NOVEMBER 5, 2004—Andrew McCarthy knew he would direct one day. He just didn’t know when.

Last year, when filming was coming to a close on the Stephen King TV miniseries Kingdom Hospital, McCarthy knuckled down and wrote a screenplay based on a short story by Irish writer Frank O’Connor. Fifteen years after he purchased the rights to the seven-page story, McCarthy finally rolled cameras on News For the Church. The short film, made in Ireland and Vancouver, will screen 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 6 during the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.

Set in Ireland in 1949, News For the Church details a priest’s reaction to a young woman’s confession of enjoying a one-night stand. McCarthy juxtaposes the confession with the failed efforts of a hungry boy to steal a loaf of bread from an hardhearted baker.

The Pretty in Pink star, who’s about to perform Off-Broadway in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, flew Friday from New York to introduce Saturday’s 3 p.m. screening of News For the Church.

Film South Florida.com spoke with the still-boyish McCarthy about his decision to make a short film, the challenges he faced as a director, and News For the Church’s Oscar chances.

Film South Florida.com: What made you feel that now was the right time to direct?

Andrew McCarthy: I thought it was about time. I’ve had the story for a long time. I bought the rights 15 years ago. A year ago I thought I would go make that little movie. Something like you have to totally generate from the ground up in terms of motivation. And I thought, OK, it’s time to do this.

Film South Florida: Why start with a short film? To get your feet wet?

McCarthy: Two reasons. This is a particular story I knew how to tell. If was making my film, I wanted it to be my film. Instead of trying to scourge and beg and borrow and do some low-budget thing--which I’ve had experience with, and from an actor’s point of view is full of billions of compromise—I wanted to say that this is the kind of film I would to make. As opposed to, Here’s the film I would have made had I had a crane here and had I had two days to shoot. Every mistake in the film is mine. Everything you like about the movie is mine. It’s the movie I wanted to make. It’s looks like I wanted it to look, it sounds like I wanted it to sound. I wanted to make my movie and see if I could make one, not a water-downed version of a movie I would have made I might have made. It was a story I wanted to tell. It’s not that I wanted to make a short. I had a story and I wanted to make that movie.

Film South Florida: Why is this a story you knew how to tell?

McCarthy: I have no idea why I could tell that. I just knew I identified with it, the themes, which is odd as I’m not Irish. My heritage is, but I’m not Irish native. It’s a very Irish story from 1949, so it is odd. But I understood certain themes that I identified with personally.

Film South Florida: That sometimes the crime doesn’t fit the punishment? In the film, the girl is treated like a murderer for sleeping with a man outside of marriage. As soon as she leaves, the baker arrives to confess for his terrible actions. Yet he too will be absolved of his sins.

McCarthy: I thought it was more the perils of self-empowerment: young people going out outside the norm to take control or empower themselves in their lives and the price that they often pay from society for having to do that. I think it threatens society when they do that. In this case, the church is society in Ireland at that time. To me, it has nothing to do with the church—I have no feeling one way or the other about the church. I’m Catholic. The other notion of the dangers of solitude, people who are alone in the world, making decisions alone without any connection to anyone else. I think all four characters are alone and make decisions solely in their head and not tethered to any part of society, and I think that is dangerous when people slip through the cracks like that. It happens all the time.

Film South Florida.com: You didn’t set out to make a film that criticized the church, but have people come up to you and say it does do exactly that?

McCarthy: I showed it in ireland at a couple of festivals. I though that would be the litmus test: do they buy this or not? They were all really responsive. One lady summed it to me by saying, “Well, I was really proud and then I felt very ashamed. That’s how I grew up.” I see the priest as—with the tools he that he has—helping her. In his mind he’s helping her and saving her. He says, “If you get pregnant, you will leave the country, and who will help you?” And it’s true: if she got pregnant, she would be put on the boat and her life would be over. In his mind, he has to bring her down to help save her, to protect her from herself. Another thing that clear’s people doing harm when in their minds they’re doing right. In my life, all the people who have done harm to me have tried to help me so far as they’re concerned. I’ve never had someone do harm to me consciously, as far as they were concerned. Well, that’s not entirety true, but that’s mostly that’s the case. Everyone in this film felt they were in the right. That little kid deserved a beating because he’s a precocious little kid. The girl needs to be saved.

Film South Florida: Why did you decide to add the subplot about the boy if it was not in the original story?

McCarthy: I didn’t think it was a film with just a girl and a priest in a box. It’s a scene, not a film. I wanted to take it out of the box and what do I want to do. I had certain restrictions on myself. Most of the dialogue in the confessional box. I decided not to try to compete with a wonderful Irish writer. There is dialogue (in the subplot), but it’s minimal. I wanted to physically represent what was happening to the girl emotionally. That was cerebral and emotional; I wanted to the other story to be mostly physical. I was interested in the whole notion of travelers in Ireland. The boy actually was a traveler--and they are not welcome in Irish society, especially at that time. That hatred that the gypsy culture bring out in people. And the whole notion of bread and the church. There’s also something about the violence erupting that is so disproportionate to what is appropriate. In America, people say, That seemed a lot. In Ireland, not one person ever had an issue with this kid getting a beating. It’s just a given in Irish culture at that time. There was a certain kind of man that did that.

Film South Florida: What was the greatest challenge you faced as a first-time director?  

McCarthy: As opposed to acting, when we’re thinking about what we’re doing now, now, now, directing, you’re always thinking, Where am I going? I’’m here, but I go to the next location, and I’ve got two hours for this shot, and where is the story taking, where am I going? Just logistical things. I was working as an actor in Vancouver. We shot some of the film in Vancouver., the interior, the confessional. Then my (director of photography) said, “I’ll shoot the rest of it for you in Ireland, but you have to shoot it in 10 days. I have a window of three days in 10 days from now.” OK. We shot the whole thing in three days--one day in the confessional in Vancouver, and two days in Ireland. So I just had to prep, find location and a crew over the Internet in 10 days to shoot in another country, which only gets done if you have to do it. I’m finding locations over the Internet. Then I get there and scrapping locations and finding others. That was all a bit of a scramble. It all sort of come together in a wonderful. The film didn’t open as written, with the girl standing on the cliff at the ocean. The night before shooting, I went to get a breath, and drove 10 miles out of the village to the ocean. I said, Wait, this is where my movie starts. So the next morning, three of us got in the car--me, (actress Nora-Jane Noone) and the cameraman--and went to the ocean for an hour and the sun came out, we shot and then we went back to shoot the rest of the year.

Film South Florida: How important is it to show the film at a festival such as Fort Lauderdale?

McCarthy: This is the only sort of world for these sorts of films in America. In Europe, they’ll show them on TV. Here, there are very few outlets for them. This is where these things live.

Film South Florida: What’s the film’s future? Is it true you plan to submit the film for Oscar consideration?

McCarthy: We won the Rhode island Film Festival, so it qualifies. We’ll see what happens. We’re going to do a few more festivals and then deal with (film and TV distribution). The more success you have at festivals, the more value these things have. Not that there’s much monetary value in it, really.

Film South Florida: How does directing fit into your future plans?

McCarthy: I’m writing something now. It’s something I would like to do. I’m doing a play now in New York, and I would love to go back and forth and have as part of my life. When I did it feel like I was going to work. I didn’t feel like, Wow, now I’m directing. It felt OK. You pick up a lot by osmosis by working with a lot of 100 directors over 25 years. It’s amazing what you don’t realized you’ve learned.

News for the Church will screen 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 6 at the Playhouse House, preceding The Chorus (Les Choristes). Visit http://filmsouthflorida.com/fliff2004.html or http://fliff.com/2004/listings/newsforthechurch.htm for more details.

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