Making the scene

In a powerful sermon in writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” a film about suspicion, judgment and moral certitude, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) preaches about the consequences of bearing false witness.

In the old fable he relates to his congregation, a woman is instructed by a priest to cut open a pillow on a rooftop and is then admonished by him that, as its feathers scatter beyond recovery, so too does the malice of gossip. It’s an inherently cinematic scene, and in adapting his play to the big screen, Shanley cuts between Flynn’s pulpit and a visual of the sermon come to life -- an East Bronx neighborhood where the gossiping parishioner slices open her pillow. “I played in those alleys when I was a kid,” Shanley says of the setting. “It has tremendous meaning to me.”

Getting the feathers to fly from the rooftop was difficult. “We were all madly slashing at pillows, blowing them around with wind cannons,” Shanley says, adding that as cameras rolled, he was throwing handfuls of feathers from the roof to help fill the frame.

But it is not the feathers themselves that truly anchor the scene. Instead, it is the distinction between the narrow, unsettling alleys behind the buildings and the ebullient street scene in front. “It’s what’s underneath,” Shanley says of his story’s essential meaning.

And did the production retrieve all the feathers? Shanley demurs. “We just got out of there,” he says, “as fast as we could.”

-- John Horn