| 20 May 2024 | The Irish Film & Television Network | |
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Irish duo Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy formed the London-based production company Desperate Optimists almost twenty years ago starting off their careers in theatre. Both were the creative forces behind the Civic Life Series – a collection of seven short films made with different community groups in the environments in which they live and work across the UK. The series featured ‘Who Killed Brown Owl’, winner of the Best British Short Film Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2004. ‘Helen’, their first feature, evolved out of this series. The film tells the story of a lonely hotel maid (Annie Townsend) who volunteers to play the missing girl in a police reconstruction and learns so much about the young woman's life she almost wants to take her place. Irish cast to feature include Betty Ashe Danny Groenland and Sheila Hamilton. The film was shot in four cities and including the Dublin Docklands ‘Helen’ has won the Grand Jury Award and the Best Actress Award at the Festival Premiers Plans/European First Film Festival in 2008 and received support from the UK Film Council’s P&A fund for distribution in the UK. Here, co director Joe Lawlor discusses the film and talks bout finding the right actress for the lead role of ‘Helen’. IFTN: Joe where did the idea for Helen develop from? JL: ‘Helen’ came out of a five year project that we did with various community groups called The Civic Life Series and sort of a methodology from that began to develop. The first one we did was called ‘Who Killed Brown Owl’ and that went on to win an award in Edinburgh as Best UK short film. This meant it made the subsequent films easier so more people took notice of them. I think we got to around film number four or five and we began to feel that at this point it was possible. There was a methodology here that could lead to a feature film. We got four commissions at the same time a couple of years ago and we convinced our partners to pool resources and make a feature film rather than four separate short films. When exactly did you shoot it the film? JL: It was shot in late October early November of 2007 and it was completed just in time for its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival where it was nominated for the Michael Powell award. Prior to that we didn’t have the money to make a print but thankfully the Irish Film Board came in with some support. There are some scenes shot in Dublin. Where else did you shoot? JL: It is shot in four cities; Newcastle, Birmingham, Liverpool and Dublin but in very specific areas in those cities because they were the four main funding partners. This wasn’t the usual sitting down, writing a script and then trying to get it funded. It worked through public commissions, like an art project or community project. In Dublin, we kept it very specifically around the Docklands for a number of reasons. Firstly, that was part of the contract – the Dublin Docklands were giving some funds and they wanted to keep it in that area and involve the local community. At the same time we wanted to shoot in generic locations so the story could easily operate across the four cities. It was about making them look like the one city. In that way it was quite easy because if you point the camera a particular way a lot of cities look the same pretty much. They all have that architecture which is very contemporary, northern European. Because four agencies worked and collaborated together with us, the idea was to make a story that wasn’t trying to make differences in the cities but to try to unify them into one enormous city so the story has a universal feel. What community was involved in Dublin? JL: The main points of contact were the two people in Dublin Docklands, Mary McCarthy and Dara O’Leary. The Dublin Docklands area is a very important not only for it being a place of dwelling, it has also a culture dimension too, so it’s more rounded. There is a community down there as well so our main community contact was with the St Andrew’s Resource Centre. We coincidently had been at the centre twenty two years prior to this when we did a six month program with Peter Sheridan looking at the community culture work in the mid-eighties. Could you tell me a bit more about yourself and Christine’s backgrounds? JL: We worked together with various community groups in Dublin often with young people, using drama or theatre, sometimes with writing, photography or working with the camera. It was more to do with using creativity really to engage socially with the people. There was a lot of that activity that was going on back then because economically it was very bad times and it wasn’t so easy to get jobs. We eventually did a degree studying writing for theatre and directing in the UK. Then after that, we came up with the rather paradoxical title of Desperate Optimists for our theatre work which we did a lot of throughout the nineties. Towards the end of the nineties we stopped doing theatre because we were using the camera much more in our work and felt that was were our hearts had lay all these years anyway. Our first protocol if we wanted to go out was not to go to the theatre but to the go to the cinema which was our main love. So we gradually arrived at making cinema but by going through other art forms of mainly theatre and to a lesser degree visual arts. I think, in our case, it has been a very productive journey not to do that too early or too soon – we are sort of late developers if you will. We are not comparing ourselves but there are many film makers such as Robert Bresson who didn’t really start making films until later that did other art work in other art forms. Our background has kind of hopped from form to form but I think the main thing is that there has always been narrative and performance. We have come to cinema quite late, but hopefully for good. In terms of yourself and Christine being a film making team, how does the writing and directing roles balance out between you? When it comes to directing we have always co-directed as well. Again we divide that role up. I will work with the actors and she will work with the crew and then we flip that around. We don’t talk to the actors and the crew at the same time. The crew and performers are used to the oscillation of both of us doing it but not simultaneously as it could get confusing. We have been doing this together for well over twenty years so we are well used to it and tend not to analyse it too much. I think if you look at Cannes, there are a lot of people who co-direct. It could be like two men or a man and a woman but I think well run partnerships over a certain period of time can get stronger. It is good to collaborate. I think cinema is a very collaborative art form anyway so you end up working very closely with other people invariably. Can you tell me a bit about Annie Townsend why you choose her for the role? I was reading that she isn’t a professional actress or is this just her first actual film. JL: No she is a complete amateur. I think she was in one play beforehand with a women’s group up in Newcastle but it was more a social thing than anything else. We were looking for somebody who again came from the neighborhoods that we were working closely with, although I have to say for that particular role we did feel that we were willing to cast the net wider if need be, and we began to panic a little bit towards the back end of summer when we were not having much success in finding anyone from specifically those areas. Anyway, we kept looking and we eventually we came across Annie. I remember there was a group of five girls up in Newcastle. They were very embarrassed to have their picture taken but Annie just walked up, looked straight into the camera and walked away again. It appears that she doesn’t have much confidence but she is very self assured, very quiet and unassuming. We felt that she would be great. She looks great and we hoped that she would bring a certain kind of calmness to the part and not somebody who wasn’t overly wanting to act… just someone who wanted to perform in a very simple way. Sometimes if someone has had a little bit of acting technique they feel they have enough skills to act and we didn’t want that. We wanted someone who had no skills whatsoever, completely natural or someone with a huge amount of skill who could just act very normally - it was either one extreme or the other. A little bit of technique is a dangerous thing in a way. IFTN: You have a project in development ‘Mister John’, can you tell us some more about that? JL: The UK Film Council were very taken with ‘Helen’ and the development team invited us in and wanted to know what we would be working on next. We had an idea and they liked the sound of it so they funded us to write the script, which is more or less finished now. I would say it is way more ambitious than ‘Helen’ in that we would want it to be a longer shooting schedule and it would demand a much greater range of acting capabilities and techniques. It wouldn’t comprise of long single takes but it would have a much more dynamic range of pacing. So instead of bringing visual flair to the film, which is out strength, we would have to step up a few notches in terms of what the cinema experience is. What is it based on? JL: My brother who lives in Thailand is a rather an interesting character and I have always imagined what would happen if he died and the effect it would have on the people around him. It’s a sort of mid life crisis story about lost a man struggling to find confidence in his identity and the break-up of his marriage. We were interested in the idea of people who have become stuck in their lives and are beginning to question where they are at and the value of their life at that particular moment in time. |
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