freedom as well... all working towards the one design. And somebody has to know what that design is. The clearer you are in your intention, and to clearer you are in articulating that, the happier everybody is to follow you. Because all they want to know is "what you want me to do?" and if you can tell them that then they will go do it no matter how difficult that is. These are things that I have read but I never made happen or experienced. It was lovely to discover that a lot of the stuff that I had read makes sense in the practice of it as well.
One of the things about The Delinquent Season is that while it is set in Dublin and it's recognisible, it could be anywhere.
When I had the idea for the script I would have been around the same age as Jim [Cillian Murphy's character] and I've a wife and two kids. So the idea was it something like this happened to you. What could make this happen? And one of the great ideas that I had was because I'm a writer my days are free, I don't have to go to a building and be there all day, and so if you could get together with somebody else who was free in the morning then the affair could happen in mornings. As opposed to I'm going out with Joe tonight and questions about why is he out every night or staying at the office late. That felt like a good way of doing it. Back to the writing of script, I wrote the script as economically and stripped back as possible. if you were to read the script you would have Danielle and Jim sit in the kitchen, Danielle and Jim sit in the sitting room, and dialogue. Because they're in the sitting room and there is dialogue. When you're on the set they might have the radio on or TV or whatever. What kind of a house is it? I don't know. Because we needed to go out and location scout. And we may not have many choices. It is like describing a character, he's 6ft tall and he has a particular lopsided grin and he has whatever. No, he's going to look like the actor that they hire to play the character. That's what he's going to look like. You've got to kind of the age range right. I know that enough from being specific on scripts and having directors ignore me, and not understanding that at the time, but then realising that the director's can only work with the options that they are given. Basically you go and look at a load of locations, and you go "this feels like a place that they like live". And there are some that you feel a bit iffy about and you strike them off because you find better places. the two locations of the houses that the characters live in were both in Dublin 8, around the Harold's Cross area. That was kind of luck we could have found our ideal interior for the other family across the city, but it turned out that they were in the same area. I'm not interested in Dublin. I feel that there are enough films out there that are about Dublin. I wanted to explore the inner lives of these characters and do something that was quite stripped down and intensely about their kind of problems. So we never really discover what jobs anybody has. I wanted to go this is their lives, this is the lives of those people. I didn't want them to have too much money and I didn't want it to look like they had too little money. I didn't want there to be any preconceptions to make the audience judge the characters or any of their decisions based on external influences. I read something recently in a book by David Thompson and he was talking about the notion of space in films, and I guess he would be a big fan of Hollywood films going back through the ages, and he said space in films is always bigger than it would be in real life. Because the camera needs space and the audience needs space. and if you look at certain films from the 1950s you can see that even if the subject of the film with somebody's lack of money that still takes 10
minutes down the corridor to answer the door. I think that we accept that subconsciously because we need space. So those characters are not ultra middle class. Both partners work in both relationships. It's not like one of them is making a huge amount of money. A very credible location for them to live could be a really small three bedroom house, but if you put them in a really small house then they are going to look poor. so is about finding a location that will be aesthetically nice, that will give them space to move around, but that wouldn't say too much one way or another. The non-feeling of Dublin is very deliberate as I didn't want it to go near any other elements. I wanted to keep it about the characters and in on the characters as much as I could. so whatever we get of Dublin we bring to it ourselves and we bring to it just by certain locations being chosen. I will tell you one thing that may be kind of revealing, I wouldn't mind having one of those houses, I like those areas and I love those red bricks. I would kind of feel that the characters will be very close as people to me, and I couldn't afford to live in one of those houses. But my house would be too small to film in. It wouldn't have to space. It was important for me and Richard to have space and to have options. You have two scenes that were set in the kitchen, but then you find that the living room is beautiful so you move one of them in there because it looked kind of great.
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CinÉireann / April 2018 55