It must have been difficult from the production financing point of view to keep it going for so long.
It was. That's why you have so many entities involved in the making of it. RTÉ started and then dropped out, I took it over and then TG4 were good enough to come onboard. Then we went to the BAI and thank God for the BAI. Without the BAI there would have been so many great independent productions in Ireland that just wouldn't have been made over the last 10 years. I don't think that there would be as much of an independent industry in Ireland without that. They have been wonderful. If it wasn't for BAI participation it wouldn't have happened at all. We got funding from them to make a series for TG4, but I had always wanted to make a feature length film out of this because it's such a compelling story. And also we shot 200 hours of footage over the 3 years. At the same time there were 50 hours of Go-Pro footage. At one point we had 3 Go-Pros on the Naomhóg, and we had 2 on it for most of the rest of the trip. So I had an assistant editor sit down here for a month to go through the Go-Pro footage and find the 20 minutes that we would take selections from to put in the film. And then we had B camera footage. We had about 120 hours of A camera footage from the journey, which was about 40 hours a years. So that wasn't too bad actually given the fact that with a film like this you don't know what the story is until the journey is complete. At any point the journey could have ended. It could have ended crossing the Irish Sea, it could have ended crossing the English channel. It could have ended anywhere along the coast all the way to Santiago. You never knew what the film would be until the journey came to one conclusion or another.
Often with the observational documentary the story is found in the edit...
We definitely had that here. I think with observational documentaries like that it's a matter of wading through the footage to find the story. When we started filming I was reading Time Severin's The Brendan Voyage and Tim is very focused on the mechanics of the journey. On how the boat was faring at sea, on the wind conditions, on how many knots it would manage to do every day. It is wonderfully written. He uses that as the narrative to delve into the history and the social aspect of how they met people along the way. So that was was our starting approach to this. But as we went through the edit we found that people were much more compelled and they responded more emotionally to how the guys were faring on the trip, rather than the technical challenges of the trip, of which there were a lot.
42 CinÉireann / February 2018