arrives at his cell and walks into the cell, that that is exactly the experience. And then we used sound effects as you could never close the door of the cell with the crew there. So we used sound effects to express that sense of enclosure, of claustrophobia. What I tries to do was keep Dafhyd away from the real locations as much as I could, so that when he was walking through a corridor...and a number of times throughout the film that was the first time that he'd ever been there. I used that technique a couple of times. It's nothing new and it's obviously very successful for a lot of filmmakers. That idea of surprise. That you'd get a reaction from the actor. Dafhyd fully understood this. He was really on-board with it. In fact I told him that I wasn't going to give him the script, I was only going to give him the scenes on the morning. There were scripts laying around. The ADs were very good. They would block out some scenes. They were really on the ball about that. But Dafhyd could have picked up a script and read the whole thing, but he didn't. He took the whole thing very seriously and said 'no, this is the process. I'm not going to cheat'. And even if he did read the script he would have told me. It was an approach that I wanted to take, but it wasn't a hard and fast rule where I said 'you must not read the script'. Instead I said 'this is what I would like us to do' and he respected that.
You appear to have a great relationship with Dafhyd.
I do. I met him when he was 12. I thought he was 13, but he reminded me that he was 12. It was in Killinarden when we were working on I Used to Live Here and he came along to one of the workshops that we were shooting out on the street. We were doing workshops in the community centre, and after a while, after a few months I said 'let's see what these look like outside'. So with the youth workers we went outside and started shooting some scenes on the street. And in the background was Dafhyd. I just asked the youth worker about him and was told that he was a bit shy, but a lovely lad. So I started taking to him and as soon as we started workshopping I could see his talent for performing subtly and for expressing emotions. He reminded me of myself as a teenager. Even though we are very different backgrounds, well not very different, but we are from different backgrounds. There was something about him that reminded me of my teenage years. He was just absorbing things and he spoke in a very funny, very honest and very light way, but sometimes he would say things that would resonate with me. I thought that by working with him we could explore teenage years. That's how he caught my eye.
The idea for Michael Inside, the idea was that the main character in the film would be an extra in a more traditional film about crime. I wasn't interested in the world of gangster activities for territories or in buying and selling drugs. I was more interested in the life of a young person living in a disadvantaged community who is affected by the ripple effect of that activity. About somebody who may have left school early and who was just normal, r even just unlucky that when he's asked to hold drugs that he gets caught. Someone who is naive and gets caught up and involved in other people's activities. The aim was to make a purposeful film about real-life circumstances. That was the motivation. To put something up on the screen that doesn't necessarily feel too much like a genre, that it feels more like a film that takes a realistic look at the world that we are in, in a naturalistic way.
And when did you get the idea for this story?
The idea came to me when I was making I Used to Live Here. I spent a lot of time sitting down with young people in Killinarden and seeing the world from their point of view. And the idea came to me that this is a great subject for the film, the lives of the young people that I am sitting around. Not the lives of the guys driving around in the big cars, but actually these younger people who I felt were vulnerable. So I got this idea to make a film about this subject and I brought it to the Irish Prison Service. I said to them that I'd like to make a film about somebody who is convicted of a crime and becomes part of the prison population. They sent me to Pathways, which is the prison educational part of the CDETB [City of Dublin Education and Training Board], the education body. I went there and that's were I researched the film.
You spent a while working with them then.
18 months. It started off being very very casual and I would go in and just start to get to know the former