Tadhg O’Sullivan told David Hennessy about his debut narrative film The Swallow which stars Brenda Fricker and is the closing film of the Irish Film Festival London.
Film maker Tadhg O’Sullivan has been acclaimed for his work in the documentary field with films like To The Moon and Song of Granite screening around the world.
His first foray into narrative film making The Swallow will close the Irish Film Festival London this Sunday.
The film, starring Brenda Fricker, has already been released in Irish cinemas.
The Swallow contemplates themes such as art, memory and the desire to hold on and to hand on.
It is a film with a single character who writes a letter to an unknown correspondent which forms the only spoken part of the film.
The Swallow came from the film maker’s own desire to explore the theme of the preservation of art.
What inspired The Swallow?
“Most of my work, historically, would have been in documentary and this is the first fiction film that I’ve ever made.
“It started out as the idea for a documentary about the preservation of art: What gets preserved in museums, what gets minded and cared for? What do we value and what do we not? And also what is the point really of trying to hold on to things in museums and archives when we’re faced with a very uncertain future with regard to climate change and things like that?
“That sort of formulated in my head as an interesting documentary but of limited interest.
“It’s a pretty dry subject.
“It’s interesting but it’s pretty dry.
“The big light bulb moment was realising that nobody really cares what Tadhg O’Sullivan has to say about that subject but if you were to place these thoughts or these concerns or these questions into the mind of somebody that the audience could have a relationship with then it becomes more interesting.
“If you take somebody for whom these are really acute questions.
“Somebody who’s an artist, who cares about what’s going to become of her work.
“Somebody who’s in the latter part of her life, who’s thinking about what is going to become of her work.
“Somebody who lives by the sea so that this prospect of the sea rising up and making all this irrelevant anyway is a very real concern.
“If you create this sort of fictional world and this fictional character then maybe these ideas become more human and more interesting for an audience.
“That was the idea: You take an artist living by the coast in the latter stages of her life and you have her think about this stuff and place these ideas in her head and it becomes far more interesting as a film.”
Of course it is just Brenda Fricker that we see on screen. One of the comments The Swallow seems to get again and again is that she holds the audience for its entirety like few other actresses could..
“In retrospect now, it’s impossible to imagine the film with anybody else but I wrote the film and got it funded before I had cast anybody or had even thought of approaching Brenda.
“But we were sitting at home one night watching RTE and Brenda was on the Tommy Tiernan show.
“She spoke incredibly well and really compellingly about the experience of living alone and the way that it had its challenges but she made no apologies for her life or her lifestyle and just spoke about her mental health challenges and just giving insight into what it is to be a 70 something year old woman living on her own in a way that society doesn’t really talk about very much.
“My partner just kind of whacked me on the shoulder and said, ‘You need her for that film’ which I wouldn’t have dared think about really myself but with a bit of encouragement, I realised that this was exactly the person who I needed and somebody who could really bring their own lived experience to this kind of fictional character that I had sketched out.
“Through the networks of the Irish film industry, I was able to get hold of her and have a conversation.
“And Brenda was very open to the idea from the get go.
“I think she appreciated the idea of somebody making a film that wasn’t casting her as a mammy or as a granny or anything, any of those other kind of roles that she’s been associated with but this was a role that would draw on her lived experience, her actual experience of not being a mammy, not being a granny but somebody on her own terms.
“And I think any actor would relish the thought of having a whole film to themselves.
“It’s daunting for an actor, for sure but getting to inhabit an entire film is a particular challenge that she was definitely up for and brought an awful lot to the process.”
So it had little to do with Brenda’s work in great films like My Left Foot but more you seeing how she was the character in a lot of ways..
“Yeah, well it didn’t need a huge transformation.
“I’m limited in terms of what I can write into the life and thoughts and being of an older woman.
“I need somebody who knows that intimately to explain what that is.
“Brenda was able to really bring a lot and hit the ground running and tell me things that I wouldn’t have guessed at or understood just from my own imaginings.”
Perhaps it’s truer to say that she is the only human character on screen as she does have company. Did she bring her own dog or where did the dog in the film come from?
“Yeah, I went to Dublin to meet her in her house early in the process.
“It was the first time we met actually and Juno was there.
“Juno was extremely obedient, extremely charismatic and with that, the character had a dog called Juno.
“It’s something that I wouldn’t have thought of.
“I certainly wouldn’t have volunteered it because dogs are famously difficult to work with but when you saw her, you realise that this takes the edge off her solitude a little bit to have a companion, to have some kind of relationship with another living creature and it draws her out in a way.
“It worked out perfectly.
“As soon as I saw that in the real world I was like, ‘Well, we have to have this for the fictional world’.”
Dramas are often limited to what they can film. I wonder if it is from your documentary background that you thought you source material such as earlier work of Brenda so we see the character as a younger woman..
“There’s a shot from a really brilliant film called The Ballroom of Romance which Brenda was in in the early 80s.
“She’s a young woman in that film and it’s an amazing film about a woman who lives with her dad.
“She’s not married.
“She goes to a local dance in Mayo.
“There’s a fella and they’re circling around each other, shall we say and the character is concerned about ending up alone.
“And there’s an amazing shot in it. Brenda must be only 30 and she looks in the mirror and sort of teases out with her fingertips what appears to be the odd stray grey hair.
“I mean she’s only 30 or whatever so there’s something really beautiful about that.
“The opportunity for me to have older Brenda and cut to her looking at herself in the mirror 50 years earlier was too good an opportunity to let go so I wrote it into the film.
“It’s a great thing about working with an actor who has so much behind her that you can draw on this kind of material.”
How did you find the move from documentary to drama, was it a leap?
“It’s kind of a leap but it’s a leap sideways because documentary has a million challenges.
“You can’t typically get people to do things twice.
“If you miss something, you miss it so you have to be on your toes all the time.
“You have to be willing to put in long hours because the thing that you’re filming is just happening irrespective of whether you’re there or not so you just have to be available whereas drama, it’s all about schedules, it’s all about planning.
“But on the other hand with documentary, you’ve no control over what you see in front of you.
“You can photograph it in lots of interesting ways but if you’re making a film about somebody and their life, you walk into a room they’ve got a bright orange couch and horrible green curtains you just go, ‘Well, that’s just how it is’.
“And you kind of have to film with that anyway, your film then has horrible green curtains in it.
“Whereas if you walk into a space where you’re making a drama somebody will say to you, ‘What colour curtains are we thinking about?’
“And I’ve never chosen curtains.
“I don’t know how to do that but I was happy to work with people who really cared about that kind of thing and to really think about what kind of room would this character inhabit, what would be on the wall, what would be on the table, what kind of chair would she have? Would there be paintings? Would there be art? What colour?
“We literally painted the house inside to create the colour palette that we wanted which is tremendous freedom in that and tremendous creativity in being able to control so much.
“But I suppose what I’m good at is responding to situations because of that documentary background.
“The approach I took here was to create a little world which is this house by the sea, make it look like this character had inhabited it for her entire life and place her within it and then to improvise scenes to just let my documentary background kick in and we would film that almost in the style of a documentary.
“So it was kind of a happy medium between the two: The freedom of drama but the responsiveness of the documentary.”
The film’s contemplative style is achieved through the character’s letter writing..
“You’re trying to get these ideas about art and the preservation of art into the film so I figured her writing a letter to somebody was the best way to create a voiceover. Having her write a letter to this mysterious character from her past was an idea that came pretty early.
“But it’s a nice way of getting inside somebody’s head because they’re talking not to you but to this other mysterious character so it’s almost like you as a viewer are overhearing something, eavesdropping on a correspondence.
“That gives it a sense of being party to somebody else’s intimacy.
“I kind of like that approach as well.”
Do you think the film has got people thinking about the themes like the loss or preservation of art?
“I like to think so.
“I think people who like the film really like the film.
“It’s perhaps a bit contemplative, a bit more experimental than a lot of the work that’s out there but I think if you’re willing to go with it, if you’re willing to listen and spend time with the film, there’s a lot there to be engaged with, to think about.
“And I think because of the ambiguity in some of the film, we never really know who this person is that she’s writing to for instance, there’s room for people to bring their own ideas to it, to fill in the background of who this person might be and to find their own truth within the film which I think is very rewarding.
“There’s a lot of films out there that just explain everything to you and you’re a passive viewer.
“I think if you’re willing to do that, there’s a lot to be got from the film.”
There’s regret in the character’s life, isn’t there? We can get that from the content of the letters..
“Yeah, a little bit.
“But I think we all have experience of that.
“I think all of us have at least one person from our past that we sometimes think about phoning up out of the blue or writing a letter or an email to and kind of bridging a gap of years.
“And maybe it is tinged with regret.
“I don’t think that’s exclusively something for people in their older years.
“It’s something for everybody really.
“That’s a fairly universal idea.
“I think people can find meaning in that for themselves.”
Was there any particular films or perhaps literature that informed the style?
“It’s a good question.
“I think probably literature and plays as much as anything else.
“There’s a lot of really good Irish writing of the last number of years that is about the internal life of people, books by people like Claire-Louise Bennett but also older stuff.
“There’s a bit of Beckett, I suppose, in this: The kind of slightly comedic but also quite serious, worldly person on their own thinking about doom and gloom.
“But I think it’s hard to say there’s any particular thing but there’s just a life of reading and watching that’s kind of filtered down and all the stuff that I’ve been drawn to over the years kind of found its way in somehow.”
Tadhg will not make the screening himself but there is something poignant in bringing this performance of Brenda’s back to the city.
“I don’t have that deep a relationship with London but Brenda absolutely does.
“Brenda’s memoir came out in mid September.
“It’s a really remarkable book and there’s a strand within it which talks about her moving to London at a young age for work as an actor but also in the same way that an awful lot of Irish people did in the 70s also juggling the odd acting gig in her early days with working as a cleaner in hospitals and immersing herself in that London Irish world which was very strong and how that transformed ultimately into getting the gig on the BBC drama Casualty which she worked on for a good few years and really established her in the public imagination and maybe helped her move on to the greater things she did later on.
“So London and London Irishness is a really central part of Brenda’s life.
“For me to be able to bring her work back to that world is an incredible honour at this stage in her life.
“I just really hope that people connect with it.
“Like I say people find all sorts of different things within the film.
“For some people, it’s the landscape.
“For some people, it’s the artist’s life.
“For some people, it’s the older woman and the sense of regret looking back.
“There’s a lot of themes within the film and I’d love to even just be a fly on the wall after the screening in London to hear what people are taking from it.
“Different people take so many different things from it so I really, really hope people connect with it.”
The Swallow screens at 7.30pm Sunday 16 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.
For booking and more information, click here.
