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| Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration starring Jeremy Pope as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Bettany as Andy Warhol at the Manhattan Theatre Club Samuel J Friedman Theatre Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
Acclaimed screenwriter, playwright, novelist, and producer Anthony McCarten (BAFTA wins for The Theory Of Everything on Stephen Hawking, nominations for The Two Popes on Pope Benedict XV and Pope Francis, Bohemian Rhapsody on Freddie Mercury, Darkest Hour on Winston Churchill, and four Oscar nominations) has two shows that have recently opened on Broadway (A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical starring Will Swenson and Mark Jacoby as Diamond, directed by Michael Mayer and The Collaboration with Jeremy Pope as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Bettany as Andy Warhol, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah), and the biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody (starring Naomi Ackie with Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, directed by Kasi Lemmons) in cinemas globally.
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| Anthony McCarten with Anne-Katrin Titze from a Manhattan restaurant: “During the early years of the 2000s I was something of a name as a novelist in Germany.” |
In Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes, screenplay by McCarten, starring Anthony Hopkins (Pope Benedict XVI) and Jonathan Pryce (Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to become Pope Francis) a failed phone call from Vatican City to book a flight to Lampedusa forms a clever framing device which already mirrors the tone of what is to come.
The film is totally captivating when when Pryce and Hopkins simply talk and react to each other. Beyond the formalities of their positions, the differing standpoints and backgrounds, these two Popes really, carefully try to understand the other as a human being, which is rare to see these days, in the cinema and beyond. The two men discuss questions of faith and compare what they like to watch on TV to relax (Kommissar Rex, an Austrian crime series starring a dog detective, and soccer, respectively).
What starts out as a verbal ping-pong match - "You make us look bad because we don't live simple enough." "Can you ever live simple enough?" - turns to a checklist of hot Vatican topics: Celibacy, homosexuality, women, and who can receive communion. That "mercy is the dynamite that blows down walls" they can agree on.
The camerawork (by César Charlone) and the editing (by Fernando Stutz) go hand-in-hand with or comment on what words express. Cuts to the Golden Calf, the red shoes, the child-like eating of the pizza with bottles of Fanta, or a candle with the smoke rising, all provide meaning with ease, casually and poignantly. There is a marvellous twist about the voice of God and naturally, from time to time, we become aware that what we are watching is fiction. Still, maybe because of that freedom of invention, the story works, as "the truth is vital, but without love it's unbearable."
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| Anthony McCarten on The Two Popes Fanta scene: “The reason why Benedict drank Fanta was because Coke was banned during World War II.” |
On Wednesday, December 28, 2022, Pope Francis announced that retired Pope Benedict XVI, age 95, was “very ill.”
Other films may briefly flicker into your mind - Wim Wenders' documentary portrait Pope Francis: A Man Of His Word, addressing climate change, for instance, or François Ozon's By The Grace Of God about the church abuse scandals, or Gianfranco Rosi's masterful Fire At Sea by the mere mention of Lampedusa.
In the first installment with Anthony we discuss The Two Popes as the beginning of his worship trilogy, which includes Basquiat and Warhol (The Collaboration film directed by Kwei-Armah is in post production) as the second, and the relationship between Warren Buffett and Bill Gates as the third. He told me about growing up in a small New Zealand town, his fame in Germany, and “thinking there is a little of Andy in all of us.”
From at first inside a midtown Manhattan restaurant and then from his hotel, Anthony McCarten joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation with a spot-on impersonation of Andy Warhol.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi!
Anthony McCarten: Hello, hello! Good morning!
AKT: Gee, two plays on Broadway!
AMC [impersonating Andy Warhol]: Oh my god, wow! How did that ever happen? I didn’t even plan for it! That’s kind of crazy!
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| Paul Bettany as Andy Warhol and Jeremy Pope as Jean-Michel Basquiat in Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration Photo: Jeremy Daniel |
AKT: How do you relate to Andy? How often do you say “gee”? I counted eleven times in the play.
AMC: I think there’s a little Andy in all of us. A little Andy is good for us. It’s the unexpected response to something. He’s capable of just popping the balloon of what we think about celebrity and what it means and the value we ascribe to it. When I read him more and more he’s constantly surprising. Certainly his intellect was always bouncing around, kind of avoiding, but kind of brilliant at the same time.
AKT: I think “gee” should definitely come back.
AMC: Let’s bring it back!
AKT: This play, The Collaboration, is part of your worship trilogy. What is your connection to worship? Did you ever worship anyone?
AMC: I worship the three things the worship trilogy is about. Religion - I was brought up in an intensely religious family. I’ve sort of sloughed off some of that religiosity in its formal sense. But it stays with you in terms of a kind of world view. You know, this idea of something more mysterious out there than what can be assigned to the laws of physics.
And money we’re all enthralled with in one way or another to a lesser or greater extent. And art - I devoted my life to it. So it was the natural name for the trilogy. It’s a sort of unifying word that links them all. The conception emerged not with an idea of three, but I did one and then another with similar themes here. It’s again a dispute between polar opposites within the same metier.
AKT: Were there any specific people you admired growing up?
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| A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical at the Broadhurst Theatre, book by Anthony McCarten Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AMC: You know, I was born in a small town in a very small country very very far away. Sounds like the beginning of a Tolkien novel, doesn’t it? Oddly enough it became the land of Tolkien later on with The Lord Of The Rings. But New Zealand is very far-flung and if you have as big an imagination as I had or at least a kind of wanderlust, any kind of curiosity about the world, then you start to find lives that would conform to a more spectacular idea of what a life can be.
So I started reading about great lives. And lives well-lived. And how we find meaning and purpose and a sense of mission. And I began a journey, a physical one, traveling away from my homeland, but also an imaginative journey. And I’m still on it.
AKT: I loved The Two Popes. Especially the touches with Benedict, something very Bavarian. I read that you lived in Munich for a while?
AMC: I did, yeah. During the early years of the 2000s I was something of a name as a novelist in Germany. My books were selling well there. Not necessarily anywhere else, but they were selling well in Germany. So I did book tours. For years I toured every city, every little town and hamlet. And my partner of many years is from Germany, she’s a Münchner. I spent a lot of time in Munich and fell in love with German culture.
AKT: So for Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Benedict XVI] you could definitely profit from your Munich experiences?
AMC: Yeah definitely. My partner’s father actually worked under Benedict. He had a few stories as well. From him I got the Fanta detail. The reason why Benedict drank Fanta was because Coke was banned during World War II. I don’t know why Fanta was exempt, but it was.
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| The Collaboration has been extended to January 29, 2023. |
This is when Anthony leaves the restaurant and rejoins me 20 minutes later on Zoom from his hotel to continue our conversation.
AKT: Tell me more about the Benedict connection!
AMC: I was with my girlfriend and we were in Rome on vacation. A cousin of mine had died and my sister said, if I’m near a church I should go and light a candle. And as I was in Rome, I thought I’ll go straight to the source, I’ll go to Saint Peter’s Square. But there was high security and I found that Pope Francis was delivering an open-air mass that day.
And I stood in the square with Eva and I asked her “So we’ve got one Pope up here, but there’s another one.” And she said “Yeah, he lives in a convent, sequestered, just having a life of prayer.” And I said “But he’s still the Pope. When was the last time there were two Popes living at the same time?” She didn’t know the answer so I googled it. It was 700 years. And I thought why in this moment are we living with this extraordinary situation? And the play came out of that.
AKT: Doubling works very well. Multiple Popes, multiple soup cans!
AMC: I like repetition. There is a similar template for all three works, that’s for sure.
AKT: And for Neil Diamond as well, Neil Diamond then, Neil Diamond now. The conversation between them?
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| The Collaboration and A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical playbills Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
AMC: Exactly, that’s a dialogue with your own past. Another form of dispute.
A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical is on at the Broadhurst Theatre.
The Collaboration at the Manhattan Theatre Club Samuel J. Friedman Theatre has been extended to January 29, 2023.
Coming up - Anthony McCarten on the book for A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical and more on The Collaboration.
Coming up - Michael Mayer on Anthony McCarten, A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical, and a connection to Hollywood films from the 30s and 40s.
