Cine É: You seem to have developed a great working relationship with Pat Collins.
Tadhg O'Sullivan: We've been working together for probably 10 years now, on various projects long and short. It's not an adversarial style. We don't necessarily push for our visions. It's a thing where I do things and we agree or we don't agree. If we don't agree then we go at it again. That striving for agreement is a lot less stressful than what other people experience in the edit.
It helps that you both have that documentary sensibility. You're more used to finding a film from footage than having to strictly adhere to what was written or what you've shot.
I've only ever edited two dramas and they're both with Pat, so I don't know. I genuinely don't know how constraining that must be. I sometimes wonder. There is great freedom in the form of a script but for what I have specialised in over the
years is exactly that, discovering meaning within things. It's like when I work with archive material, which is something that I do a lot. You're looking at something that was shot with one particular purpose in mind, but you have no particular interest in that purpose. What you're looking for is to derive that layer of meaning that is obscured. And you can draw it out through juxtaposition, through music, or through slowing it down, or through working the material and drawing out the moment that you see. The beautiful moment that you see within that. And that's kind of how I look at all material. Whether that's for a large-scale feature film or for a smaller documentary project of my own. I try to look at it with fresh eyes as soon as I bring it in, and try and draw out that meaning. Very often the meaning that I am trying to draw out is the meaning that Pat or the director intended, but it's always the job to bring that to the fore. I guess that's the sensibility that Pat and I will share. To use the tools at our disposal, and I suppose they are stylistically aesthetic tools, the use of music, the use of sound, the use of non-sync sound... I wouldn't use the word radical, but if there was a word on the way to radical I would maybe use that. A little bit out there, just pushing out these styles and being a little bit bold. And not being afraid to make hard and abrupt and challenging moves if that is within the service of drawing out this hidden meaning that we are looking for. I guess that that's something we share and that we have developed over the last 10 years in tandem. He has done his other projects and I have done my other projects but we are still talking!
The film features an interesting mix of archival footage and footage that was shot for the film. What was working with that mix like?
That is interesting because there are a lot of things at script level and then at the level of the rushes, the material that was shot, that does not have very explicit narrative cues within it.
TADHG O'SULLIVAN
38 CinÉireann / December 2017