spent a lot of time talking about it. Myself and Pat and Tadhg met beforehand a few times just to figure out how we do it . We'd all seen recreations of sessions and one thing that Pat really flagged to me from the very start was we wanted them to be authentic. We were very lucky. We had Philip King who had organised all of these brilliant musicians, the best of the best really in Ireland, and he just wanted to give us an energy that didn't feel like something that you would see on television. He wanted to make you feel like you were there at it. We very much went into documentary mode for that and there was an interesting clash of styles. The first AD Sean Griffin, he got us. Which was brilliant as sometimes the first AD comes with a crew of people and they're very much organisers as they have to try and schedule a day and get us finished on time. And they have their extras to come in and all of the rest. And we said to them we want to run this like a proper session. That these are real musicians and that we wanted them to be able to drink and just to freeform. And that we wanted our extras to just come in and act like they're in a pub. That they're actually watching it. And Sean was great. We got what we were going for. Ordinarily when you go onto a set you turn around and you go "this is the plan", "this is how were going to do it" and for the rest of the film it was like that, but for the session we deliberately kept it that nobody knew where I was going to point the camera. We had to light it with a high beam and that was the tricky thing. We had to have lights so that I could look around. I didn't really believe Tadhg when he told me that he had not cut because I had done what any documentary cameraman would have done...there were cutaways...but quite often he literally held the whole take in one shot, mistakes and all. Sometimes that can be tricky as a cameraman to watch, but I think that he and Pat felt that it gave a reality to it that it wasn't too perfect. Sometimes you can get caught up with trying to make something too perfect and that it loses the edge of realism. The performances were so strong that when I watch it again it's just lovely to listen to it. And that came from Pat. He was so strong on that fact that we needed real singers for our first two Joe Heaneys. That they were
CinÉireann / December 2017 45