Kenneth Lonergan on Manchester by the Sea

Kenneth Lonergan prefers characters who face up to troubles that are much bigger than they are.

Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck in a scene from Manchester By the Sea.

Characters tell you what to do, says Kenneth Lonergan. “You sort of fish about inside your imagination for a whole person, and they usually come fully formed, in a way. You don’t put them together piece by piece.”

For his quietly gripping drama Manchester by the Sea, which has been nominated for six Oscars, Lonergan was given a narrative framework in which to situate his characters.

Actors John Krasinski and Matt Damon brought the idea to Lonergan for him to write. At that stage it wasn’t envisaged that he would direct. They had the outline of a story about a man who suffered a loss and left his home town, then had to return when his brother died.

Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan talks about Manchester by the Sea. Picture: Getty Images

“I’m often interested in subjects where people have to deal with things that are much bigger than they are, and it certainly seemed like that,” Lonergan says of the story project he was presented with.

From this outline came the figure of Lee (Casey Affleck), who works as a janitor in an apartment block and seems to be living his life on autopilot, getting through the day by performing routine tasks. Things change suddenly when he gets the news that his older brother has died. Returning to the place where he grew up, he discovers that he is being entrusted with the care of his late brother’s teenage son.

It becomes clear that Lee is bearing a burden of grief for something that happened in his home town, and that this is why he can no longer live there. This is gradually revealed in flashbacks that function as narrative but also seem to be Lee’s recollections of the past, good and terrible, pushing up to the surface, unable to be suppressed.

Casey Affleck, left, and Lucas Hedges in Manchester By the Sea.

In Lee’s nephew, 16-year-old Patrick (Lucas Hedges), Lonergan has created a teenager with a reservoir of resilience and good sense, someone who knows and enjoys his place in the world. “I have one character who is in a lot of trouble, and I thought it might be good to have the other character not be,” Lonergan says. “I think Lee’s sorrows are enough for the audience to cope with.”

He is at pains to give Patrick a credible, rounded existence. Strong friendships are important to teenagers, Lonergan says, and there are small, touching examples of the way his friends rally around Patrick; there are also deft, often comic moments that show his social life and attachments. Discussing one of these scenes, Lonergan says, “A lot of the work I do is unconscious and I’m just trying to follow my instinct and assume that some kind of whole will emerge. And other times there is some conscious work be done. It’s very important for the story that Patrick have a full life.”

Manchester by the Sea has been a critical favourite since its premiere at Sundance last year. It has Oscar nominations for best picture, director and original screenplay; Affleck (who has already won a Golden Globe) is nominated for best actor and Hedges for best supporting actor. Michelle Williams, who plays Lee’s wife, is nominated for best supporting actress.

Family, the legacy of trauma and the travails of youth have been regular themes for Lonergan. He is a playwright, screenwriter and director who had his first big stage success with his play This is Our Youth, which premiered off-Broadway in 1996. Mark Ruffalo was one of the original cast members. A production with Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Emily Barclay played at the Sydney Opera House in 2012.

His feature debut as a writer-director, You Can Count on Me (2000), with Ruffalo and Laura Linney, was a critical hit that received two Oscar nominations.

His remarkable, under-appreciated second feature, Margaret, had a very different trajectory; it was released in 2011 after an extended and contentious post-production history. The story of a New York teenager trying to seek justice for an accident in which she was involved, it featured performances from Anna Paquin and J. Smith Cameron that should inevitably have been contenders for awards. But the film was scarcely screened in the US.

Looking back on it, Lonergan says he feels good about an extended edition, a director’s cut that was released on DVD, but “very bad about the fate of the film, initially”.

“I’m glad that it has a life ... and that people can see it, and I hope more people can. It will always be a source of distress that it wasn’t released properly,” he says.

There are plans for the extended version with some technical improvements to be re-released for home entertainment.

Yet, he says, for someone working in the theatre, there’s another way to look at its fate.

“Many more people would have seen Margaret than would have seen most of my plays, and these are plays that are considered to be successful.”

Manchester by the Sea opens on February 2.