Writer-director Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer” is a quiet domestic drama about an older couple in North Carolina, their troubled adult children, the children’s significant others, and their struggles to find peace and happiness despite the mistakes they’ve made and the distress they’ve caused others. It received respectful national attention and found a theatrical audience, even though it had little promotional money behind it and features just one cast member who’s anything close to a household name—ace character actor David Strathairn.
But you are likely to have heard of it if you’ve read this site over the past year, because many of our writers and editors adore it. It was shown at last year’s EbertFest, where our publisher Chaz Ebert introduced it:
MacLachlan was in theater for a long time, as a director, actor, and writer. His debut screenplay was for 2005’s “Junebug,” which featured a firecracker performance by then-unknown Amy Adams that earned her a best supporting actress Oscar and launched her toward stardom. “Junebug” was directed by his old friend Phil Morrison, who collaborated with him on the short film “Tater Tomater,” based on McLachlan’s play “Behold Zebulon,” and is currently working on another movie for them to do together. As a director, MacLachlan did two other films, “Goodbye to All That,” with Paul Schneider and Melanie Lynskey, and “Abundant Acreage Available,” with Amy Ryan and Terry Kinney, and adapted another of his plays as the prison drama “Stone,” directed by John Curran.
MacLachlan spoke to RogerEbert.com about his film career, specifically the small-scale triumph of “A Little Prayer.” He discussed the inspiration behind his film, which stemmed from his experiences parenting his own daughter, as well as his thoughts on parenting adult children, the relationship between writing and the subconscious, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Where did this particular story come from?
I started writing it nine years ago, actually even longer than that, and it came from a lot of different places—things that I experienced, that I read, things I saw. But I realized only retrospectively, because it took me so long to make the movie, that I was really writing about my daughter, who was 15 at the time, growing up and going off on her own, becoming an adult. I’ve had that happen more than once in my work, where I only discover what I’m writing about a couple of years later. It’s like my unconscious is trying to work something out.
What about on a nuts-and-bolts craft level? Was there a specific experience that sparked “A Little Prayer”? For some writers, it could be reading a news story, hearing a friend relate a difficult experience, reading a poem, or something like that.
I can’t remember the exact impetus, but it was about a father figure and a young woman. All the elements in the film that deal with Bill’s son, David, the Iraq War veteran, I could say come from my cousin, an Afghanistan veteran who came back and had a lot of trouble. His marriage ended, and there was a lot of difficulty. That had a strong resonance. There were also some aspects of a play called The Dead Eye Boy that Lily Taylor did in New York, which deals with substance abuse. There were so many things that I don’t know if I can pick one as standing out more than the others.
Was there a particular model for David Strathairn’s character, Bill? He’s in a still very comfortable marriage with his longtime wife, played by Celia Weston. But he has to maintain diplomacy when he realizes that his son’s marriage is collapsing because of his cheating, and whether to tell his daughter-in-law what he knows, There’s also tension at the sheet metal factory that Bill and David-co-own, because David’s affair is with a subordinate. His daughter moves back into the family home with her kids following a separation. I’ve never seen that combination of challenges before.
I don’t know if there was any specific model for Bill, but I can say that Bill was a character that I knew very well when I cast the film. I knew I had to find someone to play Bill who would assure you that there was nothing fishy about his love for his daughter-in-law and the attention he gave her, someone with real gravitas, propriety, and honor. And so when David Strathairn came on board, I knew he was the perfect person, because not only can he play that kind of person, he actually is that kind of person. He’s just the greatest person.
I’m sure you know, because of your experience, the weird hope you have that the movie gods or the creative gods or the muses will line up for you. I just had an awful lot of good fortune with this movie, despite it being in the works for so long. There’s so much luck in how any kind of creative project, particularly film, turns out that I’m aware that I’m not in control of a lot of it.
You are reminding me of that Orson Welles quote about how a film director is a person who presides over accidents.
I also remember hearing another quote that’s kind of about this, from Robert Altman, who made movies for a long time, but went years between hits. He was talking about his movie “Gosford Park,” a surprise success late in his career. He said, “You know, I’ve been working the exact same way this whole time. Sometimes you just catch lightning in a bottle.”
Sometimes it all comes together. I am aware that that’s what happened with this film, in so many aspects. People say, “Are you proud of it?” I don’t know about feeling pride, because I don’t feel that responsible for it. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I got it done, and it’s finally out there for people to see. But I was just trying to work the best I could, and thank God there was some lightning caught in the bottle.
I sense these mysterious presences and energies coursing beneath the surface of the movie. They sometimes raise themselves up high enough that you can just sort of see them, but then they go back down again. Does that make any sense?
Thank you so much for saying that, because it was certainly my intention. I was an actor for a long time, and so what really interests me is character. It’s people. And always, as an actor and as a filmmaker, my question is, how do people get through life? Why is it so difficult? I was curious about how people get through difficulties. I know that I write with a lot of subtext, and I think it’s there, and sometimes I’ve had experiences as a playwright where I felt like the people who were interpreting my other work didn’t see that aspect or didn’t feel it, but if they feel it, the audience feels it, and it’s there. That’s also the case in film.
One of the things I love about film is that you can continue to quote-unquote “write” if after you’ve shot it, you’re editing it. There were scenes where I realized that all we really needed to make a point was a reaction shot, or a shot that captures a thought that’s on a person’s face. David has this quality as a screen actor. When we were shooting the movie, he was a great presence, and all the actors were really good, too. But then, later, when I looked at the footage, David had that quality that I’ve read about, one that other great movie actors have, in that the camera picks up so much more than what people observe when they’re on the set. I felt I saw what he was doing [when we were shooting], but in editing, I saw all these other thoughts, emotions, changes, and transitions that only the camera could see.
When you have an actor like that, you don’t need as much dialogue as the character was originally given. That might also explain the success of actors who are not trained, who are just unbelievably good on screen, like Marilyn Monroe, who had something profoundly magical that she couldn’t really control, and in her best performances, it’s something.
It’s also interesting, when an actor has that quality when they’re young, to see whether it can develop into something when they’re adults. Are they still in touch with that something? Can they still do it? When I was training as an actor, I had a teacher who said that many child actors don’t really succeed as adults because they have something when they’re children, but once they become adults, they can’t tap into it. They become too self-conscious.
I feel that way about the Fanning sisters. It seems like they just came out of the womb with that something you describe, and they’re still able to access it. Just this year, I was watching “Predator: Badlands,” of all things, and Elle Fanning was so extraordinarily forceful in it, playing two different parts, that I had a thought that I’d certainly never had while watching a Predator movie: I wish Ingmar Bergman could have directed her.
It’s funny that you mention Bergman. Our film was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York last Sunday. One audience member asked whether Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” inspired the father-in-law and daughter-in-law’s relationship. And I said, “I’ll take that.” [Laughs] But then I re-watched [“Wild Strawberries”] and it does have a lot of resonance with our film, especially the close relationship between the father-in-law and the daughter-in-law.
Do you think “Wild Strawberries” was buried in your subconscious somewhere and only emerged when you were writing this movie?
Yeah. I mean, everything’s there, in the subconscious. I really, truly believe that the conscious and subconscious play active roles in the creative process. And that can be frustrating, because I have other friends who are writers, particularly novelists, who say, “I’m working on my book, and I know what my next one’s going to be, and I know I have plans for the fact that one after that,” and they’re always producing work. I have found I’m just not like that! I have to wait till something has come through [to the conscious mind] to be expressed, and when I don’t have it, I’m like. “I’m never going to get another idea. I’m never going to make another film.” And I’m feeling that now, because we’ve really finally come to the [theatrical] run of “A Little Prayer.”
It is pretty remarkable how this movie has gotten off the micro-budget indie track that usually ends in obscurity, with the movie buried in some streaming algorithm. It really has found an audience. But you made it on a shoestring, and the distributor, Music Box Films, is wonderful, but they’re not exactly rolling in dough like the big studios. So it’s got to be word-of-mouth, right?
From your mouth to God’s ears! I hope so. I mean, you always want to have more eyes on your work. I want to share it with more people. It’s a matter of luck that we got into Sundance. And then we thought we were set once we sold it to a distributor, but that fell apart. And we were told, “That’s it, you’ll never get another distributor.” But finally, Music Box came along. Thank God. They’re a very small company, and I am so thankful to them. Yeah, it’s really gratifying that it has gotten the notice that it has.
There’s a spiritual dimension to your work that’s unusual in American movies—that feeling that there’s something out there beyond what we perceive with our senses. All the parts of the movie dealing with Bill and daughter-in-law Tammy, where they’re hearing that woman’s voice singing in their neighborhood and trying to locate the source of it—it felt like something you’d see in a Terrence Malick or Terrence Davies film, where there’s no question that there’s an unseen force binding everything.
Yeah. Absolutely. And when you mention it, I do get a little goosebumpy, because I feel that way myself. And I don’t know if anybody else registers that or recognizes that. The unseen singer came about because, when I was in New York for a while at a friend’s apartment, there was a woman who would sing as she walked down the street [below] every day at 5 am. She couldn’t sing very well, actually, but I would run to the window to try to see her. I could never see her. I thought it was funny, haunting, and interesting, so I decided to put it in the script.
About the singer: To me, that’s about grace. Tammy feels something about the singer’s presence. The singer doesn’t come every day. It’s special when she does, and it’s special when she doesn’t. She and Bill try to find her, but they can’t. And then near the end of the film, after Bill comes home drunk, the next morning, you see images of the neighborhood again, and you hear the soundtrack, the orchestration playing, and then it cuts out when you would hear this woman. She isn’t there.
To me, that’s about how, at that point in the story, for Bill and Tammy, they lost a connection to grace. It’s not until Bill brings her to the art museum and shows her The Andes of Ecuador, the Frederic Edwin Church painting, and she reads the placard about the idea of panoramas, that [she gets that] there’s a bigger picture. That’s what all art does to me. Art takes you out of your grief, sorrow, or worry and connects you to something larger.
