"Casting is everything. If you get the right people they make you look good." So says noted America director Todd Solondz. Luckily in Ireland we have a number of great casting directors, and one of the best is Louise Kiely. CinÉireann caught up with her to talk about casting two of the Irish features out this month, The Cured and I Kill Giants, and her work in general.
Cin É: What we don't see that often is the process of casting as it is something that happens before a film begins principal production and happens in the background. You have two films out this month that you would have cast a while back, can you talk us through the process of casting each?
Louise Kiely: They were two different processes actually. The Cured was one that we were with for quite some time. Rory Duggan the producer and David Freyne had been trying to get Ellen Page, and that had taken some time with her agent in L.A. So that probably like 8-9 months of to-ing and fro-ing. And because she was shooting elsewhere dates had to be shifted. So when you are with a movie for a long time that does allow things to sit more You can become more just to the script and more used to the people, and that's just a really really nice process. We had a long time at the being of it, but then once Ellen Page came on board then the dates were set and that was great. It was at the end of the year [2016] that they were shooting.There were a couple of people in there...for example Paula Malcomson was in there and she was one that I was really keen to get working in Ireland as she's actually Northern Irish and I think that it's a really good fit. And she was keen to work in Ireland so I'm excited to see that, and it's a really nice role.[Malcomson plays the doctor who developed the cure in the film]. And then what happened was that it was 6 weeks to prep time and Thyrza Ging, my colleague who works with me, came in and they did the kind of traditional casting and seeing people for all of the roles. Obviously we also had the two guys as well, Sam Keeley and Tom Vaughan Lawlor, so they were the same as Ellen. It was me and the guys over a series of months trying to work out when that person was available and we were very lucky in getting the people that we did because they were the ones that we had wanted and they were available. And that was it. The three leads took a long period of time and then we went into prep, and also Paula as she was coming from L.A. But then the more traditional casting would have kicked in. Auditions, showreels, and we were very lucky with who we got. It was a big ensemble cast and there's some really lovely actors in there. Lesley Conroy is in there, and Stuart Graham is in there. There's just lovely Irish actors in there. And David was incredibly open to really good quality actors. He really likes actors and he really likes people.
So that kind of thing were you have particular actors that you want and trying to fit many moving parts in together would be common on the big films?
Yeah. And it always seems to sort of land. What sometimes happens is that it won't be workable with one of them but most of the time it just all slots in. Often if somebody is coming from America then they'll have to be shot out in the first three weeks or the first two weeks. We fit it in as it works a little bit like a puzzle. And that's kind of it really. it's always just patience and time. And negotiation, not just money negotiation, but also the fact that they arrive in on this day and they need to be here on that day, and we end up having to put a puzzle together. It's all a bit mathematical, but it all works out.
How much interaction would you have then with the location manager in working that out?
Very little. Obviously the locations manager is just over there. Casting and locations are the ones that they would start with at the beginning. They are the ones that they get going with. And locations impact on schedule and then the schedule would impact on the actors. In the same way that you bringing in somebody for two weeks at the top, or 4 days here, and they are not available on this date and this date and this date, you feed that back to the schedule, and to the locations manager and to the First A.D. who is doing the schedule. So it is very much collaborative and puzzly in that same way. You're trying to kind of say 'okay that person has to get on the 27th so we have to shoot him on the 26th, but if the location won't work on the 26th this is not going to happen'. So the First A.D. is the one building the jigsaw. The First A.D.s are amazing, they really are. When you think about how they make it work. We're just one tiny slice of the pie, but they just do and they are very chilled. It works very well. We're all kind of parts of an army, but if everybody has a chilled attitude, which people do, then it all works out fine.
Then for something like I Kill Giants they were coming here on a particular date. How then would that be different?
They would have come to Parallel. And then Susan Mullen came to us, and again Thyrza Ging was very involved in that one. So we collaborated on that one in so far as she started looking for a couple of young. Madison Wolfe plays the lead. Barbara McCarthy was doing the American casting on that, who is absolutely lovely, and she got us up to speed on where she was and then we had to find the best friend, who we got from England, and there were a couple of other kids. And then I did all the adult deals, or almost all of them. There was a bit of auditioning in there. Noel Clarke was in there who was an offer. So again it's just ideas and availability. Once all of the audition stuff has happened then all of the other stuff begins to click into place. We something like I Kill Giants, because they did have a shoot date, there was a ticking clock as well. And that would be fairly regular.
They had to decamp from here to Belgium to complete the shoot so you knew that you had a very definite end date, but also that certain people had to be available to go there.
Exactly. What we were given at the top of it was a schedule, and Irish schedule and a Belgian schedule, and you then had to tell the actors in advance that this is what was happening. And people are grand with that as long as they know. And with kids you have to get licences to allow them work. Licencing in Ireland is fine, licencing in England takes a little bit of time, and I don't know about Belgium, but that just would have had to have been done in advance. There's only certain amounts of hours that children can work on a film set relative to their ages.
That kind of film, where it's a multi-national co-production. Has that become normalised because we do it so often?
It's so normal. There are a number of things that are really really normal in my day to day job now. We often work on American stuff and there's an English casting director and an American casting director. For example we just finished our second season of Into the Badlands, and the way that that works is that Marc Hirschfeld works from L.A., and for the last season Jina Jay's office worked from England, and we worked from Ireland. And we all would feed information in. The scripts all came at the same time. if there was any chance that we could get a big part for somebody here then of course we would see people for it. If the person is going to come from North America then Marc would look after it. All of the tapes are fed through to Cast It, a casting upload site. People upload from where they are and it can be watched from an office, or a production truck, or some recce. And it's like a machine. What I like is working with other casting directors. Recently we worked on casting for the Avatar sequels. Margery Simkin is a casting director based out of L.A., a total legend, an amazing woman who's from New York and who is just really interesting and has amazing stories, and I met her when i was in L.A. She was casting Avatar worldwide, and we represented Ireland. A few years ago we did Pan, which Jina Jay was casting out of England, so what they do is literally look around the world and they'll be casting Australia and New Zealand all of these golden looking children, and then from New York where they're really diverse, and then L.A is a bit sort of golden as well, and then Ireland which is a bit more character to it. With Avatar it was funny, because when you think about it it's set in space, on this very beautiful planet where people run a lot and jump alot, so skills like parkour are really handy, or gymnastics, and martial arts. And the Irish people we'd say 'tell us what you do outside of school?' and they'd say that the read, so we'd ask 'do you run...ever?'. What's amazing is that I will actually spend Friday evenings like a total nerd watching the tapes. I absolutely love it. And watching other people's tapes so there's a simpatico and I can learn from it.
Then if you see somebody and the pique your interest, but they are not right for this role, will you remember them?
For some reason when you say that children pop into my head. And you won't remember all of them, but for example Aidan McCann who was in Red Rock just missed out on something else that he didn't get, but we liked him so much that we remembered him when that opening came up. I always say that 5 brains are better than 1. I only have a certainty capacity, but then Thyrza and Karen [Scully] and Fionnuala [O'She] are great at helping me, and we don't use any paper normally. We just feed it all into Dropbox and we just share information. And it comes from all different resources. If I say that I'm looking for a 14-year-old boy who can play the guitar, like on Sing Street, we had done a music video for a big Irish band and we got a lot of candidates from that, from the dancers , from the hip-hop artists. Ferdia [Walsh-Peelo], the lead actor actually came into us from that video because he was such a good dancer and so then we were like 'we can use you. we can audition you for Sing Street'. There's a lot of cross-pollination. You can find people in commercials as well. Thryza is always sending use through people from them that she thinks are really good. It's very very handy. Then things like Red Rock, which are long-form and have a lot of small roles, if we had to cast just from people we know then they would all be gone. Each type of job has its own challenges but its exciting and always interesting.
Get the Right One In: Talking Casting with Louise Kiely
Words: Niall Murphy
CinÉireann / April 2018 49