Following his films ‘Between the Canals’ and ‘King of the Travellers’, Mark O’ Connor’s third feature ‘Stalker’ sees its highly anticipated cinematic release this week. The film’s success on the festival circuit includes coming second for Best Irish Feature at the 24th Galway Film Fleadh and winning Best Film at the 4th Dublin Underground Film Festival. ‘Stalker’ was also selected for a number of international film festivals, most recently for the Chicago Irish Film Festival which will screen the film next month.
The psychological thriller ‘Stalker’ follows Oliver (played by John Connors), a homeless man who wanders around Dublin where he meets and befriends a teenager named Tommy (Barry Keoghan). Tommy is bullied by not only the boys who live in his area, but also by his uncle (Peter Coonan), an upper class drug dealer, and he has a drug-addict mother to take care of. A victim of abuse himself, Oliver sees Tommy’s innocence and desperately wants to preserve it, to the point that he becomes increasingly involved in the young boy’s life.
Mark, first of all I’d like to ask you about the process behind ‘Stalker’, where did you draw your inspirations from?
Well the initial idea came from when I was living in Ranelagh. I met a couple of homeless people and there were a few characters there – it was kind of an amalgamation of those characters where I got the seed of the idea for the character of Oliver. Then I met John Connors and I had a chat with him about it and we fleshed out the story and the character. We wrote the script in a couple of weeks, it happened really quickly. We went to some protests and talked about what was going on in the country at the time, and we let that all that stuff seep into the story also.
You mentioned John Connors there and you’ve worked with him before, as you have with Peter Coonan and Barry Keoghan. What has it meant to you as a director working with these actors?
It’s great because you see them progress naturally. I worked with Peter from the very start on ‘Between the Canals’ and now he’s getting an opportunity in ‘Love/Hate’ [he has played the character Fran for the last three seasons of the show]. Then there’s Barry Keoghan who has done four features this year and he was in the last season of ‘Love/Hate’. Then John has been in ‘King of the Travellers’, so watching them all develop and progress is amazing. I’ve been developing and they’ve been at the same time. With the production team as well, it’s good to build a team around you that you can rely and depend on.
So, looking back to the start of the project, how did you raise money for it?
It was Ireland’s first ever crowd-funded feature film and the money for it was raised through fundit.ie. What we did was we made a promotional video, then people were able to invest in the film and they were given rewards for investing. It was made for €15,000, a really low budget. But the campaign was a success and then we shot the film in 11days.
We have no support in the distribution stage, we’re self-distributing but we’ve still managed to get a big release. We’re opening in Movies@Dundrum, and then in Cineworld on the 28th. Then we’re opening in Galway at the Eye cinema and then it’s going to play in Access Cinema. So it’s been great to have such a tiny, little film get shown like this.
Having gone through the crowd funding process, how do you feel about other funding bodies like the Irish Film Board?
The Irish Film Board is great and working with the staff there is brilliant, but I don’t know if people wanted to take a risk with distributing this film because it is dark and it’s a new direction in Irish film. It’s tackling a lot of issues and taboo subjects like homelessness and the government cuts. I’m not sure, maybe it scares people off. But I’d definitely work with the Irish Film Board again on the right project; they’re great to work with.
What was your experience of directing the actors and helping them develop their characters?
Working with John was brilliant. It was particularly interesting because he had worked on the script with me and co-written it. Then to work with him acting meant we completely understood the character together. He even stayed and slept on the streets as a homeless man to live that character. He was developing a lot as an actor in ‘King of the Travellers’ [which saw Connors’ first acting experience] and we have a strong connection now because we had it on that film and it has just progressed with ‘Stalker’.
Barry Keoghan was brilliant as well. The two guys would walk around town in character together for days. They’d go different places and then they’d report back to me and tell me what they did and where they went. They became those characters and the relationship became very strong between the two guys. I think it came across, hopefully, on screen.
Some of the themes of ‘Stalker’ you mentioned before are quite striking - do you see it as a particularly ‘Irish’ film dealing with Irish themes and issues?
I see it as Irish cinema, because in the past we used the typical Hollywood classic structure. We imported those films and used that narrative. Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan have made brilliant films but they came from the literary side. Irish film never really had a chance to flourish. We never had that explosion of cinema, like dogme in Denmark or in Iran, or the French New Wave or Italian Neorealism or the British New Wave.
I feel in Ireland this has just started to happen now – you have a lot of different directors, writers, actors, producers coming up because we have great colleges with great courses. There is an opportunity to make films on low budgets. I feel like there’s a whole new wave of Irish film coming up now. And I don’t think we’ve ever had that in the past. Real Irish cinema is beginning to emerge right now.
So ‘Stalker’ has been shown in a number of national and international film festivals, it has won some awards and now it’s finally showing in Dublin. What has meant the most to you so far?
What meant the most was getting recognition with the cinema release. I’m really happy both that the film won awards and that it is getting a cinema release because it is all thanks to the people, like friends and family and other people who we don’t know, who donated. That is what makes me really happy because it shows investors that you can make a film in this way and it can do well. It wasn’t just some film that got made and nobody heard about.
Finally, do you have any other projects in mind or in the pipeline at the moment?
I have just finished writing a script. It is set in the 1980s but I don’t want to say too much about it yet. I’m also working with John Connors on ‘Cardboard Gangsters’, a gangster film set in Darndale we’re hoping to shoot in the summer. Then I’m writing a TV series as well.
‘Stalker’ will screen at Movies@Dundrum on Wednesday 26th February at 7.15pm. The cast will be in attendance and will participate in a Q&A after the screening. Tickets are available at this link.
For more on the film, see the facebook page.
See the trailer for the film below:
