CinÉireann December 2017 | Page 34

the film for scene after scene was built up to the whole. Sometimes you have a film where it's much clearer from the start what you are going to do. You have a script or whatever and it's clearer what is the direction of it. With something like Living in a Coded Land you are making very abstract connections between things. Not necessarily abstract but they are loose connections, Connections that are feelings or where a fragment of something links two different subjects. It's much more crucial then when you're working in the edit that you are working with someone who can take that on. And the relationship with the editor for documentary is much more crucial. It's much harder, I think, to be a documentary editor, because something that you shot on the first day could be linked alongside something that you shot on the last. Usually with a feature film everything is contained within the one mood or the one location. Whereas in documentary everything can side alongside each other. You can make connections that you wouldn't see in the script or when you are shooting. It's a much more creative process in documentary editing, it's almost like writing. It's the most difficult stage too. You always go through different stages with the edit. You want something great and you think you have it one week.. Then the next week it's not working at all. You go through such peaks and troughs in the edit. One week it's your best work ever and the next it's the worst thing that you've ever made.

The film features a mix of fictional and archive footage, was that always the intent?

Most of the archive footage, about 70-75% of it would have been written in at the script stage. The stuff that was made by Impressions of Exile, the Irish people working on the building site in England, that was from a filmmaker called Philip Donnellan. It was made for a BBC documentary that was never broadcast. It was a documentary shot in the 1960s but the BBC banned it. I would have seen that maybe 10 years ago and I was beginning to work on the Joe Heaney story in about 2011 and I thought about that documentary footage would have to be used in the film. The same with another one called Sing the Dark Away, which was an RTÉ documentary about Joe Heaney, and there were interviews with his sister-in-law and interviews with his son Jackie. And again that was written into the script. It was a little bit different in the script, but we always knew that we were going to use those archive sources in the film. Actually I don't think that I would have begun it if I hadn't have been able to use those archives. It would have been a big loss to me in the sense of how I imagined the film. I always felt that it was kind of essential to have that real element in it, that the real Joe Heaney had to be in film. Walking up the street in New York. That was a programme that was shot in the late 60s or early 70s. I felt that it was important that you have dramatised Joe Heaney and real Joe Heaney in the streets of New York. I always felt that they could sit beside each other and that the real son of Joe Heaney talking in voiceover would work. To have that reality coming through with the archive adds a huge amount to the film. Then some of the footage of New York was just footage that Sharon Whooley (co-writer) found. She came across it and we used it there.

Song of Granite could not be described as a traditional biopic.

I've never seen a biopic that I've liked, and I've never met anyone who likes them. As a format or genre I don't think generally speaking that they work. And I think that everybody recognises the fact that they almost don't