Shot on a budget of less than €1,000 and with a crew assembled on Facebook, writer/director Terry McMahon took the unconventional – and ultimately successful – route in order to bring his satirical thriller ‘Charlie Casanova’ to the big screen. Along with the film’s star, Emmett J Scanlan, he talks to IFTN.
There’s a look of remorse in Emmett J Scanlan’s eyes. Sat in a private room in Dublin’s plush Residence members club, the wiry and often hyperactive Irish actor sits sheepishly still in his chair. He’s confessing to getting into some “dark situations” in preparing to play the role of Charlie Barnum, the violent middle-class sociopath that holds together writer/ director Terry McMahon’s micro-budget feature debut, ‘Charlie Casanova’.
“I got myself into situations that only Terry knows about,” Scanlan says, refusing to be drawn on what McMahon, sat on his left, knows about. “I started playing the ‘Charlie Casanova’ game for real for two weeks prior to filming. I would go around the streets of Dublin and I’d play the card game, and I got myself into situations that were quite dark. I found out new levels of myself. I haven’t picked up a deck of playing cards since and my relationship suffered as a result. I just went really deep into it.”
Emmett J. Scanlan in Charlie Casanova |
The card game Scanlan speaks of is central to ‘Charlie Casanova,’ McMahon’s uncompromising, visceral and often shocking take on modern Ireland and an emerging “ruling class” that he sees as relinquishing all responsibility in its treatment of the working class. Drawing parallels to the banking crisis, McMahon’s movie is a work that has - and will continue - to divide audiences. With echoes of ‘American Psycho,’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Trainspotting,’ the film centres on Charlie (Scanlan) who, after knocking down a working class girl, abdicates all responsibility by letting his trusted deck of cards decide fate before spiralling deeper and deeper into madness while at a hotel conference with friends.
Co-starring Leigh Arnold (The Clinic), the fact that the feature will finally hit cinema screens this Friday is testament to McMahon’s sheer perseverance. Having seen ‘Charlie Casanova’ all but entirely rejected by the Irish Film Board (they provided completion funding but only after rejecting the work at the development and post-production stage), and frustrated by seeing a series of green-lit projects collapse at the financing stage, McMahon brought ‘Charlie Casanova’ kicking and screaming into the world with a tattoo and an opportune posting on Facebook.
Leigh Arnold in Charlie Casanova |
After having the words “The art is in the completion. Begin” inked onto his body, the Mullingar-born director then took to the social media website and typed in the status: “Intend shooting no budget feature, ‘Charlie Casanova’ a provocatively dark satire, in the first couple of weeks of January. Need cast, equipment, locations, and a lot of balls. Any takers? Script at terrymcmahon.org. This is sincere so bullshitters fuck off in advance. Thank you.”
Within 24-hours he had 130 replies. Two weeks later he was shooting the movie on borrowed equipment and favours from those in the industry. Eleven days after that the 91-minute feature was in the can and on a journey that would see it gain notable international recognition. Nominated for five IFTAs last February, the film shared the Best First Feature award at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh; was the first non-American film to be selected in six years for the Narrative Feature Competition at last year’s SXSW Film Festival and earned a Best Actor award for Scanlan at the E.C.U. European Independent Film Festival in Paris last year.
“The Film Board rejecting it, I understood entirely why they rejected it,” McMahon says in his calm, measured and dry manner, his words gathering momentum the longer he speaks. “But for me, I knew that the script was unlike anything that I’d ever written before. I knew that because there was no precedent for it, that it would be very difficult to engage with, but I also knew that I felt – and believed – that there was a kernel of truth in it that was very important to explore; to examine a new kind of breed of person that was becoming increasingly prevalent in Ireland. And I was ashamed at my own lack of political will, and my own cowardice when it came to identifying doing something about this new breed of person. So I infused a screenplay with a character, Charlie Barnum – Charlie Casanova – and, as I said before it was a case of picking up a baseball bat or picking up a camera.”
McMahon describes that new breed of person he saw as one “all pumped up on Viagra and coke” and who “despised people in tracksuits.” It was then that Charlie Casanova began to take shape in the mind of a man who had previously scripted episodes of ‘Fair City.’ The genesis of the script also took inspiration from the tragic death of Brian Murphy in 2000 and the ensuing ‘Anabel’s Case,’ an event that director Lenny Abrahamson’s forthcoming ‘What Richard Did’ is also based upon.
“That was a huge part of it,” says McMahon. “It’s interesting because I remember following that story closely. The only way to describe it is that there’s a certain rule of law that governs the working class, and a certain rule of law that governs the ruling class. Once you touch the ruling class, everything falls in. In that instance, it seemed to me that a lot of these guys were protected because their daddies were in high places except one. And the one whose daddy wasn’t in a high enough place was slightly hung out too dry. Obviously the reality is the guy who died, and that’s the greatest tragedy of all, but unless his parents had have pushed that story, nobody would have given a damn about that victim. So Charlie is about that. Charlie is about the notion of culpability and the recognition that there are people out there who through acts of violence, or acts of linguistic violence, are robbing people of their rights and sometimes killing them.”
Terry McMahon (right) on set |
Part of what makes McMahon’s ‘Charlie Casanova’ work is Scanlan’s performance, and if McMahon felt strongly about forcing the film into the world, then Scanlan felt equally strong about taking on a part which allows him a huge amount of range in which to push his not inconsiderable talent as an actor. “I was sick and tired of doing shit, and I was doing a lot of shit at the time, and I was the worst thing in that shit,” says Scanlan, who took on ‘Charlie Casanova’ around three months before landing the role of Brendan Brady in ‘Hollyoaks’. “So there was something really nice about this script. It begged more questions than it would give answers. It was also quite disturbing. I read in for the lead part, which had already been cast, but the guy couldn’t be there during the time. Then, during the audition process, he (McMahon) offered me the part there and then and I was all over it like a bad case of herpes.
“When he gave it me, what I said to him at the time was “I’m all over that shit”. I had a naivety and arrogance that I could do this, that I could nail it. And I realised that, after reading the script just once with Terry, I had absolutely no fucking idea what I was doing. I was in way over my head. There was a rhythm to his language; there was so much work that needed to be done… the responsibility and everything. And I realised that I was nowhere near as good as I thought I was. I wasn’t in the same league. I was Port Vale and this was the Champions League sort of stuff. It terrified me, and as a direct result I did the only thing that I thought would be wise,” referring to his real-life game of chance described earlier. “I just went really deep into it because, as I said, I was terrified. Daniel Day Lewis, when asked why he did method acting, he said it was because he didn’t think he was good enough not too. And I, sincerely, didn’t think I was good enough not to have gone balls deep into this.”
If Scanlan was “terrified,” McMahon was equally on-edge. He admits he was “panicked 24 hours a day” as he took his borrowed equipment, decision to shoot using only available light and a film crew that veered from “some extraordinary experience and some whack jobs as well.”
Emmett J. Scanlan in Charlie Casanova |
“Some times it works in your favour, some times it doesn’t,” he adds when quizzed about filming with the mix of experience and inexperienced. “The difference is that when you turn up – and it is back to that notion of an anarchic approach - it allows you to go ‘we’re all lost together, let’s find a way out’. That’s opposed to a whole bunch of people who know exactly what they should be doing and looking for no way out. It means that you’re not making consensus decisions. You’re making decisions on the huff and you’re making decisions from a position of panic. Sometimes that can lead to mediocre results, but occasionally it can lead to something extraordinary. And it was about that adrenaline fuelled panic, because we knew that at midnight on the eleventh day the cameras had to be back. We knew we had no room for re-shoots. We knew of all of those things. But somehow the combination of that all worked on a film that, for me, should feel like a visceral assault. And a lot of people are not going to engage with that, but those who do engage with it become staggering advocates of the film. Those who don’t become vociferously anti the film. That’s what we got out of it on-set. If that survives through the whole post-production process, and somehow that whole visceral energy survives, then you’ve done alright.”
McMahon notes that the success of ‘Charlie Casanova’ – relative to its production budget of “less than a grand” - has had “zero changes” in terms of giving him a leg-up on his next production. Although he is quick to note the support of the industry in Ireland. “The Film Board, in the end, have proven to be incredibly generous,” he says, “and Windmill Lane were astonishingly generous the whole way through. But the reality of what it takes to get another production off the ground, there’s absolutely nobody knocking on this door. There’s no precedent for this, no feeling of ‘we need to engage with it’. It’s quite the opposite. Zero changes. You realise that you have to start at square one all over again.”
The Charlie Casanova team at the IFTAs |
If that is the case, the film has nonetheless put McMahon and, particularly Scanlan, very much on the radar at home. At last February’s IFTA Awards, ‘Charlie Casanova’ landed nods in six categories with 33-year-old actor Scanlan nominated in the Irish Film Board Rising Star category, only losing out to ‘The Guard’ writer/director John Michael McDonagh.
“It was unbelievable, ha! I thought it was a wind-up,” he says laughing in his chair. “The girl rang me up and I said ‘Fuck right off!’ I thought it was him getting a friend just to wind me up. Yeah, it was unbelievable, to get the nod as a direct result from coming on board for this. You’re in a category with people way more deserving of the prize, sitting amongst some great people. But we were there because we earned it. We really did. We really did earn the right to be recognised for best director, best script, a rising star all that stuff. It was humbling.”
As for what he’ll do next, a reunion with McMahon seems inevitable somewhere along the line. Scanlan smiles “I can think of nothing better that I’d rather do with my life and my acting career than do another film with Terry.”
Independently written, produced and directed by Terry McMahon, ‘Charlie Casanova’ is released in cinemas from this Friday 11 May with distribution from Element Pictures an can be seen in the following cinemas.
Dublin |
Cineworld |
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IFI |
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Lighthouse Cinema |
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MOVIES @ Dundrum |
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MOVIES @ Swords |
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Odeon@Coolock |
Galway |
Eye |
Limerick |
Omniplex |
Check out http://www.facebook.com/CharlieCasanovaMovie for more details.
Read Terry McMahon's festival diary from the Galway Film Fleadh here on IFTN
