Michael Inside is the story of Michael McCrea, an impressionable 18-year-old living with his grandfather Francis in a Dublin housing estate, who gets caught holding a bag of drugs for his friend’s older brother and is sentenced to three months in prison.
The film is the third feature from Dublin director Frank Berry, following the critically acclaimed Ballymun Lullaby and I Used to Live Here. Here he works again with star on the rise Dafhyd Flynn who starred alongside fellow rising-star Jordanne Jones in his sophomore film.
Fresh from winning the IFTA for best film earlier this year we sat down with Berry to talk about the film.
Cin É: You managed to walk a fine line with Michael Inside in that it manages to impart a message without ever feeling preachy. There's almost a lightness to it.
Frank Berry: Similar to I Used to Live Here as well, the making of the film, and they are both very different films, but we did have a lot of fun making both films. The subject matter doesn't weigh down the experience of actually shooting the films. You still get a bunch of people together and you have something that you feel passionate about, that you'd like to make a film about and you share that with the people that you are working with and together you kind of bond, and everything that goes with that. There's fun and there's serious moments, but it's an experience that you share together. It's a job that you are all working to achieve the same thing. Dafhyd, myself, Moe, Lalor, the cast, Tom Comerford [DoP], Louise [Stanton, costume designer], Niall [Owens, first AD), and the producers as well, we all got on really well, and with that it's not all serious.
When we spoke to Moe Dunford for the January issue he talked about how the fact that you were all in one place after shooting, that you essentially decamped to Cork, led to an almost familial feel to the production.
That is very true for the two weeks in Cork, because we were in a prison and you do start to feel that, the claustrophobic feel. Then you could go back to the hotel and debrief and talk a little about the film, and have a drink. That was quite important. It did help the crew and the cast. It helped us all. I think with the experience of filming in a prison it was quite important to do that.
It must have been difficult for yourself and Tom to work in the confined space of the prison and to find shots that work.
One of the things that we decided early on, and that was quite important to me, and Tom would very much agree with this, was that we wanted to shoot everything on location, and not to recreate a bigger cell as you may see in some films. That we wanted to shoot in the actual cells. We wanted the film to really express real experiences. When Michael is walking through the corridor and he
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