don't work. Roger Ebert, the film critic, said that the trouble with biopics is that they make every life the same. Even if it goes from birth to grave, the peaks and troughs, the beats are all same around biopics. That was one of the motivating factors for making it the way that we did. If we were going to make a biopic then it'd have to be something different. I was interested in three things with the film, one is the story of Joe Heaney, the second is sean nós singing and singing in generally, and the third is the themes in it of life and death and of artistic expression. They're the three different slants or layers to it. And in some ways the Joe Heaney story is in the background. The theme was more important in some ways and I thought that Joe Heaney was the perfect vehicle for a film about them. But in the deeper background, or maybe even in the foreground, are the themes of life and death and our experience of living and our relationship and with the infinite. The bigger question! So I was never really in trying to convey the Joe Heaney story in all the detail of his life. I genuinely feel that you can't. Every single life is complicated and to try and sum it up in a narrative, in a three act structure, I just don't think it's possible in any meaningful or satisfying way. We were all very aware of the narrative pitfalls.
The film plays almost like a song itself. It's an immersive experience.
Different people have had different reactions to it. For some people it's too poetical, but overall for most they are aware when they are watching it that it's an experience. That you are immersed in it. Those kind of things are important. And it's very difficult, you can't consciously do it in some ways, except for maybe the singing scenes in the pub. Those are deliberately done to make it feel like you're there with the singers. And that you're with them for the duration of the song and that you get lost in the song. That was almost the starting point. Getting in to the singing up-close. In a way that was the beginning of the film. How do you make something that has that in the middle of the film? And have that feeling of being immersed in it? Everything else is shaped around that central sequence.
That central sequence consists of three songs back-to-back, moving from the raucous Rocky Road to Dublin to a haunting version of The Galway Shawl and on to a transcendent An Tiarna Randall. The first two are in English, but the latter is a traditional Irish sean nós song and is presented without subtitles. Did you ever think of adding subtitles there?
That's been probably the most contentious scene. We've had people asking us why weren't we let in on what the song about, but it wasn't really about what the song was saying. It was more the feeling that you get from watching it. If you were in a real-life pub and you in the room with him, and somebody was singing a song in Irish you're not going to have a translation underneath. We couldn't have put subtitles for that scene, given that we trying to get across that sense of closeness to the song, of being immersed in it. The meaning of the song would have distracted the audience from the experience of it. You'd be reading text and you wouldn't be looking at Seamus Begley holding his hand. You've time to look around the whole pub. You've time to look at Seamus Begley, at Michael O'Chonfhlaola singing, and you've time to think about what you're thinking yourself. You have ample time to do multiple things during that song. The whole choice of the three songs...myself and Philip King were talking about it for a long time beforehand. What would