something that is really driving me demented then I don't care that there are actors in front of me. It's not helping that they are live. In fact it's worse because I can't just walk out because they'll see me. Then with good theatre...I mean there are different energies. I'm just not sure. Am I nourished by the audience? I don't know. Sometimes you are if the reaction is good and you are not if the reaction is bad. And if you can't gauge the reaction then you are just living in sheer terror. So the audience is your best friend and also your mortal enemy at the same time. And it's always like that so you have that same fear when you are presenting, every single time. And yes if you have an audience responding wonderfully to your play it feels wonderful of course, but even if it's a play that's generally getting a great response night after night, anytime you go in and start and watch the play again you reset the kind of terror. And you have to be made feel okay again.
Do you enjoy the fixed permanency of a film then because it's done once and tit's the same for ever more?
Again both of them are sort of bittersweet. the lovely thing about theatre is that it can change every single night and be different every night. So that means on a particular night, and occasionally you'll have your actors ring you when it's a night that you're not in, and they'll say "oh you should have seen us last night. We were through the roof" or occasionally you can be lucky enough to be in at a show and something really special happens, but equally you can have bad nights. So you can't tell. Yes you get the great stuff, but you also get the bad stuff to balance that out. And that's both exhilarating and terrifying and not particularly pleasant sometimes if its the bad ones. And then with film it's the same thing, because you wish that you could do things better, but you are happy that it's not going to get any worse, because it's there. You kind of gain and lose in different ways in both disciplines.
You've given over control of your scripts up until this point, why was this the one that you wanted to direct?
It was my own script, which I hadn't done in a while. And I wanted to direct. I was tired of giving my work over. Sometimes you are working on commission and you're doing an adaptation so it's not really your work, you're just one step in the process. Although when you do adapt something you do get very very precious about it. You kind of fall in love with it a little bit. And then you've got to give it over. Even when the result is good, it is different, and it's a little bit frustrating in that way. My agent had said to me to write something that you cant give to anybody else. So I wanted to write something that was very delicate and with The Delinquent Season an awful lot of the story is told in what's not happening. And you are constantly trying to gauge motive and you are constantly trying to gauge your own moral levels against what is happening there. That felt like a very active engagement and I wanted to keep that open and not let it be shut down by a director who might have misunderstood the script and wanted to make it a little bit more obvious or a little bit more safe, or give people more clear or defined motivations. For me the film is about the opposite of that. It's about the fact that there is mystery in terms of every decision that everybody makes. That it's a more active type of watch. So I wrote the script to direct it. You're doing a lot of that work upfront when you are writing the script anyway. You give it a tiny cast, you decide to set it in only a very limited number of locations because you'll have no money, and then you just hold on to it and don't let anybody near it and you do it yourself. In theatre I started directing
10 years ago, directing my own work, and it was hugely gratifying to take something from the beginning to the end. Although in a way you don't get to take it to the very end, because the actors take it that final step. They kind of say goodbye to you at the end and they go onto the stage. And you start spending your nights at home wondering how they're getting on. With a film it's different because the actors go home before you do. And you go on to the end of the film. I wanted to write and direct a film, and so I wrote a film and I directed it. My wife was sick of me moaning about other directors and told me to just do it myself. so I said I do it and see if I liked it, because the pressures in making a film are much bigger than doing a play. And that would either be quite exhilarating for me or would be really unpleasant for me. Thankfully it was the former. it was really exhilarating. I had to figure out whether it was for me. Sometimes you try something and you never enjoy it for a second, but this was different, given those kind of time constraints and a big crew, and everybody working towards the same thing. The clock is ticking you have to be creative you have to invent and allow people to invent. It's a really kind of addictive environment and it's quite difficult to come down from once you're finished shooting. It's quite difficult to sleep at night because that energy is still running through you.
I spoke with your cinematographer Richard Kendrick and he said that you had a remarkable sense of control over the shoot. That's unusual for a first time director.
Richard may have been exaggerating
CinÉireann / April 2018 53