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Joseph is an elderly man who, upon dying, is given the opportunity to relive one day of his life: Joseph’s Reel, directed by Michael Lavers, is one of the ten live action short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2016.

Shot on 35mm film, Joseph’s Reel stars Robert Hardy (Sense and Sensibility, Harry Potter), Alice Lowe (Hot Fuzz, Sightseers), Oliver Tilney and Ella Road. The film world premiered at Palm Springs ShortFest in June 2015.

In the following interview, Michael tells us that he’s currently working on a feature version of the short.
 

In Joseph’s Reel cinema and its language are used as a metaphor for time travelling and manipulation. Can you tell us something about this aspect?

That’s an interesting take, and I’m now wondering if the whole thing is this awful manipulation fantasy!

I guess featuring the cinema screen and script was always going to invite those comparisons to filmmaking. Even more interesting to me though was the comparison to our memories. In the film, Joseph has to follow the script of the day as it happened, but where did that script come from? Is it a note-perfect recording of what actually happened (like time travelling), or is it just the subjective script of how Joseph remembered it?

In a way, when we remember things we’re all filmmaking — we take music, images, phrases and emotions and tie them all together (or manipulate them!) into something that makes sense to us. It’s even more relative when you think how fallible memory is and how it can change over time. I thought that was pretty interesting, and I’ve tried to keep that idea front and centre in the feature version I’m writing (shameless what-I’m-up-to-now drop).

How did you cast the two Josephs?

My producer Collie McCarthy (who will be at your lovely festival) and I always hoped we could land a known actor to play Old Joseph, so we sent the script out to a few British heavyweight character actors. We couldn’t believe it when Robert Hardy said he was interested in the role. I’d grown up watching him on All Creatures Great and Small re-runs, so it was a dream to work with him. It was also scary, but only for all of five minutes — he was the sweetest, most dedicated actor I could have hoped to have worked with.

When we knew he was signed on, we went looking for a Young Joseph we thought could look like Robert in his twenties. We looked at pictures of Robert in a BBC series of Henry V from 1960 for reference. However the actor we cast, Oliver Tilney, doesn’t actually look that much like Robert did! But Oliver was so good in his audition he didn’t give us much of a choice; he was totally believable in this weird scenario. Oliver’s trained in both screen and stage performance, so he had the physicality we wanted for all the running around required coupled with an incredible acting talent.

Where was the film shot?

We shot the flashback scenes at a cottage down in Surrey, which is south of London in the UK — it had these great open spaces and our production designer worked hard to get it looking like a 50s household. The cinema/projection room scenes were shot in Hammersmith, London, at Riverside Studios. They knocked the place down a few months later (it’s being re-developed) so I think we were the last to film in the cinema as it was. We got very lucky with the exteriors — a beautiful sunny weekend between two huge downpours — but that’s British summertime for you!

 
An ode to Love, directed by New Zealand born filmmaker Matthew Darragh, is one of the animated short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2016.

The film tells the story of a lonely man on a desert island who explores the highs and lows of romantic love when a mysterious companion is washed ashore.

An Ode To Love was awarded for Best Irish Animation in the 2014 Foyle Film Festival where it made its premiere screening, and it was screened at the 2015 Galway Film Fleadh.

How did you come up with the idea for this very original story? And what about the ironic title?

The film is about a lonely man on a desert island who falls in love with a stick. Their relationship starts off wonderfully, but then it all starts to go terribly wrong. It’s a romantic tragedy, I guess!

I wrote it while living in Spain at a time when everyone around me seemed to be experiencing all kinds of relationship drama. I began to wonder just how much of that drama we encourage or even create from some kind of basic need for it. And how much we project onto others who we want them to be, especially in the romantic phases of love. The story then formed around those ideas. Although the stick in the story is just a plain old stick, our hero still somehow contrives to experience friendship, love, and even heartbreak in their relationship.

Yes, the “Love” in the title refers to a very specific kind of love. A friend suggested the film should be called “An Ode to the push and pull dynamics and projection inherent in romantic love” but that doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

Can you tell us something about the animation technique used for the film?

The film is CG animation, using animation software called Maya. I was lucky enough to be able to make it in a great studio called Brown Bag Films in Dublin. It took our core team about a year to make the film. We worked around the TV shows being made, enlisting the artists and production crew whenever they had any down time, and then outsourced some of the animation and lighting when we needed to. It was a delicate balance, but the team really embraced it and gave so much of themselves to it. I think you can see that in the film, how much care was given to each stage of it. I’m very grateful for our team. The film turned out so much better than even I had imagined it!

Music plays a big part in An Ode to Love: how did you work with the composer Stefan French?

Filmbase and RTÉ who funded the film put us forward for an award to have the film’s music scored by a very gifted young composer, Stefan French, and then performed by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.

Stefan had a lot of influence with the music. I’d originally imagined the score as being quite quirky, using French popular music from the 60s and 70s, but Stefan suggested making the score more classical to take full advantage of the orchestra, and I think that was a great call. The orchestral score seems to give the film more pathos.

It was special to be there when the 42 piece orchestra played it. They literally read the score once and then recorded it! The collaboration with Stefan and the orchestra happened quite early on in the production, and it really raised the bar for us, giving us a lot of momentum and inspiration.

 
Paul McGuigan is the director of Girona, one of the live action short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2016.

Girona stars Scottish actor John Hannah (Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Mummy) and Northern Irish actress Séainín Brennan (The Fall).

On a long stormy night an encounter with a dark mysterious woman (Brennan) in a strange hotel causes a lonely man (Hannah) to confront his past…

Where was the film shot?

The film was shot in a boutique hotel in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, a maze of streets and side streets with Saint Anne’s Cathedral at its heart. We shot over St. Patrick’s Day when we knew the streets would be thronged with revellers, enjoying the festivities: the hotel then had to become other-worldly, ethereal, a place-apart. The location for the hotel was quite difficult to find as it needed to have a suite with an inter connecting door to another bedroom. It also needed to have a certain ambience that suited the mise en scéne.

How did you cast John Hannah to play Hart?

We never thought we could attract an actor of the calibre of John Hannah to our film, after all it was a short! When myself and the producer, Eamonn Devlin, were kicking around some names, we played a game of “in an ideal world who would we like to play Hart“, and John Hannah was on both of our lists. Of course we dismissed it as pie in the sky.

Then we spoke to the agent of another actor we were interested in and she also happened to be the agent for John – she asked if she could show the script to him. The next day I got a call from John saying that he loved the script and the character and really wanted to play the role. He came over to Belfast for four days and was amazing, generous, erudite and most importantly, great craic.

As a director, your attention is very focused on details: how did you work on the visual aspect of the story?

The film is quite claustrophobic, because it takes place in a hotel room: moving the camera becomes a luxury, so the fine details must reveal character and reveal the story. Hart values substance, his father’s battered Rolex sits proudly on his wrist, his silver razor catches the light as he shaves, sending shards of light across the darkness of the bathroom. The sound of a sharp blade harvesting stubble cuts through the silence.

The film is symmetrical, and like Newton’s third law, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: Sophie puts on her make-up, Hart shaves in the mirror; Sophie puts on her stockings, Hart fixes his braces. Karma is the great law of cause and effect, of action and reaction, which directly influences their very existence.

The framing reflects symmetry and balance, the yin and yang. Longish takes, giving the actors space to explore their characters, pervade. The camera moves rather than cuts, close-ups are for emphasis. Sometimes a shadow appears before its owner follows. Characters move through pools of light, reflecting their lives, inhabiting dark spaces synonymous with their characters.

I looked at classic films that inhabit small spaces, the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, and Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier. The characters become intertwined with the location – this was important to our film, one couldn’t exist without the other.

 
How Was Your Day?, directed by Damien O’Donnell and adapted from a short story by Nollaig Rowan, is one one of the short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2016.

Eileen Walsh (Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters) plays a woman who is excited about the approaching birth of her first child, but things won’t be what she expects.

How Was Your Day?, funded by the Irish Film Board under the Signatures scheme, won as best Irish short at IndieCork and just got an IFTA (Irish Film and Television Academy) Awards nomination.

The film is based on a short story by Nollaig Rowan: can you tell us something about the adaptation?

I heard Nollaig’s short story on the radio and it stopped me in my tracks. I was mesmerised by the story and by its theme – which questions the presumption of maternal love.

I wrote about five or six drafts of the screenplay over a period of about two years and during that time we spoke to a lot of professionals and women who find themselves in the same situation as the mother in this film. A lot of the details in the film came as a result of this research and we had to make other changes from the original story for practical purposes, but overall the film is very faithful to the theme and intention of Nollaig’s original story.

Eileen Walsh is courageous as usual in the short. Did you give her some space for improvisation for this role?

Eileen and I spoke a lot about the film and its theme a long time before we filmed it, and a lot of the script was firmly in place, but wherever there was a need or an opportunity to improvise we did so, and the film is much better because of it.

Where was the film shot?

We filmed over five days in spring of 2015, around Dublin City and its surroundings.

 
Andrew Kavanagh is the director of City of Roses, the only short film in competition at Irish Film Festa 2016 to combine animation and live action tecniques.

City of Roses tells the real story of Paddy Fitzpatrick, emigrated from Dublin to Oregon in the early 1950s, through the letters he wrote home to his mother telling all about his new life in America, his new job, and his new love: Rose.

Kavanagh’s short film features the work of graphic designer Annie Atkins, who recently created props and set pieces for Laika’s stop-motion film The Boxtrolls, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, and tv series Penny Dreadful.

Why did you choose to tell the story of Paddy Fitzpatrick combining live action and animation?

The original idea was to do an animated film based on the letters, but I spent so long telling the story that my own involvement in events became a separate narrative, particularly after I managed to make contact with the family. The easiest way to stylistically contrast the two narratives was to do one in live action and one in animation. It also helped to have the artefacts of the letters themselves as the portal in which the audience is brought into the animated timeline. The letters are the bridging point for the two narratives and feature as the link point in overall the art direction, so it reinforces their vital importance and the fact that they were almost lost.

Can you tell us something about the animation technique, especially regarding the composition of the backgrounds? And what about the contribution of graphic designer Annie Atkins?

The letters are the basis for the overall artistic direction of the animation. All the textures are notepaper, the characters were modelled on ink signatures passing across the page and the backgrounds feature post marks, stamps and even windows are modelled on cellophane windows in envelopes. We tried to use as much ephemera from the original letters as possible, particularly in the key scenes at the hospital and cemetery, but the text of the letters is used in practically every scene, often in a very subtle way. I had returned the original letters to Rose before we started the film, so I needed to make several key props for the live action scenes based on scans.

Annie Atkins’s involvement was pure serendipity: our location for the key scenes was at a neighbour’s house – he happens to be a hairdresser. He had been styling Annie’s hair and they got talking about the film. She expressed an interest in the story and we got in touch. I couldn’t believe it, she was a dream choice for this role. She remade the letters down to the smallest detail, even hand making the stamps for each individual envelope.

Music plays a big part in the film: how did you work with the composer David Harmax?

I had been contacted by Greg Magee who had done the scores for several of my films: he was working closely with David, who was on a Masters program at the time. He really felt David had the orchestral style needed to interpret the score. All the music is based on Thomas Moore’s “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms“, a song mentioned in one of Rose’s letters as Paddy’s favourite, and one which made him very homesick. As I had so little biographical detail on Paddy at the start of the film, this tune became anthemic for me. It’s a sentimental song about love and it really represents Paddy and Rose’s story very effectively. I needed someone who could arrange it in many different ways and create something entirely new. So I was very fortunate in getting David on board, he recorded the score with live musicians and mixed it separately. There are only about eight musicians but he made it sound so much larger.

 
Michael Lennox is the director of Boogaloo and Graham, one of the short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2016. It was nominated for best short film at the 2015 Oscars and won a BAFTA Award for the same category.

Boogaloo and Graham tells the story of Jamesy and Malachy, two young brothers living in Belfast during the 1970s. One day their soft-hearted dad presents them with two baby chicks to care for…

Boogaloo & Graham got a lot of success last year, all over the world: what were the responses of the different audiences to this Northern Irish story?

The responses were amazing and positive. A fear for this type of story was: would it translate globally? And it was exceeded our expectations. That’s the power of cinema.

How did you choose Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch, the young boys who play Jamesy and Malachy?

I found Riley Hamilton in a Kick Boxing Club in East Belfast. One of the issues with casting young actors is it can seem forced and theatrical. I wanted to find someone untainted by the acting world and use that rawness as an advantage. I could hear Riley having an argument with his mother after a class and I though he has exactly the naturalness I was looking for. You find gems in the most unusual places. Aaron Lynch is a massively talented young actor. He already had experience on film, so was the perfect counterpart to help young Riley as his older brother in Boogaloo.

What did you love the most about the screenplay by Ronan Blaney?

I love Ronan’s heart in every story he writes. No matter the subject matter or genre, his story has heart. He has a wildly dark sense of humour with his dialogue, which I find hilarious.