Toil and Trouble With Fries on the Side

Maura Tierney arrives a few moments late for an interview and steps to the curb just as the morning traffic on Larchmont Boulevard momentarily dies down. It’s a jaywalker’s dream, but Tierney hesitates, contemplating the infraction tentatively. As the traffic revives, she walks half a block to the crossing, where a few pedestrians are waiting for the light.

The actress, whose 37th birthday is today, has won recognition for her role as a nurse on “ER,” yet she hardly seems a star. She wears her dark, shoulder-length brown hair in a ponytail and is dressed in loose-fitting vintage ‘60s blouse and pants, Birkenstocks and sunglasses. L.A. residents are famous (and ridiculed) for their reluctance to flout jaywalking laws, but “it was my Boston Irish Catholic upbringing” that stopped her, she explains.

The comment seems ironic considering Tierney’s ardent portrayal of Pat McBeth, the driven, dutiful, murderous wife who is the centerpiece of first-time writer-director Billy Morrissette’s dark comedy, “Scotland, PA.,” which opens Friday.

Based--quite faithfully so--on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Morrissette’s reimagining of the Bard’s tragedy as a comic farce was not the easiest concept to sell, as Tierney readily admits. “It sounds like a terrible idea when you tell people, ‘Oh it’s “Macbeth,” and it takes place in rural Pennsylvania in the ‘70s in a fast-food restaurant, and it’s a comedy.’ People go, ‘Hmmm ...’” Tierney giggles at her mental picture and concludes, “It’s a hard pitch.”

Nonetheless, Shakespeare remains remarkably popular as source material among contemporary filmmakers.

According to the production notes, “Scotland, PA.” joins more than 180 film adaptations of Shakespeare stretching back to 1900 when Marrice Clement premiered “Hamlet” at the Paris Exhibition. More recent productions have unfolded in teen hangouts and high schools, including Baz Luhrmann’s “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” (1996), which is set on a Miami-like Verona Beach and stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, and Tim Blake Nelson’s “O” (2001), an update of “Othello” starring Mekhi Phifer as a love-struck high-school basketball star. (PBS’ “Masterpiece Theater” last week aired an “Othello” that retold the story of the Moor of Venice as a descent into madness by John Othello, London’s first black police commissioner. In 2000, director Michael Almereyda cast Ethan Hawke as the gloomy head of Denmark Corp. in his version of “Hamlet.”

And there have been at least 16 adaptations of “Macbeth,” including Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” (1957), which placed the action in medieval Japan, and William Reilly’s “Men of Respect” (1991), a mobster thriller.

Tierney and Morrissette were aware many hard pitches had preceded theirs. Morrissette, 39, Tierney’s husband of nine years, said in a later interview, “I had seen all that Kenneth Branagh stuff, and I love that ‘Romeo + Juliet’ thing, but it’s not the same. They’re speaking just words. After I wrote it, I had seen, ’10 Things I Hate About You,’ and I didn’t care for it. I thought they went a little too far, you know, ‘Taming of the Shrew’ in high school.

Although he took great liberties with the characters and setting, Morrissette claimed it was not difficult to remain true to the spirit of the text. “Being faithful to Shakespeare wasn’t hard,” Morrissette said. “Banco was a little slow because I remembered a guy in college who played Banquo, and I thought he was a little slow. So maybe I added a few of those things. But it came very, very naturally because these characters were all so involved in themselves. Malcolm and McDuff’s characters in the play are exactly what I did in the movie; it’s all just Shakespeare.” (Morrissette’s spellings diverge from the originals of Macbeth, Macduff and Banquo, in part as a play on the name of a certain fast-food chain.)

Even if interpreting Shakespeare ultimately wasn’t a problem, the process of writing was another matter. “I can’t tell you enough how much I am not a writer,” Morrissette confides. “I was an actor for 12 years, and I had no intention of being a writer--ever.” Morrissette said he conceived the idea for the film more than 20 years ago, back in his hometown of South Windsor, Conn.

“I was 16 and worked at Dairy Queen, and I hated my boss. I had read ‘Macbeth’ that same year and started telling people that this play would be hysterical if it took place in a fast food restaurant and everyone in the restaurant is named Mac. Nobody cared, of course. The idea went away, and I became an actor and in one bad year, as I was driving through L.A. on my way to a commercial audition, I heard something about ‘Macbeth,’ like, twice on the radio on NPR--two days in a row. It was like a premonition. My old joke and the Dairy Queen came into my head, and I thought, ‘Oh, I should get a computer and try to write that.’”

When Morrissette shared his idea with friends, their eyes glazed over. “One of my friends said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got a nice story here, but I’d cut this whole ‘Macbeth’ thing.” Tierney was a believer, however, and she and a few other friends encouraged him. “I really do believe that writing and directing are Billy’s true talents,” Tierney says. “He was so frustrated as an actor, and he had stopped working and was getting [lousier] parts and then he decided to do this. And as a result, I think he’s really found what his gift is. Now, he loves to write, and the characters he creates, he told me he gets little crushes on all of them.”

“Scotland, PA.” imagines “Macbeth” not merely as a story about unbridled greed and ambition, but above all as a story about a likable couple, deeply, madly in love, for which homicide just happens to become a convenient career tool.

Tierney was not Morrissette’s initial choice for the role of the killer housewife, Pat McBeth. “That’s the most horrible thing, and Maura knows this,” Morrissette says, “but from the beginning I was thinking the role would be a wacky Holly Hunter-type thing.” One day as he was working on the script in his study, Tierney was doing chores in the kitchen nearby. “She hit her hand or something” and let loose a burst of extremely colorful language, Morrissette recalls, “which is the way she talks. And all of a sudden it was obvious. From then on, I started writing the role for the Maura Tierney whom I knew and loved. There are a couple of lines like that in the film that are her actual lines.”

To prepare, Tierney studied several of the definitive filmed performances of Lady Macbeth, especially the work of Jeanette Nolan in Orson Welles’ 1948 version and the work of Francesca Annis, who performed the role in Roman Polanski’s 1971 movie. Gradually, she opted for an interpretation that was more faithful, not to Shakespeare, but to her husband’s original material.

“I finally decided to stick to Billy’s script,” she explains, “because he wrote a very complicated and complex and interesting character in Pat McBeth. And I began thinking that if I thought too much about, ‘Oh I’m gonna be playing Lady Macbeth,’ I would have freaked myself out. So I tried to play only Pat.”

Tierney describes the character as “a lady who just wants a washer and dryer, but who believes she is due certain things from life. The movie takes place in the ‘70s ... [and] in those days, the way a woman got real power was through her man,” Tierney says.

“Someone asked me, ‘Why doesn’t she leave him?’ And I’m, like ... (a) she loves him, and (b) he’s gonna make it happen for her. In her mind, that’s how it works.” Tierney decided “the McBeths, and especially Pat, don’t consciously think they’ve done anything wrong. Which is why Pat goes nuts ... the guilt eats at her and drives her crazy, but I don’t know if it’s at a conscious level. To express this, Billy wrote what I think is one of the best lines in the movie: ‘We’re not bad people; we’re just underachievers trying to make up for lost time.’”

Morrissette cast James LeGros (“Living in Oblivion” and the series “Ally McBeal”) in the pivotal role of Joe “Mac” McBeth, the homicidal short-order cook. Tierney and LeGros’ complimentary performances amount to a cinematic duet.

“The audience has to see that these two people love each other, otherwise you ain’t going to care for these people,” Tierney says. “I mean, that’s what they have going for them--how much they love each other.” Adds Morrissette, “I have loved James’ work and talked about him for years. I knew that he could bring things to the role of McBeth that might be missing from the script.”

After Morrissette completed the script in 1998, he and Tierney looked for funding. “Maura had met a producer on something, and he took it immediately,” Morrissette recalls. “I was very paranoid about the guy and rightly so. We lost a year and three months because he just held onto it. That was the ugly road to Hollywood, where people just take your work and option it and sit on it and don’t do anything. I went crazy.” Tierney remembers, “It just kept not happening and not happening. We had no control and were frustrated. So finally we said, ‘Give us the script back.’ And Billy said, ‘I’m gonna do it!’”

Morrissette says, “The twist is, after that, we got our very good friend Richard Shepard [‘Mexico City,’ ‘Oxygen’] to produce it. He had it for a month or two, and all of a sudden we had the money.”

Eventually cinematographer Wally Pfister (“Memento”), costume designer David Robinson (“The Phantom of the Opera”) and veteran actors such as James Rebhorn (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”) and Christopher Walken became attracted to the project.

Of Walken’s comic turn as the vegetarian detective, McDuff, Tierney quips, “I don’t know what drew him to the material. But I’m glad something did.”

Andy Dick, a friend from Tierney’s days on the NBC sitcom “NewsRadio” (1995-99), also turns in an important cameo as one of three stoned-out, trouble-making spirits whom only McBeth can see. “Andy did us a favor because we sort of asked him to be in it,” Tierney recalls. “He was a freaky joy,” Morrissette adds.

There was one potential crisis the couple had not anticipated: the strain the filmmaking process might put on their marriage.

“Well, not only did I never write before, I had certainly never directed and I was sure that it was going to end the marriage,” Morrissette says. “I met Maura Tierney 10 years ago at the revolving lounge of the Hollywood Holiday Inn, on the first day I arrived in L.A., and I now was sure we were going to kill each other and it would be a mess. It was stupid of me because what happened was, it was so simple, we both cared about the project so much and worked so hard together.”

For her part, Tierney was nervous because “Billy had never directed even a short film before, and it was really scary. We were both nervous, but I was more nervous for him than I was for me. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh no, I don’t want my husband to direct me.’ It was sort of like, ‘Do you think you can do this?’

“No one else was going to cast me in this role. I felt it was a big opportunity for me to do something really different. So both of us really wanted to get it right and do a good job. We were a team in that. I don’t think we really realized the possibilities for conflict until we were done.”

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Emory Holmes II is an occasional contributor to Calendar.