Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight looks at the importance of investigative journalism

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The actor-writer-director Tom McCarthy isn't a journalist, even if he has great empathy for the species after playing a reporter in the final season of The Wire some years ago. But in crafting Spotlight, his riveting procedural that follows a small Boston Globe team on the trail of the pedophilia scandal that rocked the Catholic Church in 2002, he and his co-writer Josh Singer spent long stretches with the reporters themselves, doggedly pressing them on the finer details of the story behind their blockbuster scoop.

"We were researching this a good 10 years after they finished their investigation, and these are very busy, active reporters with very full lives," McCarthy explains during an afternoon interview at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, nodding at the parallels his work had with that of his subjects. "There was a lot of digging, and sort of anthropological work. We had to go back and say, 'Well, didn't you say … ? And wasn't that … ?' They all have great minds, but in cross-referencing, we were like, 'Well, this doesn't sync up, and that doesn't sync up.'"

The film takes its name from the Globe's renowned Spotlight investigative unit, the cadre of three reporters and one editor who were charged in the summer of 2001 by Marty Baron, a new editor-in-chief who had just come in from The Miami Herald, to look deeper into long-standing allegations of abuse by local priests.

Tucked away in the paper's basement, far from the main newsroom, the team worked for almost five months to crack open a scandal that reached into the church's nerve centre. Beginning in January, 2002, with a Sunday front-page bombshell, the paper published almost 600 stories about the abuse and cover-up, which led that September to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law. (He was reassigned to Rome.) In April, 2003, the series was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

The difficulty of unearthing old facts was only one of the challenges faced by McCarthy in bringing Spotlight to the screen. The film industry is suffering under some of the same disruptive pressures that have kneecapped the news business over the past decade and a half. Films such as Spotlight – described by McCarthy as "a real drama about journalism and sexual abuse within the Catholic Church – institutional evil" – are getting suffocated at birth.

"Because of the climate, the marketplace is shrinking, as we all know, and it's dominated by genre movies – some very good, some not so good – and it's getting harder and harder to make dramatic human stories."

With each of the three main production companies that eventually backed Spotlight, "there was a sort of back-and-forth: 'It's on,' 'It's off,' 'It's on,' 'It's off.'"

Like the reporters who spent months not quite knowing what the story was, McCarthy says, he's not sure he ever fully grasped the roadblocks. "You have conversations with studio people at one in the morning on a Sunday night, where they're, like, 'Look, we love this script and this cast is great, and we really want this to happen' – 'Well, what's the hangup?' 'Well, there's other things happening … ' You feel like you're only getting half the story some of the time."

Shortly before Spotlight began shooting last fall, McCarthy's previous film, The Cobbler, was bowing to excoriating reviews at TIFF. A magical realist comedy starring Adam Sandler as a New York shoemaker who discovers a wondrous heirloom that allows him to step into other people's identities, the film was dumped in theatres last March in such a low-profile opening that box-office results were never officially released.

McCarthy says TIFF audiences – of real people, not critics – cheered The Cobbler; he blames the film's original backer, Voltage Pictures, which he accuses of selling "to the highest bidder without thinking about who could actually do something interesting with the movie. I think it's a very particular film. You know, without any shred of self-doubt, I'm very proud of that movie, I love that movie. It's a part of my body of work."

Spotlight is a sharply different film. It finally went before the cameras last fall in an abandoned Sears warehouse west of Toronto that had been refashioned by the production designers to look like the Boston Globe's newsroom, circa 2001. While McCarthy's previous films were sprinkled (The Station Agent) or larded (The Cobbler) with whimsy, this time around he took his cues from the reporters themselves: understated types whose work is both unglamorous and world-shaking. It follows the reporters – played by Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d'Arcy James, with Michael Keaton as their primary editor – as they pore over thousands of files, pull threads, push sources and hit one after another dead end.

Through it all, they are encouraged and protected by their editors. And though the film nods at the financial pressures the Globe was facing at the time – newsroom staff had been cut from about 520 to 450 when Baron took over – it was still an important local voice. "There's something about the institutional power of the paper that, visually, I was trying to imbue, just by the fact that it was just so massive. And that you need a massive institution to take on a massive institution. A blogger cannot take on the Catholic Church," McCarthy says.

"It doesn't mean a small town paper can't have an impact, but that small town paper had better be funded, better be supported, better be able to say to a reporter, 'You can be on this for three or four or five months, however long it takes.' Because you know the Catholic Church will wait. So, to me that was really important – to show the volume, show these long hallways. There's something so wonderfully generic about the place. Feels like a ship. That ocean liner – sort of fleet mentality – was important to me."

While the Globe is still a journalistic force – it has won six Pulitzers since 2003 – like many legacy operations it continues to shrink: Last year, the estimated newsroom head count was 340. "I really strongly believe, after spending three or four years – and maybe even longer, from my time in The Wire, where I credit [creator] David Simon with really educating me on the state of the journalism industry, past and present – but I do think there's a real disconnect with the general public, not only with how fundamentally important this type of journalism is, but also how dire the situation is. And I do think – if our movie raises awareness about that, and shows by example just how important it is? Then, that's a wonderful thing."