Interview: Writer/Director Tom McCarthy of the Adam Sandler Fantasy “The Cobbler”

I am a huge fan of writer/director Tom McCarthy (Win Win, “The Station Agent,” The Visitor), and was delighted to get a chance to talk to him about his new film, co-written with Paul Sado, “The Cobbler.”  It is a gentle fantasy starring Adam Sandler as a shoemaker who discovers his father’s old machine for sewing shoes has magical properties.  If he tries on the shoes repaired with that machine, he takes on the appearance of the shoe’s owners.  The film co-stars Dustin Hoffman, Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”), and Ellen Barkin.  It opens in theaters, and on VOD and iTunes March 13, 2015.

As an actor and as a writer, you have to use your imagination to step into the shoes of different characters all the time.  Is that what inspired this idea?

Probably a little bit. It didn’t dawn on me till later in the making of it.  It was probably as we started to rehearse with the actors that we realized realize it was something actors are very used to doing. Initially it was just the idea that you don’t know a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. There was something about that that sounds really compelling. The idea of exploring the interesting world of the Cobbler and the Shoe Repair Man as a way of exploring that idea.

The title, “The Cobbler,” has a fairy tale quality, very different from your earlier films. When you are creating a fantasy film, how do you work out all of the internal rules to keep it consistent and organic?

Paul and I really wrestled with what it meant, what we could do what we couldn’t do. We felt like, okay, there are definite limits to this. We had to keep double-checking to make sure we were not breaking any of our own rules.  We tried to keep it as simple as possible, what exactly Adam was allowed to do and what he wasn’t allowed to do, what he could control and what he couldn’t control. And like all superheroes, we figure his power would increase as he begin to master it as he got better at it.  But there certainly are stages when he is exploring it and having fun with it and in some cases abusing it and then ultimately using it for good.

What made you decide to try fantasy?

You are searching for new things, new things to challenge you at different ways and you are looking to have fun and you are looking to explore. I don’t ever profess to be limited to one particular school of filmmaking or any type of storytelling.  It’s always what sort of tickles me in the moment when I think of something exciting and challenging and “The Cobbler” was all those things for me.

“The Cobbler” was not the movie I was planning on making, I was planning on making “Spotlight,” the movie I am editing now.  Spotlight got pushed back because we couldn’t get it together in time. Paul and I had really been working on “The Cobbler” for a long time. So we just had the idea to just get together and bang ideas around.  Just the energy of collaboration and the synergy that it brings about is just really exciting and cool. Paul and I are old friends and we really connect so it was a good time.

It is quite a challenge for actors to have to not just play their own character but Adam Sandler’s character as well. 

Sometimes we just have to work on keeping it straight as we were in the moment. And then beyond that, when you have an actor like Dustin, it is really just little tweaks here and there reminding him of maybe what was too much, not enough or too much depending on where he was in the scene. All these people had a pretty good sense of how they were going to approach Adam. They weren’t just trying to mimic him. They were trying to get the essence of what Adam might be in their body. And it was really a little bit of modulation on everybody but not much. It was kind of just making sure that the story held together and that the audience could keep track of who is who at any particular time.

Your cast included some actors who are very trained and experienced and others who were not.  What did you think about as you were casting the film?

I’m always just trying to find what actor I think would best connect with the role.  Some secondary considerations are where the actor comes from and what their work ethic is like and how they approach material ultimately especially in a film like this where you are building an ensemble. But mostly it is who is right and then we work backwards from there. Some people are classically trained and some aren’t trained at all, some are connected, some come from  comedy and stand ups, some came out of rap, so people are coming from all kinds of places.  I think that adds a really nice texture to the movie. I think one thing I’m very proud of with this film is that it really represents New York in a very authentic way. I think it gets the culture, especially the Lower East Side. I think we did a good job of capturing that.

And if you could pick out one pair of size 10 1/2 shoes and be him for a day, who would you pick?

That’s a really good question. I think it would be kind of cool to check out Putin. I want to see what that guy does, walk around the Kremlin and see what is going on in that place. My feeling is Kruten doesn’t have a 10.5, though, I think he is a little guy, he is probably got like an 8 or something.

I liked the way you kept the origin of the magical shoe repair machine a little bit mysterious, even though you had the flashback with the men all speaking Yiddish as they came up with a plan to stop the neighborhood bully.

I didn’t understand a word of the Yiddish when I was filming it but it was really fun to listen to that language. They speak it so beautifully and it was nice to be around for a couple of days. But I think ultimately with that opening sequence , it’s a little nod to Max’s heritage and that period going back to a generation that would have been Jewish immigrants from mostly Eastern Europe who at that time were kind of flowing to the lower East Side and making that their home.  What Paul and I were playing with is this idea that all these sorts of different shop owners and tradesmen were being kind of run out by a slumlord/landlord who is raising rent and forcing them which of course is what we ended up dealing with later in the movie with Ellen Barkin.  Every generation has their own problems and if we would listen to our grandparents we would find out that there a lot of the same problems, just different looks. And so we thought that it is a cool way to see all the tradesmen coming to the cobbler asking for help and sort of setting up the motif. And for me also it was a little nod to a time when being a tradesman was a really respected position in society, as it should be. I think is really wonderful when you have talented craftsmen and tradesmen and I hope we never lose track of that, we don’t become one big mall. It is good to go shopping and deal with one person who fixes your shoes or works on your clothes or does whatever that is they are doing.  It is a nice way to do business.