Alan Gilsenan's feature film Unless premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, before playing the Audi Dublin International Film Festival in 2017/ Now it is finally out in Irish cinemas.
The film focuses on a writer's daughter writer who drops out of college and is found homeless and speechless on the streets.
CinÉireann sat down with the director to talk about the film.
Cin É: The film has taken a long time to get to our screens...
Alan Gilsenan: Partly it was delayed because I got ill late in post-production and that kind of delayed finishing it, but then things just kind of go into abeyance. I'm never quite sure how that works. The distribution cycle is a type of mystery to me.
Is it true that your wife handed you the book?
It's a kind of an apocryphal story but it is true. I probably have a multitude of books that I would like to turn into films but this one I managed to do. I can literally remember my wife handing me this book cross the bed and saying to me "you should read this, I think it would make a good film." And I did read it and I thought how could this possibly make a film? It's a very internal book, it's like Virginia Woolf. It's an internal monologue and quite low on storyline, but somehow there was something about it that I just felt grabbed me. It felt like a story for our time and I quite liked as a filmmaker that it was not too high-brow or too removed. The beauty of Carol Shields is that she celebrate the ordinary the people who really don't get a look-in in cinema most of the time and who have an ordinary life or a privileged life. The ones that you don't normally see unless something has happened to disturb that. I was quite attracted to the mood of the book and it kind of came from there. I think that when Carol Shields wrote the book that she had breast cancer and that she knew she was dying, and there was a sense of her imparting all her wisdom. The film is only a distillation of the book. The book is a far bigger experience.. I get the sense that she wanted to say all of these things.
Shields has been adapted two times before...
I haven't seen them, I probably should have seen. That wasn't great on the research front!
Was it difficult to get the rights?
It wasn't and I was kind of surprised by that. Because when you get an idea for a film and you go for the rights you usually find out they're gone or that you can't have them or that they cost a fortune, and so you move onto the next great idea. Her family are very careful of her estate and was I gathered that they kind of had studio interest in the book, but felt that it wasn't appropriate to Carol's legacy. For some reason they kind of liked the idea of a small company from Ireland approaching them. So actually that end of it was quite easy. I had been in touch with the family and some of them live near Toronto so I said that they'd be welcome on set anytime they wanted to come. On the first day of filming I get this nod that Carol Shields' daughters are outside. Catherine Keener nearly went bananas. There was already enough pressure. So her daughters came in and they said to Catherine, through tears and hugs, that when they sat down with their mum to watch a movie that she would always say that she wanted to watch the Catherine Keener movie. That was a nice synchronicity.
Keener is a big name to get for the film...
it's a cliche but it's true, she was literally the first name that I wanted. I think that she's an amazing actress. For her to say yes was fantastic. I remember that we sent it off the usual thing to her agent in LA and then I got a note back that Catherine would like to talk to the director. I thought that maybe she was interested but that she wanted to give me about 3000 notes about how to change the script before she did it. And I said fine and I said to give her my number. I distinctly remember I was sitting at my desk at home in my studying Wicklow, and she rang. It was about dawn her time and it was the start of this wonderful roller-coaster with Catherine. Thankfully she just loved
CinÉireann / March 2018 39