McCarthy's storytelling triumphs on screen

On an unusually warm April Wednesday, the doors of the posh theater district Ritz-Carlton were opened for me, and I was ushered upstairs to the ballroom area. There was a full assortment of beverages and foods in the waiting room where I would wait to interview the recipient of the sixth annual Arts Council Award for Distinguished Achievement - alumnus Tom McCarthy, BC '88 - who was in town to publicize his sophomore film, The Visitor, a stirring take on immigration in the context of a post-Sept. 11 world.

Emerging from a conference room full of reporters, McCarthy, clad in glasses and a blazer, opted to change scenery and sit next to me in the empty reception. With his now-full resume, it's hard to point a finger at exactly where McCarthy's career began. Interestingly, as an undergraduate, he was never involved in theater or film, though he had friends who were involved in these areas. What he did do at Boston College was join My Mother's Fleabag. "That was the beginning of the whole journey for me, really," McCarthy recounted.

It was McCarthy's sophomore year when he joined the famed improvisational and sketch comedy group, and he credits it with having a profound influence on his life. The students with whom he performed and who would eventually be his colleagues - including other famous Fleabag alumni Maile Flanagan, Nancy Walls, and Wayne Wilson - changed his thought process from teenager to adult. Their fields of study and the passions that they were pursuing would inspire him to change his major and school, leaving his accounting concentration in the Carroll School of Management for a philosophy major in the College of Arts and Sciences.

"I just started thinking more independently … and really focusing not on what I thought I should do but what I wanted to do, and I think that that was a big moment for me, because that's something that I now do with my movies. I don't think about movies that I think will be successful. I think about stories that I want to tell and focus on that," McCarthy said.

But it wasn't just Fleabag that made a decisive impact on McCarthy's future. It was also his BC education. Mid-interview, he stopped to recall the story of an accounting professor of his, Robert Turner. McCarthy came to consider Turner one of the greatest teachers that he ever had. He will never forget the day when he was called in after class to a discussion that he did not expect. Turner acknowledged that while McCarthy was doing the work, it was quite evident that his heart was not in it. The described "caring and straight-forward" conversation propelled McCarthy to change majors, setting off a fire within him.

"I always credit him as being the best kind of teacher, because if it wasn't for him, I probably wouldn't be on this path in some level, and I think he saw in me a smart kid who wasn't really 100 percent focused on the work at hand. ... And I always credit him, or haven't really done it before ... publicly … for being a great teacher for that reason - for not just demanding that your students do the work you're to do, but really caring about the students even enough to suggest that they maybe look in other places," McCarthy said.

After graduating from BC, McCarthy took three years off, doing sketch comedy in Minneapolis and Chicago with his aforementioned Fleabag partners. In Chicago, he began acting in straight plays, which was a dramatic change for him, as he had only previously performed comedy. He ultimately fell in love with acting, and, deciding that he wanted to pursue the craft for the rest of his life, McCarthy chose to pursue graduate school at the Yale School of Drama.

From there, McCarthy began a successful acting career, holding down a recurring role in the first season of Boston Public, among other guest and recurring roles in television and roles in independent movies. While McCarthy was finding work, however, he grew dissatisfied with the roles that were being presented to him.

"I was acting quite a bit, and I was doing a lot of independent films that I weren't so crazy about. I felt like there were a lot of films about being 30-something and not sure if I wanted to get married or not. I felt there's more to this … so I just thought, instead of just sitting back and keep auditioning and complaining about it, I thought that I would try and come up with my own story and tell an original story. … It was almost an exercise in curiosity. … Can I do it? Can I tell a story?" The result was The Station Agent - a film about a man with dwarfism whose only friend dies and finds companionship in unexpected places - which McCarthy ultimately chose to direct himself.

McCarthy was able to make the transition to screenwriter with utmost ease, finding immense success on his first outing. The equation was quite simple and has once again found him success in The Visitor: He writes his screenplays around the characters that he creates, making lush acting roles. When The Station Agent debuted at Sundance, McCarthy won the coveted Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, with actress Patricia Clarkson receiving a special jury award for her performance, and the film winning the Audience Award. Miramax picked up the film at the festival when it was under Bob Weinstein, and Agent went on to win screenwriting awards for McCarthy at the Independent Spirit Awards, National Board of Review, and the BAFTAs. Of the latter, McCarthy gushed, "That was a great thrill to win that."

Still, in spite of winning all of these awards and heavy nomination at the 2003 SAG awards, the film was overlooked by the Golden Globes and the Oscars. McCarthy admitted his surprise with a chuckle, as the film was supposed to be a shoo-in. "It's tough because you're dealing with huge movies that maybe aren't even that good, but they have such a publicity machine behind them; so I think that's why movies like this really depend on word of mouth. And you know now what's happened, I think The Station Agent was really the beginning of it, because the next year you know there was Napoleon Dynamite, there was Lost In Translation that year - you know now people are paying more attention to these small films, like Juno this year's an example, that sort of hysterical en mass example," he said.