by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
Once can best be described as a faux-documentary/musical set in Dublin. This concept could be easily executed badly, but when done well results in accolades from Sundance. The movie won the World Cinema Audience Award for a dramatic film at the 2007 Sundance Film Fest. It also received praise from those that first saw it at the Jacksonville Film Festival this year.
The plot centers around a busker trying to create music and a musician artist he meets on the street. Together, they collaborate and form a relationship. EU caught up with director John Carney by phone. Carney himself is a musician, he was a bass player for The Frames, a Dublin-based indie band, so his passion for music is sincere.
“I don’t just listen to music to get from home to work in the car,” says Carney “I really listen to it. I sometimes think that a lot can be said through music as opposed to dialogue. It can be very meaningful… I was sick of trying to write loads of dialogue and trying to be really witty and urbane with dialogue…A film that has a lot of songs in it, communication through music, was something that I always wanted to make… I wanted to do something different that connects pieces of dialogue and was more about communication through art and people creating art.”
Carney cast friend and fellow musician Glen Hansard (of The Frames) in the lead role. Hansard and the female lead, Markéta Irglová, collaborated on the music and story points. One of the goals Carney had when making the film was to present the modern Dublin to the world and change the perception of Ireland and urban Irish life. While the Irish have always been fantastic storytellers, Carney sees a gap as far as telling stories on film is concerned.
“We haven’t been, in terms of our filmmaking, great ambassadors for the New Dublin that’s been coming up in the last ten years…Once is an attempt to tell a story that…get a snapshot of the city as it is at the moment. That was an agenda that we all had - let’s explode some of those myths about Ireland. You know it’s not all about drinking Guinness and the green fields of Ireland. It’s a multi-cultural society and a lot of interesting stories are there for the taking.”
Once became a multicultural story with the addition of Markéta Irglová to the cast. As a Czech immigrant to Ireland and a musician, she’s part of the New Dublin that Carney speaks about.
“I met Markéta through Glen. He had a working relationship with her…When I was casting the film he said ‘You have to meet this woman.’ So I went…to hang out with her for an evening…and she played some tunes. I just had to re-think the part very slightly to cast her in it.”
The very natural and seemingly unscripted nature of Once is due to several choices on the part of the director. First, he made sure to choose unknowns. “I wasn’t going for actors,” says Carney, “I was going for singers that could half-act…The two leads are non-actors, which lends a very naturalistic tone to the film, something I was going for. I didn’t want the audience to have to suspend their disbelief or recognize somebody from the film. I really wanted them to believe that they were watching these two…lost souls coming together through music.”
Secondly, Carney decided to have little to no rehearsal before filming. “I would often shoot the rehearsal, which few directors do. They usually rehearse things and block them out…A lot of what you see in the film is a rehearsal or a first take so that the dialogue is flowing really naturally and the camera angles are a bit ropy…I wanted it to be a bit like life, almost a documentary feel.”
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