AN END OF ‘SEA’ NOT TO BE
It didn’t have to end like this … is what Cambridge native Matt Damon is now revealing about the awardwinning film “Manchester by the Sea.”
Kenneth Lonergan, the movie’s writer and director who earned an Academy Award for the screenplay, had apparently conceived a far more symbolic ending, Damon said during a recent episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast. However, a quickly dwindling budget called for a more frugal finish.
Damon, who was attached to the 2016 movie via his production company Pearl Street Films, described the scrapped scene saying: “There was this scene, where they were all on the boat that the whole movie’s kind of about, and it was a flashback to before Casey (Affleck)’s kids had died, before his brother had died, when he was still married to Michelle (Williams), and they were all on this boat and they were whale watching, right? It’s this incredible moment of joy and you see this family all together and then these whales start breaching out of the water, and it was just … this epic (scene), so as the camera pulls back as this family is experiencing this incredible joy — and you know it’s about to go horribly wrong for them, right? — the camera’s pulling up, up, up and it reveals all of these other boats all around it, and it’s all of these other families that are watching these whales and it’s like this is one little story in this sea of stories. And it was epic and it was beautiful and it like tied the whole thing together, and we ran out of money. It was like, (expletive).”
As it is, Damon said that production for the film cost $8.8M. And even though it ended up grossing about $79M worldwide, Damon added that during shooting, the team didn’t know how the movie was going to land at the box office. So they opted to finish the film by just having Lee Chandler (played by Affleck) and his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) fishing on their late brother/father’s boat.
“You needed a (expletive) drone cam,” he said of the scrapped final scene. “I mean it was one day of shooting and you gotta get lucky with the whales, but either way we could’ve figured that out.
“In retrospect, we could have done that. But you don’t know it’s ‘Manchester’ until it comes out and everybody goes, ‘Holy (expletive), it’s great.’ ”