Originally published in Movies Plus Magazine, 2004
Q: Where did the idea of The Honeymooners come from?
For The Honeymooners it came from a few different sources. I wanted to make a film that was romantic and that was feel good. I’m a big fan of romantic comedies generally, but I felt that a lot of romantic comedies that I had seen, particularly from Hollywood were about characters that I couldn’t really recognise, they lived in penthouse apartments or worked in publishing… Maybe that’s just me but I don’t know that many people like that! So I wanted to make a movie about characters that seemed to be within my circle of people that I could identify with. Also I wanted to make a movie that stripped away the layers and the gloss that you get in Hollywood, and say these are the characters and this is their story. That’s the passionate side of things. On a practical level I wanted to make a movie that I could shoot quickly and I could shoot for not very much money, and romantic comedies are perfect in that you don’t need stars, you don’t need huge, expensive sets or special effects. You just have the characters and their story. So that’s the background…
Q: How long did it take to write?
It was written over a period of a year. I’d written the first draft and we said “We’re definitely making this film”… We greenlit the film ourselves and decided that this is our script, we aren’t going to wait for anyone else to give us money, we’ll make this any way we have. The project kept growing and growing and the more people we brought in would always bring ideas. By the time we got to casting the script and the characters were always getting richer and richer. Previously I had been writing feature films that were in development with other producers, and they were sitting around for years and years, but with this it was like “this is what I really want to make, and let’s do it next year”, and that helped me with the writing. The older I get I realise that maybe I should have had more deadlines in my life!!!
Q: How did you get involved in film-making?
I had vague notions about wanting to be an actor when I was a teenager. Then when I went to university I used to write plays so I could act in them… I was a complete egomaniac! Then I realised that I was a terrible actor but I had enjoyed the writing, and more specifically I had enjoyed shaping and directing the plays. From that in university I started to make video films and they were just fun and experimental, and avant garde without trying to be avant garde! From there I went to film school, I did a post-grad for a year in Dublin. It was a new course and it had new equipment and I was able to shoot stuff on film for the first time. That was my first launch into it, then I made more shorts and wrote more scripts and worked my way up, until I felt ready to do a feature…
Q: If you couldn’t have directed The Honeymooners who would have been your first choice?
If I could not have directed The Honeymooners the film would not have been made! (laughs) No… I think when you are making a movie for the first time, you are making it because you have been influenced by so many film makers over the years, that’s the reason to make movies, because you are inspired by the film makers. A lot of the American film-makers right now are people that I am influenced by… People like Steven Soderberg, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson or Spike Jonze, or any of those guys who are very much independent film makers but have shown that they can work within the mainstream. If any of those guys had offered their services… I still would have said no!
Q: The film was made on a very small budget… Did you search for outside funding or did you stick with what you had?
I had decided, because of my previous experience of trying to get moves off the ground, that this time around we would make it for whatever amount of cash we had, and whatever amount of cash we could raise. So it was the usual story of going to friends who had proper jobs or relatives or whatever. Initially we raised a tiny pool of money that way and then other people started getting involved. Like TV3 were fantastic. They heard about the script and had seen a short film of mine. They met me, and the next day said “Yeah, we’re in” and that was unexpected. Then we had an opportunity in Northern Ireland, that if we shot in Northern Ireland that they would support us as well. So before you knew it, the film had a little bit more breathing space. Then we shot it and the Irish Film Board came on towards the end to help with costs. We didn’t go the route of going to the financiers, we just said that we were going to make it ourselves.
Q: The film was shot in just 18 days. Did you always intend to make it in such a small space of time?
Eighteen days was the figure when I wrote the script. I said I could do it in eighteen days. You have to be realistic. There is no point in saying eighteen days if it not the kind of movie that can be shot in eighteen days. It was always eighteen days. Over here people find that a ridiculously small number of days but in American independent movies the7y shoot eighteen days all the time, and a lot of those movies have really inspired me. Like Spike Lee made his first movie in eighteen days, but even now one of Soderberg’s more recent movies Full Frontal, he made that in eighteen days. You have got to get used to that environment. In American Indie they just shoot quicker and I was very inspired by that. It was always eighteen days, but a very sensible eighteen days. We did have a very rigid schedule, it should have been complete chaos but it never really was. We never worked ridiculously long hours, we always got our stuff covered and never worked until three in the morning. When you are doing shorts, you do that. We had all come from shorts backgrounds where you work for five or six days, and do ridiculous hours and then you have like, ten minutes and wonder “What the hell have we been doing?”. It was a more refined experience than that.
Q: Why did you decide to use digital film?
Everyone assumes it because of costs, but really the difference in costs is pretty small. Maybe ten per cent. But for us it was, I like the look of DV, I thought this was a DV movie. Some movies just aren’t DV movies, but I knew I wanted to focus on faces and eyes and body language, it was very observational. It broke down a lot of the barriers, and in some ways it makes you feel a lot closer to the characters, and its a lot rawer. I just thought DV suited the style of the movie that I wanted to shoot. Celluloid is beautiful and it won’t ever disappear, but it would have made The Honeymooners a different film. My big thing about DV is that clearly its not filmic. If you are trying to imitate celluloid, you’re going to fail. There are a lot of films that have done that but I think it’s the wrong approach. I think that DV can be just as cinematic. It’s never going to be filmic, but it can be cinematic if you use it in the right way, and use its strengths.
Q: If you’d had a budget of €50 million, what would you have done differently?
I would have paid myself €49.5 million and made it for the same amount of money (laughs). I really don’t know. A lot of people have asked, in retrospect would my approach have been different in terms of casting or in terms of the shooting style. I can only say that if you are into big budgets, you are into stars and when we first had the script around London, people were saying that we needed stars and I thought that the last thing we needed was stars. What’s great about this film is that we have two young, new actors who are phenomenal and are both on their way to do really big things. I’m glad in a way that I didn’t have €50 million because I would have had financiers breathing down my back. We were in a perfect position where we shot the movie on no money, then went back to London and we cut the movie in my house. There were no financiers calling me up, we had three months to cut the movie. So I think that €50 million would have been very nice at the time, but I’m glad that we made it for the amount of money that we did, rather than trying to do something bigger.
Q: What advice would you offer to other aspiring writers and directors?
Just to go for it! My experience over the last couple of years with The Honeymooners is that most people will tell you that your movie won’t be made, and is not good enough. If you really have a project that you absolutely and passionately believe in, that you are willing to give up two years of your life for, and that you think is going to play on the big screen, and that people are going to have a shitty day at work, walk through the rain and hand over money to see your movie. If you can answer those questions honestly, then you should do whatever it takes to get your movie made. You have got to surround yourself with as many great talented and passionate people as you can, an that is the only way to really get there.
Q: Having been through the Irish film industry, what do you think of it?
I guess I have an inside and outside perspective, because I live in London, I am not surrounded by it, its not my daily reality. I think people are very down about it, very negative about the Irish film industry from within. People are always complaining about Irish film being terrible. I think ultimately its a very exciting time for . I don’t necessarily believe in national cinema, I think movies are either good or bad. If we can produce movies like InterMission on one hand and In America on the other, they are wonderful movies, they’ll play, they’re full of passion and that’s the way forward. There is a lot of talent out there and hopefully a lot of it will come through. I think Ireland is an exciting place for movies right now, a lot of movies are being made here right now, by first time feature film makers. I’m probably naively positive about the whole thing! I think the only way we’re gonna get more and more film-makers coming through, like the Neil Jordan’s and the Jim Sheridan’s, is to give film makers who really have a voice the opportunity. When Neil Jordan and those guys were making moves, there was nothing, no backing, no funding, and now you have great cast and crews. Because you have had so may films being made here, people have worked on a Hollywood level and they have brought their experience to my movie. There are great resources, so I am stupidly positive.
Q: What would you like to see happen with Irish cinema in the future?
It would be nice if it found its own feet. I think Irish film is still undecided about does it want to make American style things or does it want to make indigenous indie kind of stuff. The way forward to me is like in Denmark. Danish cinema is extraordinary. They don’t care about the rest of the world, they make movies that are really universal, like OPEN HEARTS, which is just a great movie. Its translates across but they are making the films for themselves and the stories are so well crafted, they are very contemporary, they are very dark, they are very funny. In commercial terms, look at any Danish or Swedish movie charts and in the top 5 there will be a Danish or Swedish movie. That’s the only way to compete with the Hollywood stuff, which is always going to be around, which is great but I don’t think its a question of trying to be anti-Hollywood, it’s trying to create an alternative. People love stories, they love movies. People are obsessed by movies in Ireland, they can see through the movies that don’t have a heart or passion or integrity very quickly. We’re extraordinarily film literate and I think that people will start making films that are relevant to Ireland here and now, as well as films that can play in multiplexes unashamedly. I think people are now making films and getting them out there to the audiences, where as before, the achievement was just to make the movie in itself, and now the achievement is actually getting it out. It seems to me that Irish audiences are pretty generous to Irish movies, the audiences are there and they support Irish films and here there is definitely an interest in seeing Irish movies. its exciting times.
Q: You wrote and directed The Honeymooners. What’s next?
A long holiday! No, next is a project not written by me, but an American writer. A thing called Life Styles, which is kind of a New York / London script so, nothing here unfortunately, although I would be very happy to shoot it here, and that’s fun because its not written by me. Its fun for me to come on board as a director and play around with someone else’s script. I definitely don’t want to be seen as a writer – director. having to sit around and generate projects single handedly. So its nice actually to have someone else’s script to work on, also I don’t want to be seen as the guy who makes romantic comedies, I love romantic comedies, but I also love thrillers, I also love westerns. I think the only way to do that is to find really great writers. So that is the next step…
