Diary of a City Priest - Interview with the Director

Q: How did you come upon the story of Father McNamee?

Martin: When my parents were newlyweds in the early 1960's, they lived a block from where Father McNamee was working, at the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, in downtown Philadelphia. Father McNamee used to watch football with my father, and my mother had him christen myself and my brother, even though she was a lapsed Catholic. So, in a way, I've known him all my life, and been around him at various family events like weddings and funerals as I grew up.

Q: Much of the story seems to cover a dark period in Father McNamee's faith. What is he like today?

Martin: In person, everyone calls him Father Mac or simply, John. He's very charismatic, tall, 6 foot 4 inches, with a shock of white hair. He loves to hug, and is very welcoming to be with. I think he's much happier now than when he first wrote the diary. My first impression of him when he showed me his living quarters at St. Malachy's rectory was that he lives the life of a writer, poet and philosopher. He's constantly mining literature, history and current events for his Sunday sermons and his own writings. His room is covered with stacks of books, magazines and articles sent to him by friends. He can pull a book off his shelf and instantly turn to the exact page for a quotation, and he reads literature in the original languages of Greek, French, Latin and German. I think the film reflects a certain lightness in his being as well. If you were to compare the book and the film, the film takes a lighter tone towards some of the things Father McNamee was going through in 1991 and 1992, his "dark days," as he refers to them. When I met up with him again in early 1998, after not seeing him for several years, he was not as burdened by his vocation as a priest as when the book was written. But the book is remarkable for what he says and the way he deals with himself in relation to the realities he faces every day.

Q: How did David Morse become involved in the film?

Martin: I met David when I was starting to cast my previous film, Edge City. At my invitation, he came to an actors' reading of that screenplay. A few months later, I mentioned DIARY OF A CITY PRIEST to him as something I was thinking of doing next and he said to let him read it when it came together. He stayed in my mind and really was my first choice for the role of Father McNamee. I sent him a script at the start of my casting, and about three weeks later he called and said yes.

Q: What kind of input did Father McNamee and David Morse have in the project?

Martin: After developing a script in cooperation with ITVS for over a year, I decided to let Father Mac read it. When David came onboard, we began working as a triangle, taking on different parts of the story and script in order to make them as clear and concise as possible. Sister Cecelia, who works at St. Malachy's and helped Father Mac when he was writing the book, also got involved. It was a very open process of going through the language, casting ideas and emotions of all the key scenes. I think everyone was able to get a crack at what concerned them the most. David Morse brought a lot of insight into the project. He really wanted to make sure he was doing justice to Father McNamee and they met alone together and we attended a few of his Sunday services together.

Q: Tell us about the shooting of the film.

Martin: We looked for several months for a main location. This was becoming a rather large problem, because we needed a Catholic church that could handle a medium-sized film crew of 30 to 40 people. But this also presented the issue of potentially needing to seek some sort of higher approval. One day at lunch at St. Malachy's, Father Mac said, "Why not do it here?" My first reaction was that I'd love to, "But," I told him, "you have no idea how many people are going to be moving through here." But both he and Sister Cecelia thought it would be exciting for them to have us there. I tried to talk them out of it, but their decision was made and we had an invitation that we could not turn down. In retrospect, that gesture was quite important because suddenly I was free to explore a place I had already come to love through the book. But there was still the issue of how to treat the outside world, and cinematically interiors are much easier to negotiate than exteriors. I was very concerned with the issue of how to depict the neighborhood. It would be easy to fall into a cliched idea of what this place is all about. In the actual St. Malachy's parish, the neighborhood is a mix of newer 1960's prefab housing with a few old high rise developments, and as a result, the church itself is separated from any street life by at least a block on three sides. The production designer, Robert Holtzman, who had just finished [the film] Dogma, and I felt we needed to find more suitable exteriors to capture the right feeling for the neighborhood. I had known for a long time about St. Vincent's, a church in Germantown. The priest there, Father Rooney, is similar to Father McNamee, a little on the outside of the system. They have a health clinic and many social services for the neighborhood. They welcomed us the way that Father McNamee had, and so we arranged to film most of our exteriors there. It ended up being ironic for me, because St. Vincent's is located on East Price Street in Germantown and I had grown up on the same street, about six blocks west.

Q: How much were you influenced by Robert Bresson's classic film, Diary of a Country Priest?

Martin: I think that both myself and Father McNamee have been influenced a great deal by Robert Bresson. There are similarities as well as vast differences between the books and the films. Father McNamee's book is a journal, whereas the book by George Bernanos is a novel and was very popular when it was published in France. I was at Christmas Eve mass last year at St. Malachy's, and Father Mac brushed by me and said, "You know, Bresson died this week." I knew I could count on him to have noticed that. When I was 19, I went to the Cannes film festival after a semester abroad in Rome. Bresson's last film, L'Argent screened there and I still have the original program hanging in my office. Before I started making the film, I knew that Father Mac was something of a cinephile, and a fan of the French New Wave films from the 1960's. When I was in film school, I remember finally getting my hands on video copies of Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette and Pickpocket. I felt that these three films were just absolute gold. I really fell in love with Bresson's work, and was taken with his unique style of filmmaking. This led me to read Paul Schrader's book on meditative cinema, and I've since become a huge fan of this entire school of filmmaking, from Ozu to Bresson to eventually Gianni Amelio and Kieslowski.