On & Backstage: Adapted Screenplay

Posted: Monday, February 26th, 2007 by Michael van Poppel at 12.12 am EDT.

CATEGORY: ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
AWARD RECIPIENT: WILLIAM MONAHAN
FILM: "THE DEPARTED"

ONSTAGE
"There's no place to put this down, huh? Valium does work. Anyway, I was going to cut off the beginning of this speech and make it brief, but I'm gonna leave it back in and say, you know, the movie that made me wanna be a screenwriter was Robert Bolt's Lawrence of Arabia. And I don't know what could've happened in the universe to end up with the same Oscars as Peter O'Toole, you know, so it's crazy. He's here, I've seen him.

So anyway, thanks to the Academy, to Warner Bros., everybody at Warner Bros., Alan Mak and Felix Chong who wrote Infernal Affairs, the producers present and not present, the agents, everybody who made The Departed such a success. Thanks to Marty and Leo for reading the script and calling each other and saying, "Let's make it." And Thelma.

You know, everyone who worked on The Departed was, you know, it's easy to say was at the top of their game before they started, and under Marty's direction it only got higher after that. Thank you very much."

BACKSTAGE
Q. Congratulations on your Oscar.
A. Thank you very much.

Q. How important was getting to Boston to transform this Hong Kong story?
A. Well --

Q. And because Scorsese is so famous for improvising, how much of your script actually stayed in the movie?
A. I was on set and on location through the entire showing and, I don't imagine they would be paying me if there was going to be a whole lot of improv.

Q. Hi. Jeannie Wolf. How much did the actors transform what you thought this movie would be and make you make changes on the set even if it was an improv?
A. Well, actually, Jack, you know, I had written Jack's character originally, as a sort of standard issue, 68 year-old Boston Irish Catholic murderer. And, you know, 68 year-old Irish Catholics in my experience are not so much for sexual prosthesis and cocaine, but Jack wanted to sexualize his character and he did a great, great job.

Q. And the other actors and their characters?
A. Just about the same.

Q. Can you be specific?
A. Well, it was a written script. Okay. Thanks.

Q. Hi. Right here.
A. Okay. I don't have my glasses on. I don't know what's going
on.

Q. Down to your right.
A. Hi.

Q. How are you?
A. Fairly well, thank you.

Q. Better than me right now, I hope.
A. Doing all right.

Q. How did you manage to capture the character of Boston so well because that's why I think the movie was so successful,especially in Boston?A. Well, I'm from there and you know we have never really been well represented, you know, and I remember when I was a kid watching television, you know, you'd see people supposed to be from Boston and they would be out there talking like with the Kennedy's, and the Pepperidge Farm man. We are another country. You know, we are another little civilization and very northern, very dark, sometimes very self denying and you know, that's kind of what I wanted to get into after having spent so much time trying to get out of it.

Q. Congratulations. We have a whole Boston contingent here. I was a reporter there back in the days when Whitey Bulger, and all of those others guys were doing their thing?
A. Congratulations on surviving.

Q. You are so right about that; people look at this movie and oh this is very real. But thinking about that, there was a lot of realism in this story. Did you think about some of those days, the Whitey Bulger days?
A. Very much so. When I started thinking about adapting the Chinese story, it slid into Boston very well because of the existence of that known, you know, that known Whitey Bulger, the corruption, you know. So it just -- the stuff in the Chinese story was actually far less gothic than what was going on in Boston at the time, as you know.

Q. Question, leading out of the Whitey Bulger, do you think he's watching the Oscars somewhere and rooting for the film in some sort of perverted way?
A. I wouldn't wanted to call it perverted if he's watching. No. I don't know. Nobody knows where he is. As a matter of fact, you know, the character wasn't really based on him. It was just the fact that somebody like him existed, you know.

Q. And the follow-up question to that is how important was it to you to truly Americanize and root this film in the Boston milieu, given that it is, you know, a Hong Kong story.
A. Well, I mean, almost every story can happen anywhere, you know. It's just you know you flip it around a little bit and, you know, The Departed is pretty steeped in a very particular society. Internal affairs had a lot to do with Buddhism and that sort of thing and we had a lot to do, you know, with The Departed.

Q. Thank you very much and congratulations?
A. Thank you very much. I'm sorry I couldn't see anybody.