When we catch with with director Niall McCann it's the week before ADIFF and the film is not yet finished in post-production.
The sound mix is being done this week and we need to replace a lot of the narration and stuff. The sound has been very poor and we've been editing the life out of it so a lot of it doesn't actually make any sense when you listen to it. You get stuck on certain phrases which is really annoying. So he's been away. We need to have it a least ready for ADIFF, for the 26th the Monday. So we should have it finished in the week. And the new graphics are going in, different inter-titles. So a lot of the stuff you saw isn't how it will be.
The Science of Ghosts sees you editing the film yourself. Is that much of a learning curve?
I've never edited my own film before and because of the budget with Real Arts and the the amount of time I'd prefer to spend in an edit, we couldn't afford a proper editor on the film. So myself and Matthew the DOP who I shot it with me, we've been cutting it. Which has been an interesting experience for me. It's not something that I would wish on anyone. I like working with editors, especially when you can just trust them. I've been lucky I worked with Cara Holmes on Lost in France, and she was brilliant. On my first film I got to work with a few really good editors. The films I make are on the lower end of the budget scale. It's been really stressful editing the film. You don't know what you are looking at. You have no distance. We're producing it as well, you're writing as you go along, filming as you go along, and if if anything pops up that needs to be fixed or sorted out, it's my job to do. Or Matt's job to do. So you're doing your job and you're editing and it just becomes too much.
Was the Real Arts funding much of a constraint?
You are not working with a narrative because it's the Real Arts. I often think that shouldn't really talk about things like your budget, but sometimes it's appropriate to talk about your approach to things, to a project. But with Real Arts it is important because of the stipulations that they put in place. It can't be a biopic. It's supposed to be a documentary but experimental. So the approach you take and the experimental elements of that those sort of dictate what you make. We'd no preconceived notion of what the film was going to be. We would just started filming and hopefully I would find it as we went. Which was a nice approach to take, and enjoyable, but also a bit of a head-wrecker when you're in the edit.
What is t that you're trying to find?
I'm a huge fan of David Lynch and in particular of the latest season of Twin Peaks. It's that notion that Lynch has of being open and not going in with preconceived notions. I always work that way anyway. I generally write a treatment and then apply for the funding and go and make the film. You need to leave enough space there that if things change then you can adapt to that. So we went to New York with Adrian when he was going to New York. That's when we started filming. That was the end of May last year. We'd done nothing before that. I'd never made a film in that quick of a period before. We started editing in August, but we kept filming as we went along. I prefer filming in autumn for the light. A lot of the filming was done in late August, September and then October. The idea was that we would go to a place and try to find the story or something to film with Adrian. Adrian obviously when he's touring spends a lot of time by himself so that sort of came through in the footage that we shot.
There's a great sequence in the film where Adrian is being told about how an elephant was electrocuted in New York...
32 CinÉireann / February 2018
ADIFF PREVIEW: THE SCIENCE OF GHOSTS
Words: Niall Murphy