An enormous number of people wake in the morning with hearts full of hate
Mass examines grieving parents’ complex emotions in the wake of a school shooting. GEORGIA HUMPHREYS speaks to stars Jason Issacs and Martha Plimpton and the movie’s writer/director Fran Kranz
ON February 14, 2018, a high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, left 17 people dead.
While there had been news reports of similar massacres for years, LA-born actor Fran Kranz found the emotional impact of this particular case more affecting as he had become a father for the first time in 2016.
The now 40-year-old says that it ultimately led to him making Mass, which marks his writing and directing debut.
The new Sky Original film follows two sets of bereaved parents, Jay and Gail (Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton) and Linda and Richard (Reed Birney and Ann Dowd), who meet years after a school shooting tore their lives apart. The hope is that talking about the unspeakable tragedy will help them all move forward.
Mostly shot on one set, the entirety of the couples’ discussion unfolds in real-time onscreen, and it is an intimate, nuanced, and devastating exploration of grief, anger, and acceptance.
For the cast, “this was a film unlike anything we had ever done, or even read”, notes New York native Martha, who first rose to fame thanks to her role in classic 80s adventure film The Goonies.
The 51-year-old explains: “I know each of us had our own concerns. When each of us found out who was going to be in it and what it would be like, it was scary, it was daunting.
“We had no time, we had no money, but we jumped right in.”
For a horrifying number of people, school shootings are a lived experience. And yet, it’s a subject that’s rarely talked about on-screen.
Fran – who has starred in the film The Cabin in the Woods and the TV series Dollhouse – explains he wanted to focus on a “really human story”.
For two years, he read nothing but subject material for the project.
“But it started as just a concern, as a person, as a parent,” he said. “I didn’t have a movie in mind – I was working on another screenplay”.
One of the reasons Fran wanted to make Mass is because he is “so worried” about his country.
“When I was doing research, just because I have my own personal concern and frustration, coming across these stories I thought, ‘If people knew more about the families and the survivors and the children and the teachers, and if this was someone you knew, someone you were close with, you would feel so differently and so passionately about figuring this out immediately’.”
Interestingly, the filmmaker had studied the work of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) while at college years ago.
He recalls watching the documentary Long Night’s Journey into Day, about four amnesty trials for people who’d confessed to heinous crimes and expressed contrition, one of which concerned the murder of an American woman, whose parents met with the family of her killer prior to the trial.
“When I learned about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and those amnesty hearings, I was amazed.
“But truthfully, if I was really honest, I did not think I could participate, or even want to participate, that I’d just want retribution and punishment.”
But then, he adds, there would be the “hate that you live with because of that”.
“So I felt I had to write about this for my own need to believe in it and understand it, that you can work through the pain and find ways to reconcile with people you feel blame towards.” For British actor Jason, 58, Mass is not really about the tragedy the characters have endured. “It’s a film about people whose marriage has ground to a halt and whose life has ground to a halt because they’re paralysed – crippled – by blame they hold and guilt they hold and ideas that are stopping them living their life,” suggests the Liverpool-born star, whose previous film roles include the Harry Potter series and The Patriot. “And so the situation mirrors restorative justice meetings, all the meetings in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission; anytime anybody is brought face to face with the people they think are responsible for what’s gone wrong in their life.
“An enormous number of people wake up in the morning with their hearts full of hate, and they’re really poisoning themselves. And that’s what the film is about to me.” Martha adds: “I also think that the impetus for the film is important. And even though it’s not a political story, or a political film at all, I do think that its origin and where it comes from is important, because it is such a constant lived trauma, and something that, certainly in America, we live with all the time.”
Mass will be available in cinemas and on Sky Cinema from Thursday.