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 a lot, 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'Shea] 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.
Films cast by Louise Kiely Casting
Dark Lies the Island
The Hole in the Ground
Dublin Old School
Don’t Let Go
The Belly of the Whale
The Cured
Halal Daddy
Sing Street
Handsome Devil
A Date for Mad Mary
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