The actors in the acclaimed film “Spotlight” did their research. The performers, including Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams, were playing real people — the Boston Globe reporters whose investigation into the priest sexual-abuse scandal had a powerful, Pulitzer-winning impact — and they devoted time to getting to know the newspaper men and women involved.

Walter V. Robinson, who led the Globe’s Spotlight investigative team, recalls meeting the actor who would be playing him — Michael Keaton. They shook hands, and Keaton told him, “You know, you really don’t have that much of a Boston accent.” Robinson asked how he knew that already. Keaton explained that, for the previous three weeks, he had been watching videos of appearances Robinson had made on various TV and radio news programs.

Reporters are typically the ones asking the questions and doing the investigative work; being on the other side of the equation was a bit unsettling for Robinson.

“For the next day or so, it was a little uncomfortable to have the roles reversed. We had a long dinner, and it was pretty clear he was studying my mannerisms pretty intently,” Robinson says during a phone interview. “The end result is, all my friends who see the movie say, ‘Oh, my God, he nailed you.’ He doesn’t really look like me, but in terms of the voice and even the way I walk, he’s sort of got it all down.”

Robinson likes to say that the actor did such a skillful job that, if Keaton robbed a bank, they’d arrest Robinson.

Keaton isn’t the only one who did a superb job in “Spotlight.” The movie, which opens in this region today and is directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy (“Win Win,” “The Visitor” and “Station Agent”), has been enjoying laudatory reviews across the board — as well as plenty of Oscar buzz.

Beyond the acclaim, there’s an even more vital factor associated with “Spotlight”: a movie like this can raise public awareness in a significant way about an important subject. These reporters uncovered not only the extent of priests’ sexual abuse of children but also a cover-up: how the church’s Boston archdiocese protected the pedophile priests and shuffled them to different parishes.

“It’s a little hard for us, the lords and ladies of the printed word, to acknowledge that a film well-made can have extraordinary power to influence public opinion or certainly increase public awareness,” Robinson says. “So far, it’s all been a good experience.”

Robinson, who started with the Boston Globe in 1972 and is now its editor at large, has been part of the promotional efforts for “Spotlight,” doing interviews and speaking after screenings. This week, he’s in England to publicize the movie and is then heading to Ireland to do the same.

He says the Globe’s Spotlight investigative team never could have predicted that their reporting would have had the major effect it has. The series, published in 2002, was probably the first really big story of the Internet era, and it went viral.

The stories proved to be immensely important, but the idea that producers would want to make a movie about the reporting aspect wasn’t an obvious choice. Articles might make for engrossing reading, Robinson says, but “the process we go through to get them is kind of boring, right? Even more so in investigative reporting, where you spend months digging through documents. So your first reaction (to moviemakers’ interest) was you couldn’t believe anybody would be interested in this.”

And, of course, there was some hesitation that the moviemakers would want to turn the tale into something stereotypically and crassly “Hollywood.”

“We were all concerned because you know what Hollywood can do to a story. You know, car chases, shots fired, volcanoes erupting, sex — God forbid, sex,” Robinson says.

But as filmmakers and actors spent more time with the reporters, that worry eased.

It may be a fictionalized account but, Robinson says, because they were so determined that the story be authentic, it’s extremely close to what actually happened. In fact, Robinson had a treasure trove of emails from the time they were investigating the case, and the filmmakers turned a couple of those emails into actual scenes.

“Spotlight” is particularly true in terms of their actual work — the reporting steps they took, how they took them, the inner conflicts at the Globe.

“One reason journalists like this movie is because it’s so realistic. We became pretty confident they wanted to get this right,” he says.

Indeed, director McCarthy, who co-wrote “Spotlight” with Josh Singer, created a film that has nothing exploitative about it, Robinson says.

Robinson says, “There were so many thousands of children, many of whom we got to know as adults, who were victims. We care a lot about this. It’s sort of not a film about us.”

Rather, McCarthy found a way, through the prism of the reporters’ work, for audience members to see what happened “to thousands of children in a way in which they don’t have to avert their eyes,” Robinson says.

He adds that he’s talked to a lot of the survivors who have seen the film, and they’ve loved it.

“Spotlight” was a long time in the making, as most motion pictures are. The producers approached the Globe in 2008. It wasn’t until the spring of 2014, though, that everything firmed up; the actors committed, the financing came together. The filmmakers built an 8/9ths replica of the Boston Globe newsroom in an abandoned Sears Roebuck warehouse in Toronto. Probably 80 percent of the filming was done there, Robinson figures, with some scenes shot at the real Globe offices and of actual Boston exteriors.

The power of the story and the importance of what the movie has to say helped draw actors to “Spotlight.” It certainly wasn’t the money; Robinson says the cast worked for scale on the film, which had a budget of $20 million. (He notes that, by comparison, Johnny Depp was paid $20 million to star in “Black Mass.”)

At a New York event for “Spotlight,” Robinson recalls, he talked with Stanley Tucci, who plays a lawyer in the film. Tucci told him something simple but compelling: “I’ve done a lot of films. This is a necessary film. It’s not often I get to do a film that I consider to be necessary.”