemble of 20 experts who attempt to agree on a statement to Congress regarding the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate. The film is based on a real 1980 conference in St. Petersburg, Fla., which its opening text describes as "the first meeting dedicated to solving the climate crisis in America." The gathering never reached a consensus, and the source material notes that the debate over carbon emissions still divides American politics nearly 50 years later.
"I'm very proud of ['Spotlight']," McCarthy said. "I think, as filmmakers, our job is to start a conversation, get people thinking about an issue, but draw a light on things. That's what I think we've done with 'Spotlight,' and hopefully, we've done that with 'A Statement.' This movie doesn't preach. There is a right and wrong here, but we want people to come to the table and have that conversation and listen."
'A Statement' was adapted from Nathaniel Rich's 2019 nonfiction book "Losing Earth." At the festival, Rich called the film the "first climate change movie written for adults" and praised it for being "not bombastic," adding that no prior feature film had moved climate change discourse "beyond a kind of polemic into a deeper exploration of the material."
The film's debut coincided with the box office failure of Tom Cruise's "Digger," which Variety critic Owen Gleiberman described as a "bombastically self-important satire" attempting to be "the 'Dr. Strangelove' of climate change." Rich said he hadn't yet seen "Digger" but was curious to.
Paul Rudd, discussing the real-life 1980 meeting his character's story is drawn from, noted that climate action wasn't always a partisan flashpoint. "Everything becomes politicized," Rudd said. "This was not a politicized issue. This [gathering] was really smart people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who realized, 'Oh, this is an existential threat and it is something that we should deal with. Now, how we go about dealing with it, we need to figure that out — but the science is there. We know.'"
In the film, Paul Giamatti plays David Slade, a government director at the Department of Energy, who tells Tatiana Maslany's character near the film's end: "Presidents come and go, but if there's one thing we'll always agree on, it's science." The 1980 conference depicted in the film took place just four days before Ronald Reagan won the presidency.
The film's themes echo current events: on Thursday, 21 states sued the Trump administration over its repeal of federal greenhouse gas regulations for power plants. The Trump-led EPA has argued that eliminating the Biden-era limits will cut costs and increase American energy production, while the Democratic-led coalition of states contends the rollback will undo decades of progress in the fight against climate change.
Photo: Gordon Joly, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
