Taglines: There is no evidence. There are no witnesses. But for one, there is no doubt.
Doubt movie storyline. John Patrick Shanley brings his play DOUBT to the screen, in a story about the quest for truth, the forces of change, and the devastating consequences of blind justice in an age defined by moral conviction.
It’s 1964, St. Nicholas in the Bronx. A vibrant, charismatic priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is trying to upend the school’s strict customs, which have long been fiercely guarded by Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the iron-gloved Principal who believes in the power of fear and discipline. The winds of political change are sweeping through the community, and, indeed, the school has just accepted its first black student, Donald Miller.
But when Sister James (Amy Adams), a hopeful innocent, shares with Sister Aloysius her guilt-inducing suspicion that Father Flynn is paying too much personal attention to Donald, Sister Aloysius is galvanized to begin a crusade to both unearth the truth and expunge Flynn from the school. Now, without a shred of proof or evidence except her moral certainty, Sister Aloysius locks into a battle of wills with Father Flynn, a battle that threatens to tear apart the church and school with devastating consequences.
Doubt is a 2008 American period drama film written and directed by John Patrick Shanley based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play Doubt: A Parable. Produced by Scott Rudin, the film takes place in a St. Nicholas school led by Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep). Sister James (Amy Adams) tells Aloysius that Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) might have too much personal attention with the school’s only black student Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), thus leading to Aloysius starting a crusade against Flynn. The film also stars Viola Davis as Donald Miller’s mother, Mrs. Miller.
About the Production
“What do you do when you’re not sure?” – Father Flynn
From the opening moments of John Patrick Shanley’s DOUBT to its powerful conclusion, uncertainty hangs in the air, drawing the audience into a provocative mystery in which two nuns, a priest, and the mother of a young boy – as well as the audience itself — are forced to confront their core beliefs as they struggle with judgment and verdict, conviction and doubt. In the battle of wills that ensues, DOUBT raises probing questions about the challenges of navigating a world increasingly confronted by sweeping changes and moral dilemmas.
It was the very word “doubt” that first inspired Shanley to write what would become the most acclaimed play of the last decade, and now, to adapt the story into a screenplay that enlarges the play’s world and uses the fluidity of cinema to plant new seeds of uncertainty. At the time he began writing, Shanley recalls vast numbers of polarized political pundits literally shouting at each other on television. “I felt surrounded by a society that seemed very certain about a lot of things. Everyone had a very entrenched opinion, but there was no real exchange, and if someone were to say `I don’t know,’ it was as if they would be put to death in the media coliseum. There was this mask of certainty in our society that I saw hardening to the point that it was developing a crack – and that crack was doubt,” Shanley explains.
“So I decided to write a play that celebrated the fact that you can never know anything for certain. I wanted to explore the idea that doubt has an infinite nature, that it allows for growth and change, whereas certainty is a dead-end. Where there is certainty, the conversation is over, and I’m interested in the conversation, especially because another word for that conversation is `life.’ We’ve got to learn to live with a measure of uncertainty. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.”
For Shanley, the overriding challenge was incorporating not just the theme but also the very mechanism of doubt into the fabric of his story, unraveling facts and truths the audience might think are clear at the outset, and leaving the audience finally to explore these loose ends in their own way. Throughout, Shanley’s one incontrovertible dictum was to never lead the audience to any one individual conclusion. “What was always important to me,” he explains, “is that the sense of doubt belongs to the audience. I’m not going to tell them what’s right and wrong. I wanted to simply make them think and feel something, rather than tell them what to think and feel.”
Once Shanley knew he wanted to write about doubt and the necessity of weathering the inevitable challenges to one’s beliefs, he began to ponder the setting for such a tale. “I wanted to apply the way I see things to a situation that was very fraught and seemingly insoluble,” he says, “and this led to a parish priest accused of taking advantage of a member of his flock. I wasn’t interested in the church scandals themselves, but I was looking for a polarizing situation, one in which most people would brook no hesitation in condemning a person – and then throwing those assumptions back at the audience in a different light.”
Having decided on setting the story’s battleground issues of principle and compassion in a religious school, Shanley’s play took on a rich personal depth, transporting him back to his own childhood growing up in a strict Catholic school in a predominantly Irish Catholic working-class Bronx neighborhood. “I knew those people,” he says. “Sister Aloysius is certainly based on nuns I experienced firsthand, and she is also someone I relate to – there is a certain sadness I share with her about things that are gone now from the world, like silence and ball point pens and students reading Plato.”
Drawing further on his resonant memories, Shanley set the clash between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn against the volatile atmosphere of 1964, just after the Kennedy assassination and on the cusp of the civil rights movement of the late 60s. “That was a pivotal time of going from complete faith in establishments and hierarchies, to questioning those establishments and hierarchies — like the military, and organized religion,” he says.
It was also a time of sweeping changes for the Catholic Church. The establishment of Vatican II by Pope John XXIII in 1962 ushered in a series of considerable reforms designed to make the church more modern, more diverse and more accessible to a changing laity. By the mid-`60s, the face of the church would be quite different, with nuns no longer required to wear the habit and with much less formality between priests and their parishioners.
“I wanted to capture something about that lost moment,” says Shanley. “Walking around the Bronx in 1964, you’d see nuns in their bonnets and habits, but you didn’t realize that within just a few years, they wouldn’t be wearing them anymore and that time would be gone forever. I also think that Father Flynn is very much a product of the early `60s in the way he is questioning institutions as they stand, while still working within the system. He wants to make the church that he loves viable in a changing world.”
Race, too, was woven into the story through the character of Donald Miller, the black child whose close relationship with Father Flynn spurs Sister Aloysius’ crusade. Shanley has vivid memories of attending a school with just a single black student in the early, tension-filled days of school integration. “When you have only one black student in school, you start to notice that person and think, what does it feel like to be that guy? It made me see myself and my social context in a more complex way and made me start to question those things on a deeper level,” he comments.
Throughout, Shanley avoided taking sides with any of his characters – and he admits that he relates to elements of both Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. “I have a tendency to agree with every one of my characters while they are talking,” he confesses. “But that’s my experience of life. Human beings are contradictory and paradoxical and mysterious, and they remain that way.”
All of this builds to the story’s crucible moment, when Sister Aloysius finally admits she herself has – for the first time – doubts. Her certainty has been eroded by her growing compassion and even empathy for Donald Miller, his mother, the other students, and Sister James. She finds community in doubt, and thus is humanized and changed. The audience is left to reconcile what they just experienced in terms of their own beliefs and emotions. This was essential to Shanley’s vision for Doubt. He says: “For more than a hundred years, filmmakers have tended to ask a question and at the end of the movie, they answer it. With Doubt, I wanted to leave the audience at the end not with an answer, but saying rather: `What a beautiful question.’ In that way, it becomes the audience’s story.”
Shanley’s play, given its world premiere off-Broadway in the fall of 2004, was swept onto Broadway via an avalanche of rave reviews. It opened at the Walter Kerr Theater in 2005 and remained there for a total of 25 previews and 525 performances, which then led to a lengthy national tour and numerous international productions.
In the wake of the play’s international success, Shanley came to believe that Doubt, with its ability to provoke and move audiences around the world, could inevitably do the same for movie audiences. Shanley had been writing screenplays for two decades, and had won an Oscar for penning the romantic comedy “Moonstruck.” Adapting Doubt, he says, would be the most difficult screenwriting experience of all. The challenge at hand was to completely re-envision his play and allow it to become a different creature on the screen: more visceral, more dynamic, more open to the vibrant, burgeoning working class neighborhoods of 1960s New York.
“This story started with memories of growing up in the Bronx and then those memories became a play, and I used the stage and all the materials it had to offer to tell the story that way; and now, as a film, it has a profoundly different character,” Shanley says. “The kind of specificity you get in filmmaking — from the real air, the real buildings, the real things all around you — brings a verité to the story that the actors use to find a different level of performance. Theatre is very organized and real life is disorganized, so part of the process was shattering the story back into pieces and making it more like those original memories.”
Another Side of Doubt: The Screen Adaptation
When the play first moved to Broadway, Shanley noticed that the greater number of people who saw “Doubt,” the more intense the reaction. “There was a dissonant thing that seemed to happen where all the different responses people were having simultaneously every night in the theater created a kind of common power,” Shanley says. “It seemed a lot of people felt passionately that the subject of certainty and its consequences was something they needed to talk about. And that’s when I realized I’d like to do this as a film.”
As he began the adaptation, he saw that translating the story to the screen would allow him to explore many elements that simply couldn’t be addressed in the play: the live of the nuns, the children at the school, the whole outside world of a Bronx neighborhood on the cusp of major changes. Shanley states, “I wanted to convey a real sense of community – because I knew that if we spent time with these families and their kids, we would begin to track how the actions inside the church take a toll on the world outside of it. By the end, I believe the consequences of Flynn and Aloysius’ conflict strike a more profound emotional resonance since we see and know who is paying the price of their battle. The film allowed me to detail this aspect of the story which I was unable to in the play – but had always longed to do.”
It was also vital to Shanley to capture visually a sense of the spiritual devotion of the nuns, whose lives were so mysterious and often misunderstood to those outside their world. “With the film, I had the chance to really communicate the realm that the nuns lived in – the tradition and beauty in their world. I really wanted to use the silence of their lives as a part of the film’s structure. It’s a reminder in our noisy world that there can be great meaning in quiet and stillness.”
He continues, “And those silences also serve the story dramatically, allowing the audience time to consider what has been said, and to really focus on the deliberate choice of words by our characters. Flynn, for example, knows full well the impact of his words – he gives sermons to his congregation every week, and uses these moments to promote change and growth and openness in the community. His spare, precise words and his measured delivery during these sermons are freighted with meaning. As these parishioners sit in silence, listening, I was able to show the audience how his words affect other characters, as well as provide space to reflect on what is going on in their own hearts and minds.”
There was one overarching concern with the adaptation: conveying a sense of energy and urgency, and bringing the story’s deeply embedded issues to the surface. “Flynn and Aloysius are dynamic, shrewd and verbal people, and they are not afraid to use words as weapons. So much of the drama of this story is in the dialogue – especially in the confrontation between Flynn and Aloysius. I needed to figure out a way to make that work cinematically,” Shanley says. “In the beginning I wrote half a draft and threw it away because I felt I was failing at translating the story – and for a while I was miserable.”
Then, came a creative breakthrough. It happened while Shanley was writing the scene in which Father Flynn gives his “pillow sermon,” about a woman instructed by her priest to gather pillow feathers scattered from a rooftop. “Instead of simply having Father Flynn speak, I shifted to images of the story he was telling, so you would actually see the feathers floating, and I found that very freeing,” Shanley explains. “I started writing the rest of the screenplay with that kind of spaciousness in mind. It helped me to get the past the characters’ words and focus on the physical reality they inhabit. In a movie you can really explore the relationship between humanity and the natural world, the environments we move through. So things like a light bulb going out, or the blinds being adjusted, or a napkin blowing in the breeze began to take on great significance for me and the characters in the screen adaptation. Once I made that shift, I had hope again.”
“The other big revelation for me,” continues Shanley, “in not only writing the script but also in directing the film, was that I was able to utilize the conventions of a genre – in this case a mystery – to provide a propulsive energy to the narrative. The film begins with a simple question: did he or didn’t he? And while I never lost sight of this question, I was resolute from the moment I started writing the script that I would never answer that question at the end – which, obviously betrays the convention of the genre. So, while it was incredibly challenging to structure the film with an emphasis on mystery and suspense, I also benefited from this unexpected liberation of not being obligated to provide a conclusive ending. The audience would decide for themselves what their ending is. This yielded tremendous satisfaction for me as a filmmaker.”
Shanley wrote very much with the camera in mind, adding many visual flourishes to the screenplay. “One of things I wanted to do in the movie was to build a big visual entrance for Sister Aloysius so that the battle is immediately joined by the audience — you see the two opponents in juxtaposition from the earliest moments and you see immediately her impression of herself as the priest’s peer,” he comments.
One of the many new scenes Shanley added to the film comes after the story’s climax, and features a third, departing sermon from Father Flynn. “In a movie, you want that defining moment that brings you full circle to where it all started. So once again, you’re in the Cathedral with Father Flynn giving his sermon -this time a farewell — and you see how much the landscape has shifted for everyone,” he explains, “and you are left to draw your own conclusions as to what actually happened to each of the players in the story.”
By the time he finished the screenplay, Shanley was excitedly anticipating returning to his childhood stomping ground to shoot — and to having the nuns and neighbors he grew up with participate in the production. “We didn’t just go back to places,” says Shanley, “we went back to people. Kids I knew growing up are now playing congregation parents in the movie, and it was all very resonant.”
Shanley had originally dedicated the play to the Sisters of Charity, the order of nuns who ran St. Anthony’s, the Bronx school he attended and on which St. Nicholas is modeled – and he also wanted them to be a significant part of the motion picture production. In direct contradiction of the stereotypical portrait of the rebellious Catholic schoolboy who lives in sheer terror of nuns, Shanley still holds great affection and deep admiration for the teachers of his youth. “I’ve actually had enormously formative experiences with the nuns I’ve known, “he says, “and I wanted to communicate my respect for them and for their selfless devotion to people who need their help, most especially children.”
One nun who was especially integral to the production was Sister Mary Margaret McEntee — also known as Sister Peggy — who taught Shanley at St. Anthony’s when he was a feisty first grader and she a fresh-faced 21 year-old on her first teaching assignment. Sister Peggy made such an indelible impression on the young Shanley that she would later inspire the creation of Sister James, and he was very pleased to bring her on as a consultant. “She’s enormously knowledgeable and she’s also a vibrant force who brought something completely unique to the production,” says Shanley. “She helped out with everything from showing Meryl how to wear her rosary beads, to the proper way to put on a bonnet. The Sisters of Charity were enormously supportive. They’re a rare and beautiful group of people.”
Sister Peggy worked closely with Streep, Adams and Hoffman, answering questions on attire, ritual and tradition and, more importantly, lending her spirit and memories to the players and crew as inspiration. She generously shared her own experiences teaching at St. Anthony’s with the filmmakers. “I thoroughly enjoyed teaching there,” she says. “Everything was very uniform and very rigid – but it was very peaceful.”
Her recollections of the church’s sudden changes in the early 1960s further helped everyone to understand the tinderbox atmosphere at the fictional St. Nicholas – the two generations battling over how best to reach children in a manner that might instill values, and faith, in a time of great social and religious upheaval.
“I always felt John XXIII had a beautiful vision,” Sister Peggy says. “He wanted to open the windows and let in fresh air. Of course, once opened, it was very difficult to close them. Many people had mixed emotions about it. Some loved the changes and some were rather staid in their ways and they didn’t want changes. And by changes, I guess some of the most noticeable would be liturgical changes, how we worshipped. The priest would no longer have his back to the people; he turned and faced us. The altar was brought down. And there was more involvement of laity. I thought the message from Vatican II was a beautiful invitation to be more inclusive. And sometimes we forget that.”
Sister Peggy also had memories of young priests emerging with a new point of view in the 1960s. “I saw many young priests who were moved by the changes of the times and were becoming friendlier, more open, very much like Father Flynn,” she comments.
As for the difference in approach between the fearsome, absolutist Sister Aloysius and kind-hearted, open-minded Sister James, Sister Peggy is reluctant to take sides, despite how close she might be to the latter character. “I think each is really being true to who she is, to how she was trained and to what life offered her,” she observes. “Sister James’ formation was at a time when Vatican II was first happening, when the church was more sensitive to people and wasn’t so authoritarian. Sister Aloysius’ formation happened many years before that, when the church was stricter and very definite in its rules and regulations. Personally, I like Sister Aloysius, I guess because of my real life experience as the real Sister James. She is very firm but she is also deeply kind. She feels it’s her most basic and absolute duty to be very protective of her students and to be very alert to any threat that might be happening.”
Finally, Sister Peggy admits to taking pride in all that John Patrick Shanley has accomplished. “I taught him how to read and write,” she comments, “so I’m very happy to know that a student of mine has done so well with words.”
Portraying Doubt: Casting the Filmn
When it came to casting the film, Shanley might easily have turned to the some of acclaimed actors who appeared in the stage play but he wanted, instead, to start fully anew, with actors who would bring a fresh and unexpected — even to him — perspective on the characters. “I never wanted to simply recreate the stage experience in a film and I felt very strongly that I did not want to simply lift the terrific work of the director of the play, Doug Hughes, and call it my own,” he says. “I wanted to achieve a new work and put together a very creative, intelligent ensemble of film actors with great screen instincts.”
Early on in development, he started envisioning Meryl Streep taking the role of Sister Aloysius. He knew he needed an actress of unusual skill and subtlety, someone who could go well beyond the simple trope of the dictatorial, heartless nun – someone who could allow the audience, measure by measure, to glimpse the sister’s inner passion, and ultimately her doubts about her quest for justice and even her faith. With Streep, he felt, he would be assured of a performance that details and honors all that makes Sister Aloysius compelling and complex, even in her righteousness and certainty.
“In fact, I love Sister Aloysius,” says Shanley. “And I think that she is right about a tremendous amount, even the things that she fights for that are hopeless, like fountain pens over ballpoint pens. She is fighting battles we know she will lose, because these changes have already taken place in our culture — but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a valiant figure for doing so. I agree with her that something beautiful is lost in those kinds of changes. It’s also important to understand that Sister Aloysius became a nun during World War II, and she saw herself as part of the battle between good and evil that was very much a part of those times but which became something quite different in the 60s. The posture that she has worked perfectly in 1944, but in 1964 and especially now, it can seem rather stark and outmoded. But is it really? I’m not sure.”
Streep, says Shanley, was full of extraordinary surprises in the role, and illuminated Sister Aloysius in ways even he hadn’t foreseen. “Meryl is a protean actress. She has so many colors coming out of her and makes so many intriguing choices, all justified within the parameters of her character,” he says. “I didn’t realize how thrilling it was going to be to work with her. Her heart and her soul and her imagination are wide open. She’s like a six-lane highway.”
He continues: “It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle when you’re shooting with her because every take is completely different, yet each one is justified and grounded in the very depths and truths of the character.”
Streep came to the production excited by the expansiveness of Shanley’s screen adaptation. “This story is a living organism and John took the opportunity to come in and both expand and distill it to its strongest incarnation. And the astounding thing is the way he opened the screenplay up in a different way, adding characters, adding scenes, adding in the children who become so important and central, the fulcrum of all these events,” she says. “I thought it was amazing and brave. In getting more specific, the story becomes more true, and it applies to everybody everywhere, and is filled with things that are familiar to you from your own family, your own business, your own relationships with the world.”
Yet the story’s ability to provoke on a personal level remained the big draw, says the actress. “This is a story that people really see through the prism of their own biases and experiences, their own emotional connection to authority, both celestial and temporal,” Streep remarks. “To me, I think the story is about the quality of mercy, and our understanding of and relationship to that quality in human affairs.”
For all the discussion the story sparks, Streep was also impressed by Shanley’s willingness to not say anything at all at times, to leave stark, powerful silences — moments rife with spiritual reflection or emotional shock — in the body of film. “Sometimes the eloquence comes when nothing is said, when the moment is filled with possibility or menace or even grace – and John understands silence,” she says.
In her preparation for the role, Streep worked closely with the nuns at the College of Mount St. Vincent, which she says was a distinct pleasure. “The discipline, the purity, the clear intelligence of these women was fascinating to me, and they were very helpful,” she says.
She also learned a great deal from them about another reality depicted in Doubt – the power gap between the priests, who could wield their complete authority in church matters, and the nuns who had to eke out power in very different and subtler ways. “Coupled with their sense of great capability, what I also got was a sense of their hierarchy in the church, how they were always second-tier to the male hierarchy of the priests and how some chafed against that,” Streep observes. “All of that was very valuable for Sister Aloysius. And all of it drives the narrative.”
Indeed, Streep says that she looked at Sister Aloysius from every conceivable angle to arrive at her portrait. “I wanted to look beyond the habit at the question of who is she? Where did she come from? Why did she spend her life in service in this way? What are her secrets? What is wonderful in her background? What is terrible? That was my job,” she says.
That job was enhanced, Streep notes, by Shanley’s way of working with actors. “Throughout, John was very open to invention, and he’d very happily say, `I never saw it that way before.’ He would say that quite often and it made us feel wonderful and free, which is what you want from actors,” she comments.
With Streep as Sister Aloysius, Shanley felt his options for Father Flynn were narrowed to those few actors powerful enough to truly stand up to her in the climactic one-on-one confrontation. Shanley says, “Phil was the only actor I could think of who could make Meryl sweat through every scene. And when they had their big scene, it was a battle royale; it was gladiatorial, it was outsized, and it was thrilling to watch. It was one of the most electrifying weeks I’ve ever had.”
Shanley also thinks the two actors share something key in common that was essential for the roles. “They both have that quality where you can see a long way into them when they’re performing but you can’t see to the bottom. You can’t unravel the last knot in the yarn, you can’t open the last door – and those are eternally tantalizing, attractive qualities,” he observes.
For Streep, the choice of Hoffman was especially interesting because she and Hoffman had previously played mother and son on stage in “The Seagull.” “In this story, we’re adversaries, but it’s also much more complicated than that and that’s what Phil brings to it – all these layers of humanity,” she says. “So many people want to reduce the role to `who’s right, who’s wrong,’ but with Phil, you’re never able to pin him down because his passionate interest is in bringing out all the contradictions.”
Shanley notes that the duo created an electric, yin-and-yang presence whenever they were together on the set. “The set became like the ring that prizefighters go into,” he observes. “They would just sit in their respective corners when we weren’t shooting, with their heads hanging down, in some private universe of some very, very tormented place, and get ready to do that scene. And then when they were called to do it, they would get in there and the walls would shake.”
Hoffman had enjoyed the play numerous times from the audience, and its intricate web of themes had always attracted him. “I really like that there are no absolutes in this story, except people’s passions. I love that it’s a battle between the old and the new and, in the midst, religious issues, ethical issues, political and gender issues, and racial issues are all left up in the air,” he says. “I think that’s an astounding and rare thing.”
Still, he was taken aback when he was offered the role. “When John Shanley called, it did take me by surprise because I’d never thought of myself in the part,” he says. “But I knew it was a challenging, interesting piece and if John was offering me the role there must be a good reason for it. So it was one of those times when you say yes because it feels right and only then do you start to figure out what the role’s really about.”
Once Hoffman began to peer beneath the surface of Father Flynn, he became even more fascinated by the character, the ways in which he is both revealing and those in which he conceals himself. “I would describe him first as a modern thinker,” he says. “He has a way of looking at faith, religion and a lot of things in life that I think challenges the status quo of how the church is run.”
That modernity rankles Sister Aloysius well before she ever has reason to accuse him of anything and makes them natural enemies – and yet, Hoffman sees them as sharing much in common. “I think they’re similar in a lot of ways,” he offers. “They’re both very strong individuals who see things one way. She sees him as a threat to her way of life, her identity and her view of the church; and he sees her as a threat to how he wants to relate to the parishioners. And neither one is someone who will back down.”
There’s one key difference between them. “Sister Aloysius can’t really live in the world of doubt, in the world of the gray; she needs a right and a wrong, and she needs absolutes, “ Hoffman notes, “while Father Flynn actually tries to exist in the world of the unknown, which is not an easy place to be.”
Hoffman says that he came to his own private conclusions as to Father Flynn’s actual guilt in the matter at hand but he never shared them with Streep or Adams and he, like Shanley, prefers to let the audience come to their own decisions. “One of the wonderful things about this story is that at any given point, you might have empathy for any one of the characters, and I think people will be split over Father Flynn,” he says. “It’s an unsolved mystery. It isn’t necessary to always offer the answer.”
To further prepare, Hoffman spent time behind the scenes of a Catholic church learning the duties of a parish priest. “A lot of what I wanted to know was about the physical, logistical movements of a priest, and also knowing about the history of the church and the transformation it was going through at the time was important. But at heart,” he hastens to add, “the story is not really about the church at all but about human beings in general. Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius could be anyone in any setting.”
The catalyst of all the unsettling doubts about Father Flynn is Sister James, the idealistic young teacher who first shares with Sister Aloysius her vague worries about Donald Miller’s unusual private meetings with the Father – and who never is sure if what she saw adds up to anything at all and who lives with tremendous guilt over her own culpability in the events that follow. As the battle between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius accelerates, Sister James comes to mirror the audience, weighing both sides of the argument while trying to figure out if there can be any just conclusion.
Says Shanley of the character: “Sister James has something to learn from everybody in the story, and the people in the story have something to learn from her. Nobody in this story is right. Nobody is wrong. Everybody in this story has to change, and everybody does change, including Sister James.”
Taking the role of Sister James is Amy Adams, the actress who garnered an Academy Award® nomination for her breakout role in “Junebug” followed by the lead role in Disney’s smash hit Enchanted. It was Shanley’s screenplay that compelled Adams to go after the part fervently. “I was familiar with the play and just loved the way he adapted it for screen,” she says “I also fell in love with the character, and it became something that I felt very strongly about doing. So I really fought for the part.”
Adams was deeply moved by Sister James’ decency and by the profound internal changes she goes through. “She’s someone who really operates from her heart, from her soul and her faith. She believes in goodness,” says Adams, “but the events that occur with Father Flynn shake her whole sense of reality and her sense of self. They make her question things in a new way, and reveal how just one little seed of doubt can change everything. It’s not that she loses her faith, but the way she sees things – her teaching, her sense of self, the way she understands God — is forever altered. She comes to see that what is true for one person is not necessarily true for another and I think she is able to move forward from there with a renewed and profound sense of her own faith.”
On the set, Adams found her real-life anxieties about starring with Streep and Hoffman echoing the nerves Sister James feels as she stands between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. “I was with these two enormously talented, enormously powerful actors which was frightening and intimidating. So I let that work toward how I built Sister James,” she comments. “Sister James wants to please them both and hopes to learn from them both. So did I.”
The building tension between the threesome comes to a boil in the “tea scene,” in which Sister Aloysius first confronts Father Flynn with her unsavory accusations, while Sister James squirms with concern and guilt – a scene that Adams remembers vividly: “I have to tell you that with the discomfort and the awkwardness of it all, I felt nauseated with all the tension – and I hope the scene will create that same sense of urgency and discomfort in the audience.”
Streep – who would go on to star in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia with Adams right after production of Doubt — was equally taken with Adams’ gifts. “There are very few people who can convey truly innocence, who have the quality of untrammeled snow,” she says. “She can create the feeling of a girl who truly believes – and that’s why she is where she is. Amy is the real deal.”
Another deep influence on Adams was the presence of Sister Peggy, on whom her character was originally based. Adams notes that she did not set out to become Sister Peggy, but rather to get at her fundamental nature. “I wasn’t interested in her mannerisms or doing an impersonation of her,” says Adams, “but it was her spirit that made such an impression on me. She’s so full of life and has such a twinkle in her eye and you can still see the girl in her. That’s the essence that I wanted to emulate.
She also found that simply wearing the nun’s habit was transforming. Says Adams: “It’s a really interesting universe when you’re in the bonnet. You don’t have a lot of peripheral vision so it gets you focused. It removes all sense of vanity — and Sister James has no vanity. It’s all truly about the soul with her, and that was so refreshing.” It was also challenging, admits Adams. “Playing someone in doubt sounds simple, but it really shakes up your universe when you’re doing it.”
Adams says she and the rest of the cast were immeasurably helped by Shanley’s openness to that learning process. “John did not bring any preconceptions to this,” she explains. “He made that very clear to us, saying I don’t need anything from you that I’ve seen before. He was so open to learning something new about the piece through what we brought. He didn’t ever force me into an analytical place in my brain; he always kept it in an emotional place that was very, very true.”
The most unexpected piece of the puzzle in Doubt is Mrs. Miller, Donald’s mother, who comes to St. Nicholas at Sister Aloysius’ behest and takes the Sister by surprise with her urgent insistence on what she believes is necessary for her son’s survival. “Mrs. Miller gets at the terrible, difficult bargains people sometimes have to make to survive and for their children to survive,” says Shanley.
When it came to casting Mrs. Miller, the director was won over by the audition of Viola Davis – the Tony Award-winning actress who garnered an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Antwone Fisher. “I have to say that I feel she is one of the most talented actresses I’ve ever seen,” says Shanley.
Although Mrs. Miller has but one extended scene, her confrontation with Sister Aloysius is the crucible of the story, creating a net of complexity and doubt, the aftermath of which will change the Sister far more than she expects. “It’s a very human moment that transcends any time period,” Davis says of their encounter. “Mrs. Miller is, most of all, a mother trying to save her child. She’s not going to toss him aside and say, `well, he’s gay, I don’t have any scope of understanding of it so I’m not getting involved.’ No, she has decided she is going to love him and accept him, even if she has no way of knowing what he is going through. And I think in many ways she has more courage than any other character in the story.”
She goes on: “Her day-to-day life is pretty much hell: watching her son beaten by his father, working her fingers to the bone to pay for him to go this Catholic school. And the only source of happiness she has is her love for her child. So when the phone call comes from Sister Aloysius, she knows and fears that it could blow even that bit of happiness away.”
While Davis sees the character’s impulses as timeless, she also notes that Mrs. Miller is hamstrung by the realities of the culture in 1964. “She knows that as a black, gay, young man, her son doesn’t have a lot of options. What choices were open to a young black male in 1964, especially one who is confused about his sexuality? She’s fighting huge obstacles — the fact that his father hates him, the fact that no other school wants him, the fact that he is being picked on and beaten,” Davis explains. “So she sees Sister Aloysius as very threatening. All she hears from her is: I’m going to destroy your son. She sees her as someone willing to destroy lives just to be right.”
Davis notes that such a confrontation between teacher and parent would be quite different in 2008, but circumstances leave Mrs. Miller with little power other than trying to communicate the depths of her sheer human struggle. “Nowadays, she would probably just cuss Sister Aloysius out, but I came with very specific mannerisms that were dictated by those times. Because the Sister is not only a nun but a white woman, Mrs. Miller knows she has to try a different approach to get some space in her heart, to try to let her to see her point of view. Ultimately, she is begging for her son’ s life in the best way she feels she can.”
As Sister Aloysius approaches Mrs. Miller with such absolute conviction, Davis observes, Mrs. Miller becomes the very embodiment of her own wrenching doubts. “There is a lot of doubt in Mrs. Miller that I hope you can see, doubts about whether what she is doing is best for her son or if it is going to screw him up in ways she can’t even understand. She is put in a terrible position by Sister Aloysius. Mrs. Miller just wants her son to get through the school year to have a shot at a life he deserves, so how is she to respond to Sister Aloysius’ suspicions, when there is no evidence of wrongdoing?”
Davis doesn’t feel ill will towards Sister Aloysius – on the contrary, she was fascinated by the journey she makes. “Sister Aloysius has lived her whole life believing there’s a right and a wrong way to do things. She doesn’t know any other way to live and she holds onto that because without it, it feels to her like she’s going to die. I think that’s why she breaks down in the end. It’s very hard for her. But, you know, it’s not a bad thing to feel doubt, to delve into the unknown. That’s when you grow.”
The key for Davis was making Shanley’s words come alive with all the confusion, desperation and vulnerability of a real mother in mortal pain over her son’s plight. “I didn’t want to make her just a social mouthpiece,” she says. “I wanted her to be fully realized, and to really discover her.” To do so, Davis says that she talked with a lot of people about the dilemma Mrs. Miller faces, looking for authentic reactions. “I asked different mothers what they would do to save their children if they found themselves in similar circumstances and I got a lot of revelations from that.”
Shooting outside in the elements brought additional flavors to Davis’ performance. “It was so cold when we were shooting that it made me close up a little bit, hold myself tighter,” she observes. “It was also this very private moment that we shot in public, in a housing project with lots of people around and that informed the scene in a completely different way, helping me to bring out Mrs. Miller’s desperation and the hope for intimate communication with Sister Aloysius.”
Working with Meryl Streep for the first time was a thrill for Davis. “It was terrifying and I was awestruck,” she remarks, “but Meryl couldn’t have been any more beautiful. She’s such a fantastic actress, I really wanted to meet her at her level. She so humanized Sister Aloysius that it really affected me. She wasn’t just this relentless, hard-core person — you could see this woman’s vulnerability.”
Streep says it was Davis who took her breath away: “Mrs. Miller defies every one of the Sister’s expectations and I thought Viola was perfect. Her work was so fully realized and revelatory that it was hard for me, because I saw how exposed and desperate this mother was, and I felt so much for her.”
Of all the things that inspired her, though, Viola Davis says the greatest inspiration was Shanley’s insight into Mrs. Miller and all the characters. “All the power and impact of this story were in his head,” she says. “Only he could really bring it to life because he knows each and every one of these characters. He knew Mrs. Miller — I imagined her.”
Manifesting Doubt: The Design
To open Doubt outwards from the narrower confines of the theatrical stage to the broader, more fluid, three-dimensional energy of the screen, John Patrick Shanley had a very specific stylistic vision, at once minimalist and visually engaging. “I wanted the environment around the characters to be stark, yet very vibrant and alive, so that against it, their humanity would really register,” he explains. “The physical environment of the film became a way to reinforce the drama, the tension, the emotions. So the ringing of a phone that isn’t answered becomes like the sinking of the Titanic to Sister James and Father Flynn adjusting the Venetian blinds in Sister Aloysius’ office becomes a parry in the battle between them. Every single camera move had to be justified by either adding something to the storytelling or to the portrayal of the characters. Everything in the design of the film exists as a reflection of what the characters are saying, thinking and feeling.”
For Shanley, there was never any doubt that Doubt would be shot on location in the Bronx, in the very same working class, Catholic neighborhood that had been the raw inspiration for his play in the first place. “This is a New York story,” says Shanley, “and I wanted to go back and shoot in those same locations where I grew up. It adds a richness and a texture that you can’t replicate anywhere else.”
Ultimately, the fictitious St. Nicholas church and parochial school would be created by knitting together several different locations throughout New York City. Most of the interiors were shot at the College of Mount St. Vincent in the Bronx, which was founded by the Sisters of Charity as the first women’s college in New York City. Standing in for the school’s exterior is St. Anthony’s, Shanley’s original grade school in the Parkchester area, while the church exterior is St. Augustine’s, also in the Bronx. Classrooms were filmed at the original Girls High School (now the Brooklyn Adult Learning Center), a Bedford-Stuyvesant landmark before the Civil War. Meanwhile, the courtyard, garden and nuns’ dining rooms are those of St. Luke in the Fields on Christopher and Hudson Streets; and the basement, gym and lunchroom scenes were shot at St. Mark’s Lutheran School in Yonkers.
For the film’s interiors, especially inside St. Nicholas Church and School, Shanley took his cues from the idea of a season of change. “This is a film that takes place in the autumn — not just the autumn of the year, but the autumn of an era in which ideas that were once vibrant and green have now turned brown and are falling to the ground,” he explains. “They’re about to be replaced by the fresh sprigs of a new time, a new zeitgeist in the culture. So we emphasized that with the use of surprising colors in the interior scenes. The feeling of Sister Aloysius’ office is that is you’re looking from a very vibrant green room out the window to a drained-away world of leafless trees and sidewalks scorched by the cold.”
The elements themselves are suddenly intruding on this world, as Sister Aloysius is plagued throughout the story by a fierce wind she tries to keep at bay. “Windows keep opening and the wind keeps getting into places it shouldn’t be and Sister Aloysius keeps closing those windows,” Shanley remarks. “It seems to be the winds of change.”
To capture all of this on celluloid, Shanley worked closely with his director of photography, seven-time Academy Award® nominee Roger Deakins, who he says was able to beautifully compose the sharp and stark angles that create the film’s overarching ambience of disorientation. “Roger is not only one of the best cameramen alive,” comments Shanley, “he also has very pure aesthetic and a kind of austerity in camera movement that was so important for what I wanted to do for Doubt. He understood that I had something very specific I wanted to express visually and was very intelligent about lighting and moving the camera in ways that always evoked that.”
Early on, Deakins asked Shanley for storyboards, but Shanley would only provide them for the entrance of Sister Aloysius. He explains, “I told Roger that I didn’t want to storyboard the rest of the film because I wanted the camera to follow the lead of the actors. I didn’t want to put the cast in a cage; I wanted us to be free to be inspired by what they were doing in the moment.” Deakins rose to that challenge. “Roger is not a technician, he is an artist and it was great to work with him on that level,” summarizes Shanley.
Deakins found working with Shanley invigorating too. He says, “Since John lived with his story for so long, he was extremely confident and precise in how he wanted to film it. His assuredness allowed us to moved with a fleetness and agility that I enjoyed.”
During pre-production, Shanley emphasized to Deakins that he wanted the audience to be aware of the world outside the church and the school, in the pivotal scenes between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn. Deakins notes, “John wanted to convey the idea of the natural world impinging on this cloistered world – from leaves blowing in the window, driving rain, lightning, sunlight coming through the blinds. He wanted the audience to really feel the force of the elements and how our characters reacted instinctively to this as a way to peer inside their psyche at that moment. I found this idea to be incredibly effective, and it gave the action in our interior scenes a palpable sense of foreboding.”
When it came to lighting the scenes, Deakins took a less heightened approach, as he wanted to maintain the focus on the actors’ faces. He says, “I felt the light needed to be more naturalistic so the audience would not be distracted by any sense of artifice. Photographing the faces in this kind of environment is important so the audience can absorb the full strength of the performances. We knew that audiences would never want to take their eyes off of these characters.”
Shanley then brought in Oscar®-nominated production designer David Gropman who focused on forging Shanley’s palette into sets that came alive with character and period details. “I came to David with very strong opinions about colors and set design and he took that task on in an extraordinarily creative way,” says Shanley. “And while doing that, he also was able to create a palpable sense of the era.”
Gropman recalls, “John was very precise in what he wanted. There’s a clarity and preciseness to the whole palette – it feels honest to the time and place but is also purposefully very sharp and striking. The idea was that with exteriors we would use the organic colors of the surrounding Parkchester neighborhood. But when the camera comes inside, John wanted to use a color scheme that would bring the audience back out of the period and into this world of clashing ideas. For example, we used a really rich green in Sister Aloysius’ office – where much of the film takes place. John kept saying `we have to be bolder with that color.’ So it’s a truly striking green that elevates the drama that takes place there. It’s a color that takes your breath away and I think John’s instincts were so right because it brings an extra intensity to the characters’ interactions.”
Vibrant colors also come into play in other rooms. “Another example is in the convent where the nuns live, there’s a sitting room and John said, `let’s paint that room Virgin Mary blue.’ I showed him a range of blues and he picked the strongest blue, which really makes you sit up when the camera enters that room,” adds Gropman.
At the center of Shanley’s design ethos was the concept of constantly reinforcing the state of doubt for the audience. “That’s one of the reasons we used so many unexpected colors,” says Gropman, “because John wanted that feeling that every time you entered a room, you had no idea of what to expect. It’s a way of keeping the audience from every being sure of itself, which goes to the heart of the film.”
A further strong and defining influence on the palette was the local architecture of the Bronx. “There’s a lot of this kind of tan or yellow brick and that became a strong feeling in the flavor of the film as well,” Gropman explains. “The warmth and hardscrabble strength of that brick reflects these traditional institutions that supported the community yet were in a moment of change.”
Shanley and Gropman also discussed creating a stark design contrast between the traditional ascetic lives the nuns lead in their cells and the more social life of Father Flynn and the other priests. “The room where we see Father Flynn having dinner with the Monsignor and the other Fathers has an almost clubhouse atmosphere,” notes Gropman. “It makes an interesting statement about Father Flynn’s desire to relate to people in a new way.” This warm, intimate setting also served another purpose: to convey a sense of authority and power enjoyed by the male hierarchy of the Church, as they had the liberty to put aside temporarily the rituals and rules of their faith. The nuns, on the other hand, respected their restrictions at all times, and never waivered from their devout, prescribed lifestyle. Gropman adds, “We see the room in which the nuns eat – stiff white linen, minimal decoration, a solitary, formal room, the complete antithesis of the priests’ dining room.”
One of Gropman’s most challenging tasks was transforming the cathedral in which Father Flynn gives his sermons back to the typical church style of 1964. “The church was very much in transition at the time,” he observes, “and today everything is different. “We used the chapel at Mt. St. Vincent, but we had to do things like recreate the high altar and put an altar rail back in. The big changes were difficult and emotional for the nuns on the set – seeing the church go back to the way it had once been brought back memories of harder and less forgiving times. They were very happy when we restored it to its current state.”
The costumes of Doubt were equally important to Shanley’s visual conception, forging a world of contrasts between the soon-to-be-obsolete nun’s habits and the more expressive clothing of the working-class parents and students. To create them, Shanley brought in Academy Award winner Ann Roth. Says Shanley: “Ann has a very elegant, Old World sense of style that was a great match with this story. She also has a way of building a very personal relationship with actors and giving them everything they need, which she did with Meryl, Amy, Phil and Viola.”
Roth’s biggest task was recreating the traditional, medieval-style Sisters of Charity habit, which was phased out in the late 1960s, and is now hard to find, save for among a few elderly nuns who chose to keep wearing it. The unique habit, with its somber bonnet and black cape, had remained unchanged from the one worn by Mother Seton, the founder of the Sisters of Charity, in the early 19th century.
“The habit we use in the film is exactly the habit as prescribed in the time of Mother Seton and the same one nuns wore in 1964,” says Roth. “We copied it exactly, but what I learned from meeting with the Sisters is that there are a lot of little rules about how it must be worn so the focus was on getting all those details right. There are very exacting rules about how much shows at the wrist, where it touches the ground, what is worn under it, the way the stockings are held up with garters. It was all very specific and, for the most part, terribly uniform.”
In 1964, each nun would have stitched her own personal habit upon joining the order, so Roth and her crew sewed habits for Streep, Adams and the rest of the nuns that had that same authentic home-made essence. The actors in turn found putting on the habits transforming. Says Streep: “It would take a long time to get dressed because it’s all very intricate and precise and there are so many layers that you don’t see underneath everything. I began to feel that the ritual of putting on the habit was part of the spiritual ritual of the day. You get ready to be this servant of God and it begins the minute you get dressed in the morning. Wearing the habit was a big part of the preparation for the role and I loved wearing it.”
Roth then injected another element of change into the visual design with the well-groomed outfits worn by the school children. “They are still wearing school uniforms but there’s a certain sharpness to the way they dress that was emerging at that time. You see it in their haircuts, their shoes, the way they wear their uniforms,” she says. “A lot of that was based on conversations I had with John about his memories of the working-class kids he grew up with and that moment when fashions were changing, when individualism was emerging, even within this very traditional environment.”
Adding to the seasonal palette, Roth further contrasted the black-and-white outfits of the nuns with an autumnal range of colors for the film’s extras. Finally, Roth focused on the one lay adult who figures so prominently in the story: Mrs. Miller, whose clothes speak to her driving desire for a better life for her son. “In that era, if you were a black lady who cleaned houses, you wore a hat and a nice coat and you knew you had to look good to come into these wealthier neighborhoods,” says Roth. “That was what we wanted to get at with Mrs. Miller — the way she wears her clothes with pride is a part of who she is and what she is striving for in trying to get her son into another world where he will be safer. I especially enjoyed working with Viola Davis because I think she is one of our greatest actresses.”
Following production, Shanley turned the footage over to Academy Award® nominated editor Dylan Tichenor for a first assembly that took him by surprise. “When you’re a writer, you’ve already cut the film to a certain degree in your head,” says Shanley, “but when I saw what Dylan had done in his first cut I was impressed because it was so superior to what I had envisioned. Dylan was able to put it all together with all the musicality of the script. We worked very well together because he also has an almost rabbinical talent for communication.”
Next, Academy Award winner Howard Shore came aboard to work with Shanley on the film’s subtly building, emotionally rich score. “Howard had perhaps the toughest assignment of all on this film,” says the writer-director. “I asked him to create music that would allow the audience the spaciousness to feel strong emotions without telling them what they should feel. That’s a tremendous challenge, but Howard did a masterful job of being a jury who considered all the elements of the story without coming in with a judgment or any finite sense of conclusiveness.”
Shore recalls his initial sessions with Shanley: “We talking about wanting to develop the emotional arc of the film musically; to reflect the thematic relationships between the characters in music; and also to give a sense of the old giving way to the new inside the score. For me it was about trying to create a score that would mirror the feeling of John’s writing. As I was composing, I felt like I was in his slipstream, turning his ideas into sound.”
To begin that process, Shore started with the central details of Doubt – its `60s time period and Bronx Catholic school setting. “That brought me back to a lot of ideas based on traditional hymns, and I was also influenced by my knowledge of sacred music,” he explains. “I used a lot instrumentation that would evoke the traditionalism of that time period, including dulcimers, zithers, pan flutes, mandolins, different recorders, of course lots of harmonium and also Irish Bouzouki.”
Shore also kept the natural world in mind. “Climate and wind are big characters in the film – the winds of change, the coming of storms – and I used orchestration that would shape those kinds of environmental sounds,” says Shore.
Throughout, Shanley and Shore kept the focus for the score on a spare but vibrant minimalism that echoes the film’s visual style. Summarizes Shore: “We used a chamber music approach that is in synch with the cinematography, the palette, the lighting, the editing. John’s underlying idea in Doubt was never to use too big a force to tell the story, and this was equally true with the music. It was very exciting working with John. His ideas are so strong that it made the compositions stronger.”
Behind Doubt: The Sisters of Charity Remember Life in 1964
In bringing Doubt to the screen, John Patrick Shanley moves well beyond the stereotype of the parochial school nun and reveals these remarkable women as rich human characters who have chosen to lead spiritual lives devoted to love, prayer, compassion and service.
To do so, he had a lot of help from the Sisters of Charity who had taught him as a child at St. Anthony’s, several of whom shared their own recollections of what moved them to embrace vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and what life was like in the convent and parochial school.
Then, as now, the lives of the nuns moved to a deep, devotional rhythm focused on finding God in the midst of serving the poor and needy. For these sisters, the very choice to become a nun in a cloister was so radically different from what most of the girls around them were doing that it was sometimes clearly questioned by friends and family. “I felt I was answering a direct call. I just knew this was something God wanted,” says Sister Irene Fugazi, who has been a Sister of Charity for 71 years. “But it was very hard to explain that to other people. My father eventually agreed, but very reluctantly. And he gave me three weeks before quitting… of course, he was wrong and many years later, he admitted that.”
The nuns’ lives back then were simpler, stricter and more isolated than they are today. They adhered to a rigid schedule, the horarium, which began at the break of dawn when the women were awakened by a bell for morning prayers, followed by time for silent, personal meditation. After mass at 7 a.m., the nuns would have a small, silent breakfast before the teaching day would begin. Sister Peggy recalls that, after the workday was done, the women looked forward to dinner. “Afterwards we took turns washing the dishes and then we would go in for our night prayers,” she says. “They would ring a night silence bell at 8:10 and by 9 p.m. it was supposed to be lights out, although I remember I kept a secret flashlight for reading.”
In those days, the nuns were often kept apart from the rest of the world, including their families. When they did have to leave the cloister for a doctor or dentist appointment, they always had a companion. “It was rather austere,” Sister Peggy notes. “We couldn’t have wine or go to parties. We were allowed to go funerals but not weddings. They were very strict about that. I couldn’t even go to my brother’s wedding, which was sad, but you accepted that this was the life to which you committed.”
Outside of the classroom, silence was way of life, a way of staying closer to God. “We were pretty much in silence unless the sister in charge had mercy on you or had something good to chat to you about,” recalls Sister Fugazi.
Inside the classroom these women were dedicated to their young charges, even as they struggled with the rigors of teaching classes of 42 children or more. Notes Sister Fugazi, “I love teaching and I love children. But if you really wanted them to learn, you had to have order. And you learned to keep order. But my students also knew that I really loved them, even the scamps. I would go out at lunchtime and teach them to play basketball or hockey.”
In 1964, when the film takes place, the sisters were acutely aware that changes were coming to the church, changes that did not always appeal to the older nuns but were welcomed by the ones just beginning. The liberalizations that followed Vatican II allowed them more freedom and contact with the world. The strictness of their life inside the convent was gradually relaxed. They were allowed to get drivers licenses, to vote, and they became as Father Flynn says, “friendlier.” “I think Vatican 2 has helped us in our relationship with the laity. Now I can really get to know the families of my students,” continues Sister Peggy.
Still, many of the nuns approached the changes cautiously, reluctant to give up the rigorous spirituality or to modify how they expressed the devotion to God that led them to be nuns in the first place. Says Sister Rita King, who has been a Sister of Charity since 1948: “I’ve seen a lot changes. And when times change, you always have people who want to go back and also those who want to go forward – but I’ve always hoped to stay somewhere in the middle.” “Sometimes I wish someone would ring a bell now and put us into silence,” adds Sister Peggy, “because the phone is always ringing and people are coming and going, and you really have to seek out peace.”
Even the gradual disappearance of the habit was looked on with mixed feelings. Sister Fugazi comments: “I remember as a young sister really taking pride in the habit. There was a certain joy in being part of a community where we all had the same aims. Once we were out of the habit, things were different, although it was just as happy in another way.”
As the church changed so too did society and, most visibly, the children the nuns were teaching. Today, the sisters all agree, children live in a entirely new reality. “They’re definitely different, they’re more outspoken, more sophisticated,” says Sister Fugazi. “But to say that they’re different doesn’t mean that they’re not as good or as kind or as interesting. They just live in a world so unlike the one that existed when we started teaching in the 1960s. Now, they’re all walking around with earplugs in their ears!”
Yet, the most essential elements of the nun’s lives — expressing their love for God through teaching and caring about children in tough neighborhoods — remain very much the same. “The children’s lives have changed but not their needs,” sums up Sister Peggy. “They still need the support and encouragement of adults and teachers. They count on us- and that part hasn’t changed.”
Doubt (2008)
Directed by: John Patrick Shanley
Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Alice Drummond, Carrie Preston, Lloyd Clay Brown, Susan Blommaert, Robert Ridgell, Frank Shanley
Screenplay by: John Patrick Shanley
Production Design by: David Gropman
Cinematography by: Roger Deakins
Film Editing by: Dylan Tichenor
Costume Design by: Ann Roth
Set Decoration by: Ellen Christiansen
Music by: Howard Shore
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material.
Studio: Miramax Films
Release Oaüe: December 12, 2008
Views: 93
