Anthony McCarten Reveals His Top Seven Current Obsessions

When I was growing up, my mom had two effigies on the mantelpiece—one of the Pope and another of Neil Diamond—and she had an equal passion for both. As a mother of seven who was often stressed, she would drop the needle on a Neil Diamond record. There’s a real interiority to Diamond’s music. He really works out how he felt and what he’s searching for in his songs. After I wrote a musical about his life [A Beautiful Noise], I had the opportunity to drop it off and perform it for him in Malibu—an unexpected and truly terrifying experience. At the end, Diamond said, “I’m a believer.” It felt like a full-circle moment to hear him say that about a book that I had written, while referencing a song that meant so much to my mother.

I’ve long been impressed by the degree to which John Lennon and Yoko Ono took real physical risks with their lives to campaign for peace, especially at a time when so many leaders and voices in the Civil Rights movement were being killed for being outspoken. The couple fell into the crosshairs of the Nixon administration, who essentially tried to kick them out of America. They fought to stay and fight for peace. They showed a level of commitment and daring that is incredibly rare in artists. We tend to try to stage our revolutions from the safety behind the barricades, but they were prepared to climb up on top of them.

While I was in New York, a friend of mine invited me to a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the Brant Foundation in the Lower East Side. And I was stunned by the power of Basquiat’s collected art. When you see it one painting at a time, it’s powerful. But when you see the mass together, it really has a kind of physical impact. In the same day, we walked over to the Whitney, where there was a major Andy Warhol retrospective. On the way, we walked through the streets where Basquiat and Warhol had worked and died. We were discussing the two-year period when they met and collaborated. At that point in 1983, Warhol’s career was sort of in decline—museums were no longer buying his art, and he was looking for some form of rejuvenation. And Basquiat was experiencing a sort of meteoric rise—the first big commercial Black artist—but he was incredibly young and was carrying all that pressure on his shoulders. I thought their partnership was interesting because they’re so very different not only in terms of their aesthetics, but also in terms of what they think what art is, what it should be, and what its function is. I became really interested in fleshing out these polar positions and putting them into a kind of rabbinical dispute to see what emerges when I was writing The Collaboration. It explores Basquiat’s mystical vision of what art should be with Warhol’s almost photographic understanding of art, wherein society is all about the surface. It prods at this idea that if we avoid debate for the sake of peace, then we won’t make any progress and we will become increasingly polarized.

Between Basquiat and Warhol, there’s a cross pollination as a result of that collaboration. We start to see Warhol painting with a brush, which he had not done for many years, and Basquiat begins to increasingly incorporate brand names into his work. Basquiat begins making works that bear a strong resemblance to Warhol’s. Despite opposing ideologies, they really learn from each other.

I was surprisingly thrown into grief when Leonard Cohen died. His was such a unique voice that combined high literacy with a priestly inquiry into the meaning of life. His music also had this sensuality and power that I always found both incredibly uplifting and depressing.

As I worked on The Collaboration, I listened to a lot of Lou Reed. I often play music while I’m writing. Reed is a kind of outsider in the tradition of Charles Baudelaire—a quality that I’ve always been attracted to. We need these kinds of voices, but we have so few today. In particular, I’m thinking of the [1979] album The Bells. The song “Families” is a brutally honest hit about himself and the distance he’s traveled from those whose loving he no longer can afford. The tax of that love is too much, and now he’s not going to come home much anymore.

I also listen to the song “Perfect Day” [from Transformer] frequently as well, which shows that Reed was a sort of poet laureate of the dispossessed. There’s an expression of cynicism about a world that pretends it’s virtuous, but underneath it’s merely a promise or allure of virtue—what we call virtue-signaling today. I often wonder what he would be singing about now.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Boston lately. Robert Lowell is one of the glorious voices of that city. He’s fallen out of favor in many respects because he represents a kind of East Coast Brahmin white elitist tradition that is not fashionable these days. However, he’s one of the great American poets. The poem “Skunk Hour” [1957] has a similar confessional quality to Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, but Lowell was doing that back in the 1950s. Along with Sylvia Plath, Lowell was one of the first so-called confessional poets.

I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” [1922], which captures brokenness and loss amid the uncertainty of World War I. Perhaps it’s because this moment that we’re living through, but it feels a bit like the interwar years. Instead of the canon fire on the horizon, however, it’s the omens of environmental disaster. Eliot picks up on our inability to learn from the past, which seems like an unending human gift: to be unteachable. The battles we think we have won have to be continually rethought. But that’s history. So, we shouldn’t be deterred. We must keep going.