Square, so we did move a little bit. We shot all of that drama in a week. Which was kind of mad, but we did it. Then Kate [McCullough, the DoP] was fantastic. Everybody really got in on what we were trying to do and believed in the script. I think that when you have a really good script and everyone knows that everyone working on it believes in the project then it makes it easier to galvanising people into ensuring that everybody wants to do their best. And Mick again was key.I had never done documentary before. Thaddeus had years ago. Both of us have a very strong drama background and that's really all that we've done, so he was fantastic to have to be able to call and say "okay this is what we are doing here" and in finding the story in the interviews that gave the context to those scenes.
It sounds like it was a real collaborative effort.
It was. I have a joke with Thaddeus that I think that we knit this film. It was really crafted Usually in drama you have your script and you have your schedule, and you know where you are most of the time. But on this it was very demanding. We all put in a huge amount of effort to getting it as right as we possibly could. Even when it came to the titles over people I asked Niall Sweeney, who was someone that I worked with along time ago, I said to him "Niall, I don't want it to fall down because we don't have enough in the budget to have nice titles and nice graphics even over Roy Foster's name". We became a bit Hugh-like in our attention to detail, but I think it paid off.
You mentioned that Mark's script was 1908 up to his death. Was there ever a desire to expand that?
The man was fascinating. There's so much out there. The whole thing where he restored the painting himself, we just kind of diluted that, but what director of a gallery can do that now. At the time that he was doing this he was in his 20's. It is amazing. I knew very little about him before hand, I knew about the gallery, but I knew very little about that man. So I've become a little bit of a bore on him now. [laughs] So yes, we stuck with that timeline for the drama and then the contributors were able to go backwards and forwards and fill in gaps in the context of what the drama was doing. They were all passionate, our contributors, and I think that comes across, from Roy to the wonderful Morna to Robert O'Byrne. It think Hugh's passion for art comes out in their passion for Hugh.
You can tell that these people have dedicated large parts of their lives to studying him and what he did. It's a wonderful tapestry of a film because of the mix and it's a testament to your efforts that it holds together as a narrative.
It was quite a task, quite an undertaking, and it's probably true to say that when we set off on the journey we weren't quite sure where it was going to take us. But then the drama worked so beautifully and we
CinÉireann / May 2018 35