Claire Frances Byrne spoke to David Hennessy about her feature debut film Ready or Not that screens at Irish Film Festival London this week. A coming of age drama about teenage girls, it deals with themes such as consent.
Claire Frances Byrne has been a part of short films that have come away from previous Irish Film Festivals in London with prizes.
Just last year the short that she produced Waiting Day won Best Short Film. She was also involved in Ascending Grace that took the prize in 2021.
She has also been IFTA nominated for her 2020 short Sister This which also took Best Film at the Fastnet Short Film Festival and prizes at the Kinsale Shark Awards, among other accolades. That same year, she won the Aer Lingus Discovery Award at the Dublin International Film Festival.
This week Claire brings her feature film debut Ready or Not to the festival.
It has already screened at festivals such as Dublin International Film Festival where it had its world premiere.
Ready or Not centres around Ruby Conway Dunne’s Katie’s teenage protagonist in a coming of age drama that can become very dark and disturbing.
Conway Dunne, who already has credits in Bad Sisters and Rosie to her name, plays a young character unprepared for the threats of predatory boys, caustic girls, peer pressure and sex with little consideration for consent.
The young cast also includes Alex Grendon, Molly Byrne, Lewis Brophy, Dane Whyte O’Hara and Alicia Weafer.
The script was penned by Lynn Ruane and produced by Ruth Coady.
Katie has always been best friends with Steo as they share a love for football.
But when teenage hormones kick in, the relationship goes further and all of a sudden Katie is publicly shamed as a slut.
She becomes a target for Steo’s boorish cousin Byrner (Brophy) but is more charmed by the older and seemingly more sensitive David (Whyte O’Hara).
Are you looking forward to the festival? It is a festival you have had success at before…
“Yeah, absolutely I am.
“It feels like a lovely full circle moment because I’ve had so many shorts in the Irish Film London Festival so I’ve been coming over to London for this festival since 2018.
“I’ve been living in London for the last while so to finally have a London screening is great.
“It’s very exciting.”
How did you come the project? Was it a case of Lynne coming to you with the script?
“I was on board well before there was a script.
“Lynn had a few outlines of things she wanted to do and we had touched base about a film based on her life in the 90s and then when we got Ruth into the conversation, it became a bit more serious and it was about nailing down the kind of themes that we all wanted to work on.
“This isn’t biographical or anything but it’s definitely personal to Lynn because she’s telling the story of her community and her experience of growing up with consent between boys and girls and everything.
“It’s very, very, very, very, very close to the bone for her and I think me and Ruth coming on board at that very early stage just built trust and also understanding from the two of us that we knew what she wanted to say and what she really didn’t want to say.
“That was very important for a project like this.
“There could have been a whole lot more gone into it but I think keeping it very focused on the themes of consent and that kind of rape culture amongst young teens has paid off in terms of impact of those kind of subjects.”
How have you found reactions to it up to now? Have you find it starting conversations on issues like consent?
“Yeah, really powerful.
“We had two screenings in Seattle and that was a really cool experience because I went over very nervous, wondering if a North American audience would even understand this.
“After every screening there’s always at least one person in the audience that says that they would love to see this on school curriculums.
“In Seattle, it was the same.
“I had a woman coming up to me and very passionately asked me, ‘Could this be shown in schools?’
“So it does seem to resonate with people in a way that they feel like it’s important for young people to see.
“Young people are living such a different reality nowadays.
“This is obviously set in the 90s and it’s a different beast altogether now with technology.
“But the response is always really, really powerful and people connect with it.
“And some people say, ‘Thank you for creating this film’.
“And some people are also going to have a negative reaction to it and that’s kind of to be expected as well but it’s mostly been very, very positive and very, very powerful when we do get it in front of an audience.”
The startling thing for me was that you cast children as children unlike in other teenage dramas where the cast is made up of young adults. This film is startling because it actually shows children in adult situations..
“Yeah, absolutely.
“I think it was such a learning curve for me.
“I think we all went into the casting process with a bit of naivety because we thought that we would follow suit with every other teen film and we would get these 18, 19 year olds to play our 13, 14 year old characters because that is the safer thing for everyone.
“And also you’re bringing them to work so you want them to be somewhat adults in terms of even the hours you can get with them.
“We absolutely went in thinking that that’s what we were aiming for and then there’s a few different factors.
“We didn’t want to lose the youth of these characters.
“We really wanted to cling on to that young age that all this is happening for them at.
“And then Ruby threw us a bit of a curveball because she’s the closest in age to the characters in real life.
“Alicia actually was the same so we had two 14 year olds and we just had to roll with the punches then because you can only get six hours in front of camera with under sixteens and we really wanted to abide with all these guidelines to the letter because not only were we asking these kids or teenagers to come to work with a load of adults but we were putting them through their paces and we were talking about fairly hard concepts and stuff.
“It was so rewarding because their energy and their raw kind of talent is untarnished because they are young and less experienced.
“Ruby has obviously been on a million and one movie sets since she was a tiny little thing.
“I loved every day working with our four main young cast of Molly, Alicia, Ruby and Alex.
“It was just a joy every day to have them.
“They brought so much understanding to the scenes and we’d make sure that they knew exactly what it was that they were acting out every time but to be honest, it needed very little explanation half the time.
“I asked them, ‘Is this something that makes sense in your world? Does it feel real?’ And it was always a yes.
“They were always like, ‘Yeah, people still talk like this’.
“There was always a piece of truth within the scenes that they could really connect with which is sort of sad in a way but also it just meant we cast the right people because they really got it.”
Consent is a big issue in the film. In the film Katie has two sexual encounters and she doesn’t say yes either time..
“I think it’s important to be reminded of how new a concept consent is.
“That sounds mad now that we know how important it is and how it needs to go hand in hand with intimacy in any situation.
“But when I grew up, I didn’t know what consent in that context was, it was just not a thing in my world.
“That’s the one thing that myself, Ruth and Lynn were constantly able to go back to.
“We all have experiences where consent was not even a consideration so we have a broad spectrum of experiences within this film for young girls that they don’t have consent in mind and they don’t have awareness around when they can say yes or no to things.
“All the power was in the boys’ hands and that’s not to say that it’s always their fault or they’re always the bad guys in the situation.
“That’s what they were brought up to believe as well, that they are the ones that have to instigate and take control of the situation.
“And then girls, especially back then, were brought up to be submissive and to be very allowing of all these things so I think it’s shocking now knowing what we know.
“Growing up, it’s like consent was just not something we spoke about. It really wasn’t.
“You’re dealing with kids that just don’t have the vocab or the tools to actually ask first for consent and then to actually own it and say yes or no.”
The film also shows how the female will get judged no matter what. Katie goes from being ‘frigid’ to a slut just like that..
“In a moment,
“Yeah, you’re on a knife edge all the time.
“You either sit on one side of the fence or the other really as a girl, you know?
“What I want people to take away is that it was a very uneven playground for girls.”
The other uncomfortable thing is that the film shows these young girls, these children, in the company of men or at least much older children. It’s just not right. I’m talking about a character like David who is a predator, isn’t he?
“Yeah, he really is and he’s just a quieter version of Byrner.
“Byrner is very overt and he’s very outspoken and loud and violent in his actions.
“In a way it’s better the devil you know because you can see him coming.
“In the film, it was important for us to look twice at that character and show you where that violence is coming from which is his home life.
“But David had other powers at his disposal and he was very persuasive and manipulative.
“It’s a quieter way of going about things but he, at no point, considers his own fault in the issue.
“It’s also about thinking about what these boys were up against.
“It was about, ‘You have to get with the most girls’ and it’s all badges of honour and notches on your belt or however you want to look at it but that’s also a huge pressure that was put on them and still probably is as well so there was no winners in the situation.”
David speaks for Katie also, there are a number of times when girls like Katie have their agency taken away..
“It’s all a power play, isn’t it?
“I think this is something that just has been throughout history.
“I’ve had some fantastic conversations off the back of Ready or Not and with my family included.
“It’s like generationally that’s something that Irish women and Irish men seem to have experienced.
“Men often end up hanging out with younger women or girls and it’s a power thing.
“David is aware that he holds the power and so by letting Katie in or by giving her that kind of security, ‘I’ll take you under my wing’ it’s a privilege almost.
“It’s kind of twisted but I think it’s a story as old as time.
“It was definitely true for Lynn’s experiences growing up.
“She was always hanging out with boys slightly older and it would have been the same in my school.
“I remember we had girls in first year going out with boys five, six years older than them and at the time you just go, ‘Oh cool’.
“But now you’re like, ‘Oh God, that was illegal’.
“I don’t think you can underestimate how clueless you can be as a kid around this stuff because no one’s talking to you about it in a real way.
“It’s all kind of shame and hush hush and so of course you don’t have the information because adults aren’t willing to share it with you.”
The film depicts underage sex. I noticed you gave thanks to both Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and intimacy co-ordinator Ita O’Brien in the credits so there was clearly great care with such things..
“I know it’s a tough thing to sit through.
“You have to find the balance of being real about it, of lingering in the moment and lingering in the discomfort so that we actually feel impacted by these scenes.
“There’s no point in Disney-fying them too much so that they lose all their power but at the same time, we weren’t setting out to fully traumatise anyone whether it was our cast on set or whether it’s anyone in the audience watching our film.
“We always knew that we were going to suggest rather than be really explicit about anything and let the explicitness exist within the dialogue because that feels very true to teenagers.
“They don’t really sugarcoat their words.
“So in terms of what you actually see on screen, we always knew it was going to be an art of suggestion.
“But we had every kind of safety block in place.
“We had welfare officers and we had intimacy coordinators and we had stunt coordinators.
“You name it, we had it in place.”
So much of the film rests on the performance of young actress, Ruby Conway Dunne. Did you feel you unearthed another young gem there?
“Thank God for Ruby.
“The whole film kind of rests on her shoulders.
“Whether the audience gives a sh*t or not about these kids, a lot of it rests on her shoulders so you’re asking so much of such a young talent and that’s a big, big role to fill.
“It was scary for me because I knew if we didn’t get that part right then you might as well not make the film.
“We were confident that we could actually do this with a 14 year old girl because she was experienced.
“Whenever you point the camera at Ruby’s face, you’re just going to get a world of emotion and an incredible depth in her eyes and her expressions.
“It’s not just her ability to show up on set and be the most professional person on set even though she’s the youngest on top of that, she also just has that magic, ethereal thing that in between the lines that she knows so well, she does so much with her face.
“I am so excited to have worked with her this early on because I know she’s going to go to huge, huge heights and places.”
Ready or Not screens at 6.30pm Friday 14 November at VUE Piccadilly as part of Irish Film Festival London. Irish Film Festival London runs 12- 16 November. Irish World readers can get 20% off by using the code, FRIEND.
To book and for more information, click here.
