MAKING THE SCENE

For Tom McCarthy, the opening scene showing Walter Vale, a quietly miserable professor who eventually opens up his life and heart, stumbling through a piano lesson held the key to his story.

“I always had an image of Richard Jenkins’ character taking a piano lesson. I don’t know what it was about that, but I thought, ‘What would that be like for this guy to take a piano lesson at his age, at this time, in this place?’ The whole story sprang from that moment because I started thinking about who this guy was and I really liked the idea of him going down to New York from the suburbs and having an adventure where he stepped out of his life in some way and stumbled into another life and kind of became a different man as a result.

“It’s really a basic, simple scene. But I found that if it was too funny or quirky, or too serious, it would undermine the tone of the movie, and I didn’t want to mislead my audience, knowing where the movie had to go. So I had to be very cautious about how I was using humor.

“The funny thing about picking that piano scene is that it really is disassociated from the rest of the movie. If you were to talk about that movie you might say it deals with immigration or it’s ultimately a love story, but as a writer, that scene was something I kept coming back to.”

-- Lisa Rosen