By Ben Pearson/Oct. 11, 2018 5:30 am EST
Read Damon’s description of Lonergan’s original Manchester by the Sea ending below.
“I love Manchester, I’m incredibly proud of it, but Kenny had an ending—there was this scene where they were on the boat that the whole movie’s kind of about, and it was a flashback to before Casey’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. It’s this incredible moment of joy and you see this family all together and then these whales start breaching out of the water. You needed [a] fucking drone cam, 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. It was 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—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 watching these whales and it’s like this is one little story in this sea of stories. It was epic and it was beautiful and it tied the whole thing together, and we ran out of money (laughs). It was like, ‘fuck.’”
The visual Damon describes of this story being one of many in a vast sea of other stories sounds like a minor detail, but it’s the kind of subtle touch that can add to a movie’s complex tapestry and create an entirely different perception of it when the end credits roll. In fact, I distinctly remember thinking, “Wait, that’s it?” when the movie came to a close, so perhaps this original ending would have left a larger impact on me.
