the popcorn reel roundtable rendezvous
CONVERSATION
Glen Hansard, John Carney and Marketa
Irglova discover that
once is not
enough
by Omar P.L. Moore | The
Popcorn Reel
May 22, 2007
"We're not trying to sell it in a really big way."
Director John Carney is speaking about "Once", the
story about two musicians whose own love songs are inevitable emblems of their
own love for each other. It is this commercial-less attitude that has
served the film very well. The less-is-more no-frills approach is the
film's crux, making it as down-to-earth, real and as easily identifiable to both
lovestruck and lovelorn audiences as possible. Shot with a hand-held
digital camera on the streets of Dublin, "Once" is
filled with songs and music written by the film's two stars real-life musicians
Glen Hansard (lead singer of the Irish band The Frames) and Marketa Irglova (a
pianist and musician from the Czech Republic), who play the simply-titled
characters Guy and Girl respectively. The film opened in New York City on
May 16 and opens in San Francisco and other American cities on May 25.
Mr. Hansard (who had a role in Alan Parker's film "The Commitments") and Miss
Irglova have collaborated as musicians before doing "Once",
but on this sunny San Francisco afternoon in a suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel
it is Hansard, wearing a red and dark navy blue plaid shirt who is doing almost
all the talking, along with Mr. Carney, a tall, slender man with dark, ruffled
hair. The director, wearing a body-fitting white top and blue jeans looks
like an artist at work as he talks. Serious, but with a sense of humor
that is infectious, he fields questions about his new film, a film its
distributor Fox Searchlight hopes will be this summer's "Little Miss Sunshine",
the Searchlight film that delighted audiences in large numbers last summer.
Lauding Fox Searchlight, Hansard, the curly red-headed and bearded musician,
said, "they didn't touch a frame."
As one looks at Marketa Irglova it is incredible to realize that she is 19.
Petite and perhaps a touch shy, the soft-spoken Irglova sits quietly on the
couch of the moderately opulent surroundings sometimes with her knees tucked
under her chin and arms wrapped around the knees, other times with her
khaki-covered legs outstretched. Her faint-strawberry blonde hair, with
highlights, is the "loudest" thing about her. On the rare occasions that
she speaks during the journalists' roundtable she is barely audible, but when
asked about her taste in movies she rattles off such titles as "Eternal Sunshine
Of The Spotless Mind", among others. She knows her movies inside and out.
(For good measure, Carney, 35, and Hansard, 36, flaunt their knowledge with
their favorites. Carney throws out Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From A
Marriage" and Hansard recommends that people see an Australian film called "The
Castle", which he declares is a "rare" and hard title to find, one which played
at Sundance a few years ago.)
Irglova was 17 when "Once", her first film, began
filming in early 2006. Her maturity on screen as the Girl is profound and
she seems to have been performing on the big screen for twenty years. If
Natalie Portman grew up before our very eyes in the film "Closer", directed by
Mike Nichols, then Irglova has already reached that level with her first big
screen role. Her character is adult, confident, and in touch with her
emotions and feelings to such a level that authenticity seems one of the weakest
ways in which to characterize (or categorize) Miss Irglova's stunning work in
"Once."
There are times when Glen Hansard's eyes register the saddest gaze that a big
screen can contain. The character he plays has lost love, and wants it
back. The Guy needs a girl to stabilize his own emotional anguish and
erase his loneliness and longing with warmth and companionship, but it is
this Girl that he can't take his eyes or mind off. Several scenes in
"Once" punctuate the Guy's fears, desires and
longings, and are dramatized in the subtlest of ways by Mr. Hansard. Miss
Irglova's Girl is in a stunted marriage that has left her bereft of emotions for
her spouse. An empty character, the husband has drifted away and left the
Girl to shoulder the burden of being a parent of a very young child.
Mr. Carney and Mr. Hansard are from Ireland and the "Once"
director was a musician in Hansard's band several years ago before leaving the
group. He recalls the aftermath of this in a not-so-sentimental way: "I
left the band, I went off, I kind of did my own thing and I met this girl and I
started hanging out with her and going out with her. She was a Frames fan
and it used to kind of drive me mad in a way, like Marcella (Marcella Plunkett,
who plays the Guy's ex-girlfriend in the film), would listen to Frames records
and in a way I was like, 'stop playing Frames records around the house!
You always listen to fucking Frames!" It was Marcella Plunkett who
suggested to Carney that he collaborate again with Glen Hansard, this time on
film. After nearly six months of putting the planted idea to rest, and
thinking of a musical film, Carney called Hansard. (Earlier, Carney said
that "Once" was not a film that should be thought
of as a musical, just a love story that had lots of songs in it. To hear
him say it, film musicals appear to be a jaundiced format. "It would
never be 'Dreamgirls", or anything like that," he says somewhat
dismissively, and as if the Oscar-winning film was a curse of some kind.)
"Once", a modestly-budgeted film produced by
producers that the director says "had nothing to prove", is essentially about a
busker (or street musician) played by Hansard who lives with his father
following his mother's death and assists him with his vacuum cleaner repair
business, while scrounging up a living with his passion for music on the high
streets of Dublin. A chance meeting one evening with Irglova's character
who sells a magazine entitled "Issues" and the memories of loss that pain the
Guy begin to alternatively burn brightly and flicker out. Is this Girl the
one, or are the memories of his cheating ex-girlfriend whom he invested his love
in just too difficult to recover from?
Said Hansard, "[t]he difficult part, was what we said was grueling -- was the
hours. We shot it in 17 days. So John was like, 'we need to do this
fast.' So we were working from like six-thirty (a.m.), we were going home
like seven or eight in the evening . . . the actual filming of it was a joy and
a pleasure, and also it was just a lot of trust because we just didn't know if
we could act. Neither of us has done it. And John said, 'I'll get a
performance out of you if you trust me.' And so we just trusted him
completely. We didn't watch rushes, we didn't get involved . . . I was
like, 'dude, please just do whatever you need to do, whether it's shouting at
us, or firing us, or getting new people, that's okay -- just do whatever you
have to do to get a real performance.'"
Carney did not go to film school but learned to cultivate performances as he
went along during filming, making the expressions of the performances on screen
all the more convincing. One of the great challenges faced was the filming
of the opening scene in which the Guy is singing. The entire song is
played. As Hansard describes it, "the opening scene where me and Mar (his
shorthand for Marketa) meet, it took us so long to get that take because people
would interrupt, because it's a full song. The camera's across the street
and it kind of pans in -- that scene took us so -- we had to re-shoot it.
The second time we shot that scene was like five o'clock in the morning on a
Sunday night so the street was dead. After that there was no way to get
the whole song without interruption, so we eventually had to go for an extreme
measure. "
There were other scenes that were fraught with mishaps, such as a scene where a
beggar steals. People actually thought that a real-life robbery was taking
place, and jumped into the middle of filming to get the beggar (played by Darren
Healy) and Mr. Hansard who is trying to prevent the robbery, off of each other.
Healy who stayed in character, refusing to say a single word to the
now-bewildered and confused acting novice Hansard, who was convinced that Healy
was being strange and anti-social. Mr. Healy apologized after the scenes
involving his character were filmed, explaining that the method acting was his
style and that he didn't mean to "vibe you out."
Despite these moments, the film stands alone and without the gloss of film
studios, which the director regards as a good thing. He forecasted the day
when "Once" would inevitably be remade into an
American film, where every single detail would be explained. He joked
about a wicked fantasy he had about taking the money for any potential remake
and rooting for it to fail miserably. On this day in San Francisco, at
this conclusion of a long press tour, Carney was letting loose, with
four-letter-words aplenty, and seemed to be unwinding from a journey which he
and musicians Hansard and Irglova (who would perform a gig later on in the
evening at a local movie theater) hope the film "Once"
will carry on for them.
Musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa
Irglova flank "Once" director John Carney on the
set of the director's film in Dublin.
(Photo: Samson Films/Summit Enterprises via Fox Searchlight)
MOVIE REVIEW:
"ONCE"
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