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FILM 1465: SPOTLIGHT

TRIVIA: The real Walter Robinson said: "My persona has been hijacked. If Michael Keaton robbed a bank, the police would quickly have me in handcuffs".

The screenplay for this film was featured in the 2013 Blacklist; a list of the "most liked" unmade scripts of the year.

During an interview on NPR's "Fresh Air", director Tom McCarthy said that they built a large set to depict many of the Boston Globe offices where parts of the story takes place. When the reporters depicted in the movie first visited the set, they gravitated to the desks where they had been sitting during the writing of the "Spotlight" piece, and many of them started to re-arrange the items on their desks to the they had been at the time.

The one thing that Michael Keaton was afraid of when he accepted the role was the Boston accent. After watching a video footage of the real Walter Robinson he was surprised that Robinson didn't have that much of a Boston accent.

The real Michael Rezendes said "Watching Mark Ruffalo reenact five months of my life was like looking into a fun house mirror."

Tom McCarthy cited The Verdict (1982) and Sidney Lumet's style direction in that film as influence of this project.

Matt Damon was considered for the role of Michael Rezendes which went to Mark Ruffalo.

When Rachel McAdams tells Neal Huff that she will have to postpone the interviews with the survivors, a TV in the bar is broadcasting a Penn State game, and Joe Paterno appears on screen. The longtime Penn State football coach was fired in 2011 after he failed to report sexual abuse of young boys by assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Paterno died of lung cancer 2 months later. On October 9, 2012, Sandusky was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison.