Earning an Academy Award nomination for your first feature film screenplay should make your confidence in filmmaking soar so much you never endeavour to do anything else.
Kirsten Sheridan, a Dublin director and screenwriter, did just this, gaining a number of critically acclaimed films under her belt before she even hits 40.
Big budget productions, with big budget casts to boot, like ‘Disco Pigs’ and ‘August Rush’, Sheridan managed to step out of the shadow of her hugely successful father Jim, and earned her own director stripes.
Her latest offering, ‘Dollhouse’, a low budget unscripted project which Sheridan shot over 21 days in her parents’ home in Dalkey, proves Sheridan not only had enough confidence to direct without the aid of a script to guide her, but also still relies on Daddy Jim for some perks…
IFTN caught up with the award-winning filmmaker to talk all things ‘Dollhouse’ ahead of its theatrical release tomorrow.
Kirsten, where did the idea to put a bunch of drunk teenagers in a house come from? I actually had a location which was my mam and dad's house out in Dalkey. They were going to be in America shooting a film so I used the house!
You didn’t write a script for ‘Dollhouse’, you worked off a 15-page treatment instead. Why was this? I spent about two years trying to finance films on bigger budgets and I just got frustrated so I decided to just get a cast that I love, a very very small crew, and a camera, and keep the budget low and focus it all down into relationships and moments.
I couldn't write a story about people who live in the house [due to budget] so I decided to clash two worlds and do it about people breaking in. I wrote a 15-page treatment and I didn't tell the actors the plot so they were improvising. What I wanted to do was get genuine reactions as the cameras were rolling on set so I didn't tell them the plot essentially, but we did a lot of improv work.
I spent about two years trying to finance films on bigger budgets and I just got frustrated so I decided to just get a cast that I love and keep the budget low
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I sent them away to a house for a week on their own and they came up with their characters and then I'd do rehearsal improve with them and cherry pick lines, and they would come up and moments and character traits and I would feed it back to them on set.
I had spent a large amount of time writing scripts for myself and other people that are quite traditional and I kind of just wanted to turn all that on its head and do something a bit riskier and kind of challenging, and also I wanted to keep the process alive for myself as much as anything else. Sometimes when you spend a year writing a script on your own then when you get to the set all you're doing is executing something that's on paper, it doesn't really have a life really. You have to kind of work harder to create authentic life, so I thought that it would be more fun, more of a laugh!
Your previous directorial efforts have been very successful. Not only was ‘August Rush’ nominated for an Oscar, the cast and crew won a number of awards, as well as the cast and crew on ‘Disco Pigs’. Did you feel pressure when branching out to do ‘Dollhouse’, which you were more or less entirely responsible for? The good thing about this is because it was a bit risky and a bit experimental and everyone was like 'Oh that's mental' I didn't actually put any weight of expectation onto it. I did think 'OK if this doesn't work that's fine in a way’ because it was always supposed to be a bit of a crazy risk and ‘let's just see what happens’.
So it wasn't like I had a studio breathing down my neck saying 'You're spending loads of money what the hell are you doing?' And I think you have to mix it up, I think you have to be attached to bigger projects as well, and then these I suppose you'd call your more passion projects.
Was distribution and a theatrical release not on your radar for this film then? You always hope, but it's a very very hard world out there in relation to independent cinema at the moment, and especially in Ireland. I think getting Irish people to see Irish cinema is much harder than any other European country.
Why is that? I think partly because we speak English, so we compete really hard, hand in hand, we compete with the marketing budgets of 'The Hobbit' and 'Twilight', so I think that's one thing. Then I think RTÉ doesn't have a film department, I think that's also a big factor.
But I just don't think they have budgets. I think it's something that actually has to happen on a broad, cultural, government department sense.
Young actress Seána Kerslake stars in ‘Dollhouse’ |
At times, ‘Dollhouse’ jumps from hostile scenes to a friendly atmosphere, and back again. The audience is really left wondering where the next scene is going to take them. Was was the message you were trying to get across by doing this? We did a lot of work in rehearsals and improv and they knew that that was something I was going after, they kind of understood that it can go from being very friendly and it kind of shifts in a heartbeat and it's very very unpredictable, so I think they knew that was my goal, and I'd shout in 'turn' and they'd do that.
I thought that if I wanted to make a story about a group of people lost and on very shifting sands and live a very unpredictable life, then I thought that the process should equally be as unpredictable, and shifting. If I had written that down in a very controlled logical manner I'm not sure that would have translated onto the screen.
And what if the treatment process didn’t work? Would you have recast o would you have written script in the end? Yeah I would have written a longer script. I didn't actually give them the 15-page treatment; that was withheld, they didn't actually know the story at all. I'd feed it to them sometimes as we went, but I would have probably wrote more obvious chunky scenes and back stories.
To be honest I didn't know whether it was going to work or not until we first screened it. I was going 'Do I have a feature film here?' for a while. I'll realise it when I sit in the first public performance!”
You used just one location in the entire film, your parents’ house in Dalkey. Was this solely down to budget or was this to convey so many different stories in one environment? It was really down to budget but it was also just not having to deal with extras and things like that. That was really good, I just thought I can concentrate everything down into relationships and it removed my safety net.
You had to trust the cast with the responsibility of pulling that off then? I had to totally trust them 100 per cent and vice versa. I think it was pretty terrifying for them as well to not have a safety net, I cast pretty close to type though, and in some cases some of the cast had never been on a film set before, it was Jack Reynor's first feature film role as well, so they didn't really come with any preconceived ideas of what a film set should be, they were very open.
Would you shoot this way again, without a script? Yeah I'm developing something at the moment, it's actually with a group of complete non actors this time, but I can't say what it's called at the moment!
The hard thing in terms of production [on ‘Dollhouse’]was that we had to do it in chronology. [In one scene] they had a food fight, that was there for 21 days, all the food all over the floor. But I've been shooting for much longer in the past. I suppose the good thing about it is you don't have this monster of a huge production so you can be much more flexible and free in terms of what you want to do. That was liberating.
This is the first feature film you directed that wasn’t somebody else’s script. Why did you decide now to direct your own thoughts? It was just by coincidence that the first two I did weren't my scripts. And probably the next one I do will be so it was the way things happen I suppose, it wasn't from not wanting to do my own scripts it was just that those were the ones that got financed. Then I did really think 'OK it's time for me to put my energy into actually making something even if it's lower budget', rather than put my energy into chasing finance for other people's scripts.
I think getting Irish people to see Irish cinema is much harder than any other European country.
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'August Rush' had been about New York and Chicago, the geography of it and the timeline was such a head melt, and then it became a flash back film in post-production, it wasn't originally a flashback film , that was a very intensive post production process. I had seen a film call 'Buried' and the whole thing takes place in a coffin and I thought it was absolutely brilliant, and I thought 'Wow if he has a coffin then I have a lot to play with a whole house'.
The camera work on ‘Dollhouse’ is used in a lot of close up scenes, most notably when there’s drug-taking involved, and when some of the cast are in vulnerable states. Talk me through the shooting process. A lot of it was necessity. We used a RED camera and we had a set where the lights were built into the set, you had a 360 degree set so the actors could go anywhere. That was a freedom that I wanted for them, so that dictated that we used a lot of practicals. I had two camera men (Colin Downey and Ross McDonnell), so I had two cameras at all times. Both of them direct films, and one of them directed documentaries, so I knew that he would always be filming and never waiting around for me to set things up in again a controlled logical way. I knew he'd be grabbing moments, he'd just be in it so that was very important.
Then I used certain things to light scenes, like I used torches and I used the projection and the fire, and again they were all very practical considerations. But I liked it in the end that [the cast] light each other sometimes with the torches [in a scene], so a lot of it was really necessity. I tend to go very close on actors just as a tendency as mine, and I guess I wanted it to be kind of claustrophobic and at the end of the film it becomes more composed and more like a still life.
‘Dollhouse’ is released in cinemas nationwide from tomorrow, December 7. Seána Kerslake, Johnny Ward, Kate Stanley Brennan, Jack Reynor, Ciaran McCabe and Shane Curry all star.
