MASSACHUSETTS
The Sagamore
Chloe Jepsen, Staff writer
June 18, 2016
The movie “Spotlight,” which was directed by Tom McCarthy, won the Academy Award for Best Picture this past year. It follows “The Boston Globe’s investigative journalism team,” as it investigated and reported on widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The team, known as “Spotlight,” was led by editor Walter Robinson and included reporters Michael Rezendes, Matt Carroll and Sacha Pfeiffer, who were played by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d’Arcy James and Rachel McAdams, respectively.
The Sagamore conducted a Q&A with Robinson about the original investigation and his thoughts on the movie interpretation of it:
Q: How close was the Spotlight movie to what you actually did?
A: It was very close. It’s not a documentary, and, obviously, it’s not a transcript. It’s a dramatization. Here’s the best way I can explain it: you and I are having a conversation right now, and if we weren’t taping it, but it was an important conversation, and somebody came to us and said ‘I’m doing a movie and one of the scenes is going to be that conversation,’ you would tell the person what transpired. It might be thirty seconds of your recollection, and then the person would call me and say, ‘Tell me what happened when you two talked,’ and I would recall what happened. Then, the person writing the movie would go off and write a scene. None of the words coming out of the mouth of the actor playing you or the actor playing me would be what we actually said because even we don’t remember the exact words. But the question is would it faithfully capture what actually happened? The film very accurately captured what happened in real life.
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