stairs. And because it will cost €100,000 to repair back to it's original condition that hasn't yet been done. We were very fortunate that we could utilise that damaged floor and install our own floor. So that we could utilise that for our own special effects. Up until we thought that we would have to put down a green screen and do it all as digital effects, but we could do it all entirely in camera because of Loftus Hall.
And was there any issue with getting it as a location?
Brian: No the owner of the house, Aidan Quigley, wanted it in the film. He was actively pursuing it, but he wanted a particular type of film. He wanted something classical, something classy. He didn't want a gory, teenagers being massacred type film. We came along and it represented how he wanted the house represented. And it's very much one of the main characters in the film. He was totally on-board and very supportive. And he's running a competition for people who send photos of their tickets for the film that they can win a stay overnight in the house. By the way, having spent a month in that house, I would not stay in it overnight.
David: I would, no problem.
Brian: It has a very spooky presence. David worded it beautifully when he said that you can feel the presence of the generations of people there before you, just in the texture and the way that the floorboards are worn and creak, and the way that on the staircase you can see that the banisters are impregnated with the
oils of the hands that have glided over it down the centuries. There is a sense of a presence, without it feeling necessarily supernatural.
David: I think a lot of the time when we are feeling haunted what we are haunted by is history. I have never experienced a ghost, but I remember being in the house of a friend of mine as a child who had a sibling who had died very young, and there was always a pervasive sense of the presence of this sibling though she was not there. And that is haunting. That's what we mean when we say that we have been haunted. That we feel out of time.
Films in themselves capture people out of time. So they are in a way versions of ghosts...
Brian: So what you are saying is that all films are ghost stories?
That all memories are ghost stories.
Brian: That's a good way to look at it. Maybe in the era that the film is set in that this was part of their lives.
On that. Why was the film set in 1920?
David: I guess because the country is in a liminal state. It's between being colonised and being what it later became. On some kind of microcosmic level the experience of living in a haunted house is living in a property that is not your own. You don't have dominion over your home, which I guess is why the film is called The Lodgers. And when you live in a colonised country you also don't have dominion over your house. There's this antipathy between the Irish and Anglo-Irish people in the film. They are actually lived experiences, similar on a sub-conscious.
Brian: Typically at that time the owners of these houses would create these stories that the priests would feed into the village for a few coins. As a kind of insurance policy. Do't go up there because of this or because of that. And that's where a lot of the ghost stories from those houses came from. They were made up as a form of projection. One of the things that hasn't been picked up is that the lodgers are the twins. Everyone assumes that they are the ghosts, but they are not. The twins are effectively living in somebody else's house.
David: A guess the corollary to that is that if this was really the country of the Irish in 1920 then they wouldn't have had to live the way that they did either. You wouldn't have had people pointing guns at them in the street. I think there's some kind of connection there that is difficult to tease out literally, but there is some kind of connection.
You also have a returning soldier. The Great War is era defining, and anybody returning from that is going to be changed.
Brian: Exactly. Post-traumatic stress disorder plays out in the film, which of course at the time shell-shock was not understood. In the film the war is over a year or two and it has taken him that long to get home. Why? Maybe it has literally taken him that long or maybe he couldn't face coming home.
And then there's also question marks about any Irish person that went off to fight for the British...
David: There were and there still are. People are extremely hostile to the idea of the Irish having fought in the first World War and the second World War, but the fact was that simply living was so difficult for a lot of young people that they didn't really have much choice. This was a living. This was a way to provide. They had to do it. It wasn't a political decision. They weren't in a position to make a political decision. You might liken it to how many people have had to emigrate now and that is seen as a betrayal of the country. But it's not, it's about what opportunities the country
36 CinÉireann / March 2018