Hollywood on franchise films, where the cast is already in place and even the script may already be in place, and you are just brought in and told to make it work. This is a much more collaborative process than that.
Karen: And writing can be quite solitary.
You would have also had constraints then in terms of budget and in terms of time. Especially with a school dynamic where you'd have a fixed term.
Daniel: That was the big challenge. The actual school part of the process lasted about 12 weeks. Obviously there's not much time there to be rewriting drafts as is the traditional process. I was with the actors twice a week for all those weeks and we actually went through quite a few different versions and iterations of the story. Exploring a lot of different characters and there are a couple of characters who changed quite dramatically over the course of that period. What we lost in not having a traditional rewriting process was made up by having an idea that afternoon and instantly being able to try it out with actors that night. You could know immediately if it was working or not and then tweak it on the fly. And that was actually kind of a luxury of this whole process weirdly. That's something that when you are writing in solitary and you get an idea that you think is great and then the moment that somebody says those words you know it's wrong. Here that was instant. You go through all of that really really quickly. That was a really unexpectedly great part of making a film this way.
It also allows the actors to live with the characters for a longer period beforehand.
Daniel: Exactly. They get to know the characters so well.
Karen: Normally with the rehearsal period people don't have that.
Daniel: That's another thing as well it's a 12-week rehearsal period. It's another crazy luxury. While we definitely missed out in certain areas we gained immensely in others.
Then in terms of the shoot, how long did you have for that?
Daniel: The shoot in total was just under two weeks.
And that was here and in The Netherlands?
Karen: One night in Holland. Dan was on the fly with the camera.
Daniel: Me and Vanessa covered just about every square inch of Amsterdam walking around.
Karen: I think that it added to it.
Daniel: I'm very happy with how that part turned out.
Karen: Even the airport worked out.
Why Amsterdam rather than the UK which is the more typical destination for terminations from Ireland?
Karen: The financials.
Daniel: That's the practical reason given in the script. While we have Tara's storyline going on we also have a parallel storyline going on with James and he is victim of parental child abduction. That was inspired by a guy that I met a few years ago when I was in Berlin and he was telling me about how his ex-girlfriend took his child and he hired a private investigator and found out they were in Berlin and he was spending every minute walking around Berlin trying to find his daughter. I was just staying in some hostel about to go partying and this guy was telling me this very harrowing story. And it always stuck with me. Then when I was developing the character of James that bubbled to the service. For that to work practically you need to go further than the UK. So that was how we arrived at that. It actually was Berlin for a while in the script and then became Amsterdam. The Netherlands is the second-most visited country for women from Ireland seeking terminations so it just made sense for the story to go there. It was also a good reason for me to go spend a night in Amsterdam.
Karen: Also from a practical point of view the waiting times can actually be longer in the UK.
Daniel: I'd forgotten about that but that was a big factor when we were going back and forth on it.
Karen: It can be easier to go to Berlin or Amsterdam if you are under a time constraint.
How much research did you do into the topic?
Karen: I think that we wanted to show the reality and that's why Dan when he was first discussing the subject was conscious that he was a man doing this, so we chatted to a lot of women who had been through crisis pregnancies and who had had abortions, and a lot of the details in the story are from women that we had spoken to. So it was just about showing the reality and trying to do it in a way that felt honest. It is a crisis pregnancy that's not the result of rape or anything like that, it's just circumstantial. So we just spoke to a lot of women about that and Dan got a lot of details and stories from them, and we just tried to show one story. One story of a reality that happens, and then people can make up their own minds about it.
CinÉireann / May 2018 43