that we pretty much got our first choices. When you are talking about Irish actors Sam and Tom are up there and they are so good. They both have these qualities that they bring to the screen. Sam has this incredible empathy and vulnerability that brings Senan to life. In many ways that was the biggest challenge, because Senan is struggling with this inner monster and all of this inner turmoil. But the problem with inner turmoil is that it is not verbalised. So there's very little dialogue to do that with. You have to be able to emote and get into the character and under the skin and portray that with a look, and that was what I thought Sam could and did do brilliantly. Now with Tom, I think again that he's an incredible Irish actor and nobody can go from charming to menacing quite like Tom. We always wanted that moment where...we wanted people to be behind Conor until halfway through the film when they realise "Christ, I'm rooting for the bad guy!" and I think that Tom does that so beautifully. I've said it time-and-again now but I just got so lucky with the casting of this, particularly a first feature. Just to have the guys and have Ellen on-board it really is a dream scenario.
You announced the casting of the film at Cannes of all places!
It was the announcement at the start of the summer just before we shot. Once we got Ellen attached then the sales agent was like "this is the next market so we should get i out there" and it was a lovely place to do that. It was really nice. that was when we were on the home stretch and it is such and up and down journey, filmmaking, particularly when you're a first-timer, and there's lots of dips and troughs. There are lots of financing up and downs, but that was the point where we knew officially that this film was going to to happen, at Cannes, and we were moving towards that pre-production and that was an exhilaration for us. Finally! It was great.
The Marché [the film market at Cannes] is not quite as glamourous as the main festival...
Cannes is not a great place for directors, unless you are in the competition. There's so many films there, there's so many films in the Marché, and you just get frightened and petrified by the amount, by the volume of films that are competing to get out there.
You launch amid such glamour and heat and then return home to shoot in cold north central Dublin.
That's what you expect when you're shooting in winter in Ireland. I think it only rained one day, which was so much a blessing. And you can't plan for it. You can prep and prep and prep but things just go wrong. We had to go to Belfast for a day of shooting. And that was mad. We were pretty much shoving to days into one as it was the only place that we could get a prison type of location. Then as we were driving back at 6 o'clock in the evening we went to recce this carpark for a scene and we had our unit base out there and everything, and then we get a phone call while we are there saying that they had reneged and we weren't allowed shoot there. So for the rest of the evening, myself and Rory [Dungan] and Rachael O'Kane my other producer and locations [Karl Daly] just drove around Dublin trying to find a carpark that we could possibly shoot in the next day. And we were literally with Julien [Benoiton] the A.D. going "can we reschedule this?" and he was like "no, we've rescheduled everything. We have nothing left to reschedule!". So we were like "we can't lose a day" so we ended up finding a carpark and we lost a couple of hours by the move, but we got it done. And that's what you have to realise, shit goes wrong and you just have to embrace it and go with the madness. in a way that's part of the fun of filmmaking. The good thing was that we always handled that stuff, perhaps with not a smile, but a slight grin. A panicked grin. Everyone came in and were asking "why do David and Rory look so tired?" We had just got in!Meanwhile it was me and Piers [McGrail, the DoP] running around going "can we shoot this scene in that alley? No we can't there's too many needles. Can we use this alley?" so I think that you just have to go with
44 CinÉireann / April 2018