We went to Coney Island, and that story about the elephant, we just found that out when we got there. We didn't know about it. We met that girl who was there and she agreed to be in the film, and she had known Adrain from before, and she came up to me just before we shot the scene and said "i've heard this story about an elephant, will I just say that to him?". It was good. A lot of the time when Adrian meets people in the film, he hasn't met them before and we haven't told him what they are going to be talking about. He's acting in the sense that he is playing himself in the film. It's not a documentary in the classic sense. What then what is documentary anyway? I'm always trying to play around with these things. The whole thing is quite tongue-in-cheek too.
Another sequence sees Adrain visit Rosro, a holiday home in Connemara that once played host to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Where did that come from?
We were just in the area and I've always wanted to go to the house where Wittgenstein worked in Ireland. I've always been obsessed with him, and I always thought that if you look at his work and what he talked about, he struggled with how language represents the world, and that's what I struggle with in ways. How do you represent somebody's life on camera? How do you show their life on screen? It's kind of a silly idea in a way, unless you openly undermine it and you are open about the process. That the audience is aware that there is method in there. We're selecting stories. And Adrian is a storyteller so that aspect of it came in quite early on. He didn't really want to talk about himself much and I asked him to write stories from moments in his life. He gave me some but I think a lot of them might be fictionalised too. It was a case of he'd tell me the story and I'd take it and we'd edit it and then we'd decide to film it in a certain way. Is it his story then anymore? What is it? And what does the audience bring to it? Trying to explore ideas like that. The Science of Ghosts tile comes from Jacques Derrida when he was saying that psychoanalysis plus cinematography equals the science of ghosts. The idea then with Adrian...when you ask somebody to play themselves in a film...that you are essentially making a ghost out of them Because at some point Adrian won't be around anymore but he will in film.
So Wittgenstein is more for you than for Adrian..
Wittgenstein, for a very personal reason for me, was important. When I was younger I wasn't well. I was in hospital and the hospital I was in I found out at the time was one that Wittgenstein used to come to to visit. He used to talk to patients there when he was thinking about becoming a doctor. It was when he had moved to Ireland, but before he had moved over to Rusro. So he was a ghost for me. And by talking about Wittgenstein we are bringing him back too. The quote at the start of the film is about opening up and letting all kinds of ghost stories in. Or letting in the other as the quote says. It's my ghosts. It's Adrian's ghosts. You're asking somebody to become a phantom in their own life.
That's a very poetic way of looking at the act of filmmaking...
It was experimental in that way. That's been the fun of it. And then the challenge is to try and make it reasonably entertaining for an audience. The idea was always that like music we would go someplace with the emotional journey. That it was more important than the intellectual one. Even though I'm big into ideas and I've left a lot of ideas in there. I'd like to let people find what they want in it. Be something that people go back to.
When I make films about people that I admire, and I do admire Adrian. I think he's very gifted. personally I think that he should be better known than he is, because his music is beautiful. It was about celebrating Adrian and his music too. About trying to visually and sonically portray him in a way that makes sense. When I listen to his music The Science of Ghosts is how I feel. His music always made me think of dreaming. So Kevin Barry is very important in the film. I've always been interested in cinema as the closest thing to dreaming when you think about it. There's all of these ideas in there, but I didn't want to be overly prescriptive about that.
I wanted it to be loose and fun too. I think maybe that it's about the emotional journey that I've gone on over the last few films. And my own issues with cinema. Adrian wrote a lot of the stories, but I wrote a lot of the narration. The line at the end is not just Adrian's worries, but my own too. Am I contributing to a culture of individualism and exceptionalism, which I don't have much truck for, by making a film about an individual. That bit where the film breaks and my partner is the narrator...I thought that it would be interesting to have my partner say the things that I wanted to say. I tried to put my own voice to it, but it was like nails down a blackboard. I couldn't leave it in there. I thought would be interesting to have the person who supports me and allows me to make the films I want to make be in there.
And where did the idea of inserting the narrator into the story come from?
CinÉireann / February 2018 33