Artist Spotlight: Alfred Uhry

American playwright and screenwriter Alfred F. Uhry is among a select group of writers to receive an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Tony (of which he has two). His 1987 play “Driving Miss Daisy” received widespread critical acclaim and was adapted into a 1989 film for which he wrote the screenplay. The film went on to garner four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Uhry recently sat down with The Crimson to talk about the differences between writing for the stage and for the screen and the role of the arts in shaping political discussions.

THC: What was the process of [adapting “Driving Miss Daisy”] for the screen like?

AU: I had a very good director named Bruce Beresford, and he had done plays adapted into movies. So I wrote my script, and he said, “Well, you know what you've done is just retyped your play. And that's very nice, but that's not a movie…. In a movie, you don't have to say as much. You can get by with the look in somebody's eye or the way their mouth might move…. What I would love from you is pages of visual stuff. What it felt like to live in Atlanta then.” So, I wrote about National Geographic magazines piled up on the radiator, sunlight coming through Venetian blinds, what the food was like, what the weather was like…. The screenplay has its own rhythm, and I realized…that a writer is in control of a play, but a director is in control of a movie.

THC: How involved were you on set during the making of your movies?

AU: I was very involved with “Driving Miss Daisy.” I was lucky; I was there a lot, and they trusted me. Well, a reason was that I had written about a subject that I knew about—Atlanta in the ’40s and ’50s. And they would ask me questions like, "Would Miss Daisy eat fried chicken with her fingers?" and I said, ‘Well yeah,”.... I got [to Atlanta] and Bruce met me and he said, "I have to admit I asked your mother the same thing, and she said you were right." I mean, so they were checking. But on most movies I would rarely be there. I would turn in my script, and they didn't want me.

THC: Were there any actors or actresses you thought were particularly good at portraying the characters in the way that you had seen them?

AU: Yes. Morgan Freeman played the part in the play [“Driving Miss Daisy”] originally, when it was off-Broadway in a 72-seat theater. He was the original Hoke. He was only 40 years old, but it was remarkable because he played this old man, and he played it with dignity and humor and everything I would have wanted. The first day of rehearsal, he said, "I think you and I knew the same man." He managed—because he wasn't a movie star—to get the film, and he became a movie star. But that was luck; Morgan illuminated that movie.

THC: Were there ever points where your vision for a movie really conflicted with that of the director's?

AU: Yes. Not in…[“Driving Miss Daisy”], but there were…. There are a lot of cooks involved in making a movie…and the writer's voice is not nearly as well-represented in a film as it is in a play. Of course, the advantages of writing a movie are that you get paid in advance…. In a play you don't get paid in advance, and you're sort of skipping from stone to stone all your life, you know…. Some playwright—I've forgotten who—said, "You can make a killing in the theater, but you can't make a living." In other words, you can have one hit play, maybe two, but there's all those years in between, all that time…. So I was very lucky in that I got into writing screenplays because of my plays, and I did it for 10 or 12 years. It supported me, and I just found that I was spoiled; I liked the theater better.

THC: Why did you like the theater better?

AU: Because it was me. I like the actuality of knowing it was alive every night, and seeing it in front of an audience, and having the actors take those risks that they took every night. Trying to remember the lines, trying to remember the blocking, what happens if they go up, what happens with that piece of scenery. It's alive. In the movies it's canned. You can be dead and still be really good in a movie, you know.

THC: What do you find most rewarding about writing, whether for the screen or for the stage?

AU: The most rewarding in the theater is standing at the back of the house and having people react to what you've done. It's really a wonderful, warm feeling. What I love, and what's also really rewarding in the theater, is the rehearsal period…. I've been very lucky with actors who are these talented, committed people, and who spend that period just thinking about how to interpret your work. Recently, “Driving Miss Daisy” was done in Australia by James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury. Now those are two big, huge theater people, both in their eighties...and they were both being so careful about it…. I mean, going over it with a little microscope. I thought, “My God, these geniuses are devoting all this time to my work.” It's very, very rewarding. In the movies—I hate to sound snobby—it's not that.

THC: What are the roles of theater and film in shaping the conversation surrounding highly politicized topics such as racism and religious prejudice?

AU: I think film and theater play an enormous part in our social conversations. I think the fact that there is such a film—that's successful—as “12 Years A Slave,” is a much better reference to that period of American history than, say, “Gone with the Wind” because it deals with actual things that really happened. It doesn't prettify anything…. I think a film like “American Hustle” is a good artistic representation of the 1970s in this country, and done very artistically. I believe that film, television,…certainly theater, has a lot to do with what we talk about, and I think it shapes a lot of our feelings.