William Monahan's screenplay for The Departed, which is up for four Oscars tomorrow, draws on his Boston Irish memories and Elizabethan revenge dramas, writes Patricia Danaher
William Monahan sums up the story of his multi-Oscar-nominated movie The Departedas being the mindset of old Boston Irish, where you never dare to change your life in case you're thought to be putting on airs.
"I'm Irish," says the character Colin Sullivan, played by Matt Damon. "I'll just deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life."
This variation on the joke about how many Irish mothers it takes to change a light bulb (don't mind me, I'll just sit in the dark) permeates this darkly comic film and has propelled its writer into the stratosphere. "The audience usually laughs when they hear that line," says Monahan. "But growing up in Boston, I saw so many Boston Irish people condemned to think of themselves as locked or fixed in the condition they found themselves. Boston is a place where you can get a sense of the world as a tenement of dust, where if you're just making a living, that should be enough for you. Funnily enough, the New England Puritan reserve has elements of that too and the two come together weirdly there."
THIS COULD NOT be farther from the truth for how Monahan sees his lot, particularly given the roll he is on right now before the Oscars are handed out. His adaptation of the Hong Kong cult movie Infernal Affairsis up for four Oscars, including best adapted screenplay, and may even deliver Martin Scorsese his long-denied Oscar for best director. He is slightly bemused at all the attention he is getting and at the fact that Warner Brothers have appointed him his own publicist. "I keep thinking I should be at home in Boston, pissed off with people and things."
Although he has not yet visited Ireland, he is a keen reader of most Irish literature, describing Flann O'Brien as his favourite writer. He cracks up at a remembered Mylesian line from The Brother. "'The brother couldn't look at an egg' remains my favourite line."
The Departedis steeped in themes of Elizabethan revenge drama, from the bloodfest finale to the jaunty rat which appears, representing the equivalent Jacobean clown who would come on stage after the blood-letting. "We had a lot of arguments with the studio in Hollywood over the fact that lead actors get killed in The Departed, but it was really not negotiable and for an Elizabethan wonk like myself, the bloodbath at the end was extremely satisfying."
He was also pleased to read that a writer on the internet pointed out that the last cop who survives in The Departedis called Dignam, as is the first person to die in Ulysses.
"That was not intentional on my part, but I was gratified to see this link made. Although I haven't been to Ireland yet, Irish literature has formed a huge part of me."
The Monahan ancestors arrived in Boston from Roscommon at the end of the American Civil War, travelling via Newfoundland. They did not look back on the old country with any romance or affection. "We were not the kind of family that got off on our Irish heritage the way some Irish Americans do, which is often all just shamrocks and bullsh*t. My father took a pretty dim view of Ireland. I think a lot of Boston Irish were the way they were because of the tough time of it they had, trying to knock the Ascendancy out of their way."
He has spoken frequently of the Boston Irish lack of ambition, for fear of being seen to have notions beyond your station, but thinks this died with his fathers' generation.
"His generation were products of the ghetto and although he was brilliant and imaginative, he would never allow himself to make the connection between his imagination and his endeavour. He worked as an engineer and could have gone farther, but he was happy with just three hots and a cot [ three meals and a bed]."
But he did not try to stop his son's ambition, although he did recommend he become an electrician even after his first novel was published.
Monahan's grandfather was appointed a clerk to the court in Boston by the colourful, corrupt and larger-than-life mayor James Curley, on whom the Spencer Tracy movie The Last Hurrahwas based.
"My grandfather was given life tenure when he was appointed in 1927, and he was still working there in 1983." This same grandfather, who had a major influence on young William, was also heavily involved as an organiser in the Democratic party in Massachusetts.
"The appearance of the Kennedys on the political scene made all Irish people in Boston feel like rock stars. Suddenly people would say to us, 'you talk like a Kennedy'. It was a far cry from the usual low self-esteem. I was born in 1960 and see myself and my world view as part of the break with the old world-view that characterised my father's and grandfather's sense of themselves. I am hugely ambitious for myself."
The author of six other screenplays and a novel, he is currently working on another movie with Ridley Scott, a spy movie called Penetration. He has also just acquired the rights to the John Pearson book The Gamblers, based on the life and disappearance of Lord Lucan.
He has also set up his own production company, Henceforth, and has offices on the Warner Brothers lot. Not bad for a kid from Southie.
WORKING WITH MARTIN Scorsese, who has made several mob-based movies, including Gangs of New York, he describes as "becoming part of the Marty process. You could get a phone call at any hour and he sends lots of faxes late at night, as the ideas are flowing."
The shared Catholic heritage also infused much of the movie's motifs, including the title. Even the cops refer to the dead criminals as "the departed" and a Mass card at the beginning of the film reads, "Heaven help the faithful departed".
Monahan says he did very little research for The Departed, as so much of it was drawn from his own backyard.
"Once Brad Pitt had acquired the rights to Infernal Affairs, and we debated where it should be based in the US, I knew it had to be among the Irish in Boston. The Italian mobster drama has been done to death.
"A lot of the gang stuff in the movie had to be laid in afterwards. These mobsters are not people from nature. They are my people.
For the record, he wants it known that Jack Nicholson's character Costello is not based on Boston's most famous modern criminal, Whitey Bulger. Monahan says he deliberately kept these kinds of ambiguities in his script. Costello has an untameable sexuality that Monahan says he doesn't normally associate with elderly Irish American men. But then, Jack Nicholson is no ordinary actor either. "Many of the lines written for his character had a way of becoming uniquely Jack lines. He asked for an opera scene in the movie which becomes a ménage à trois - that was his idea. He wanted a scene with a black and a white woman."
Scorsese has described The Departedas a commentary on the US today, where good and evil are intertwined and self-perpetuating, especially since 9/11. Coincidentally, Monahan was having breakfast with Scott when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers that morning in 2001. They were discussing the script Tripoli, which Monahan had written based on William Eaton's epic march on Tripoli during the Barbary wars. The script was bought by 20th Century Fox for six figures, but although it has never been produced, it helped his screenwriting career to take off.
Scott hired him to write a movie based on the Crusades and he wrote Kingdom of Heaven, which was released in 2005. It was not a critical success and he still smarts at the decision of the studio to cut one hour from the three-hour film before its release. "As far as I'm concerned, if you haven't seen the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, you haven't seen the movie," he says. He has also worked with Scott on the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian.
MONAHAN'S STAR IS most definitely in the ascendant with four Oscar nominations for The Departed: best picture, best director, best screenplay adaptation and best supporting actor (Mark Wahlberg). He has just moved to Los Angeles from his beloved Boston, along with his wife and two children. He was presented with an award on February 22nd by the US-Ireland Alliance at the Oscar Wilde pre-Oscar event, along with Van Morrison and Terry George.
A successful journalist and essayist before committing to screenwriting, Monahan says he is happy adapting work from other sources. His first novel, The Lighthouse: A Triflewas published in 2000 and was optioned for a movie. He became very annoyed with the publishers for not pushing it and took the book off the market three years ago.
"They were waiting for the movie to be made before pushing it. The Bostonian in me got really incensed and withdrew the book. It was emotional and vindictive of me."
He would like to return to the novel in the future, but for now he is really enjoying himself making movies and says he would like to do another crime movie set in Irish American Boston. "I really like the business aspects of film making. You feel like you are really producing something. People often ask me if I think I've sold out in a literary sense by being involved in the movie business. Did the Beatles sell out because they were popular and successful? I've always liked artists who do something great in a popular medium."