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
50 CinÉireann / April 2018