For a lot of them it was their first proper feature and I'm happy that a lot of them have gone on. It was a lot of work. Sean Flynn, our locations guy, said it was like moving house every day.as we didn't settle in anywhere for a long time. We were in Wicklow and Dublin 8 and Croke Park Villas. All over. It was good fun, but it was hard. Everyone really enjoyed it. They say that if you enjoyed making it then it's not going to be a good film, but hopefully we are one of the exceptions.
It's almost like a filmmaker collective.
It is and we are going to revisit that with a wider group. The big thing that we try and do, and I'm sure a lot of people try and do but we think we do more, is that we really interrogate the material. We read it a lot together. Mark it up a lot together, with Emmet and Dave, and myself and Mike. We had a good script editor in Lucy Ryan. All of the cliches are true. Get a lot of great people around you and do all of the heavy-lifting in the script. Obviously it's not perfect as it was our first time.
You assembled quite an ensemble for it.
It was a convergence. Almost like a perfect storm. The cast was really great, lots of theatre people who were really hyped on it. That came from Louise Kiely and the continued relationship that we have we her. And picking really good actors like Stephen Jones, Sarah Greene, and Mark O'Halloran. We sat down and thought "oh god there's 9 of them!" Even all of the day players, like some of the cops, are great. A lot of them are people that we have worked with before.
Ian said that the character that he missed playing most in the transition from stage to screen was Dave the Rave.
I've a great story about that. Ian did a short-form project that I produced with Liam and that JJ shot called Scratch. It was at a petrol station and Ian does this scene-stealing bit at the en. And I thought "this guy is amazing". We used to keep in touch and we met again at a DIFF launch. Ian said to me that he's at the fringes, because when he's there with Emmet he's with Emmet, but when Emmet goes back he's with crew and in the house. So Ian said to me "do you mind if I come up to the rave scene one day?". So we were up in a place called Lacken and we were shooting the big rave scene at the end where Emmet plays and Ian texts me to say that he's just at the bottom car park. I walk over and I hear the bit that we are coming to. Everyone is on the monitor and I said to Ian "will you run?". So we ran up to this clearing and as you come through the clearing you see the rave. And just as he came through Liam Heslin stands up and says "Young people...". Just at that very moment. It's unbelievable the coincidence of it. And we got some great photos of him. He loved that. He is big friends with Liam and has a lot of respect for him, and he understood that he had to let go. But it was great to have that moment where on a discreet set visit he came across that monumental moment.
That scene and the part before it with the raft must have been huge logistical challenges.
That was the big day. It was unbelievable. It's obviously a very important narrative part, and a lot of work went into that narrative because of what comes after. It's almost him going back to his family of sessioners. The production values there were great. That was Ballinrush, they do Vikings down there. Getting that production value and the water safety was hard. Then the other day, the rave up in Lacken, that was a huge day. Loads of extras. And it rained right up until everyone arrived and then it stopped. People danced, sometimes without music, for 8 hours. It was crazy. I don't know what would have happened if it had have rained that day.
The film takes place entirely in day weather.
We made the decision to shoot it in dry weather. We had also pitched and said that it's a summer film. It takes place over a bank holiday weekend and we wanted to stick to that. We made finance decisions based on that, rather than wait. We wanted that window and we had confidence in that window. We got rain, but nothing that halted us the way that it could have. In the play the sun is beating down so we tempered that a bit, but overall it is summer and I think that's why Dublin shines.
40 CinÉireann / June 2018