Tony Kushner talks about ‘Lincoln’ screenplay at NOMA
By ALAN SMASON
Tony Kushner has always felt the influence of Abraham Lincoln, even as a youth growing up in Lake Charles a century after his death, he admitted to a packed audience gathered at the New Orleans Museum of Art this past Wednesday evening.
Kushner, who identifies as an American writer, a Jewish writer and a gay writer, said he first perceived an enormous admiration that his father, the conductor of the Lake Charles and Lafayette symphony orchestras, had harbored for the assassinated 16th President of the United States. Later, he, too, was drawn to this bold and impressive leader.
Award winning playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner at the New Orleans Museum of Art on Wednesday. (Photo by Alan Smason)
Kushner appeared in the NOMA auditorium to help promote the museum’s latest exhibit titled “Photography and the American Civil War.” Rare photographs and daguerrotypes are featured in the exhibit that runs till May 4.
As screenwriter for the Stephen Spielberg directed film “Lincoln,” Kushner devoted six years working on the manuscript, starting with a 500 page tome that covered four months of the president’s life. That draft was eventually discarded when Spielberg decided to concentrate, instead, on the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, better known as the Emancipation Proclamation.
Kushner talked about the momentariness and permanence of his writing. “I think that writing is an attempt to resurrect the dead,” he said. “That’s what all art is and it always fails. It is an attempt to go to where the rational sciences cannot go.”
Kushner, who is a Tony Award winner for his 1993 play “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” was selected by Spielberg to shape the manuscript for the film that starred Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role following his critically acclaimed script for “Munich,” also directed by Spielberg. For his portrayal of Lincoln, Day-Lewis captured the Academy Award as Best Actor two years ago.
Kushner said he eventually tried to write inside Lincoln’s head. “I used some of Lincoln’s words, but most of the dialogue was me,” he admitted. “I felt I would have to write the words if I was going to write the character.”
Day-Lewis’s uncanny resemblance to Lincoln was the reason both Spielberg and Kushner kept pushing for him – and only him – to play the role.
“Go look in the mirror,” Kushner remembered telling the actor when he was still mulling over the role. “God is trying to tell you something.”
Kushner also credited historian Doris Kearns Goodwin with providing him with plenty of historical facts about Lincoln and the Civil War era. He himself read several volumes on the era and Lincoln in particular to steep himself in his persona.
“He was a manipulator,” Kushner proffered in his evaluation of Lincoln. “He played people and not for malicious reasons.”
Kushner said he felt Lincoln’s decisions were usually very wise, but that he made one big mistake in dumping his first term vice-president in favor of Andrew Johnson in his run for a second term.
Kushner also felt Lincoln was a brilliant wordsmith and incredible speechwriter, pointing to the speech in the film that was central to the passage of the 13th Amendment. “He had a sense about the right word at the right moment having a tremendous effect,” he reflected.
