“I said to Joe Breen,
playing young Frank, ‘Do you know who this gentleman is?´ and Joe answered, ‘Yes, me
when I´m older´”
Young Frank (Joe Breen) waits for his father’s return in ‘Italy’, so-called because it is the only warm, dry part of the house (downstairs, which is regularly flooded, is ‘Ireland’).
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In the year or so since I had first read an early publisher´s copy of Frank´s book, it had won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and was already on its way to becoming the phenomenal bestseller it has now become. The book currently has been published in 25 languages and sold over six million copies in 30 countries. It was on the New York Times hardback bestseller list for 177 weeks. I had expressed an interest in acquiring the rights to the book when it was first published, but learned that they had been snapped up by the canny and prolific producers David Brown and Scott Rudin. An excellent early script had been written by the Australian writer Laura Jones and, once I was asked to direct it, I began work on my own draft of the screenplay based on Laura´s faithful template.
Everyone who has ever read Frank´s beautiful memoir will have come away with a thousand images of their own. This is always daunting for a film-maker, because every reader has their own movie locked away inside their head. The unique quality of the book is in the ‘voice´ that Frank found to tell his story: the wisdom of a retired schoolteacher, told in the first person, present tense, from the perspective of a young child. For decades, he claimed, he had been scribbling about his childhood, filling a duffel bag full of notebooks with his writings. “I didn´t get round to writing sooner,” he said, “because all these years I was too busy marking other people´s essays. Also, the timing wasn´t right. My mother had to die and I think I had to grow up. And it took me a long time.”
Also, he says, he couldn´t find his own voice - “I was trying to write live Evelyn Waugh or James Joyce”. The unique present-tense voice in his book Frank has attributed to visits from his granddaughter, Chiara. “I was watching her, how immediate she was. She had no hindsight, no foresight. She was just completely immersed in what she was doing. Then I started writing in the voice of a child - immediate, urgent and without hindsight or foresight. Children don´t lie.”
Adapting any famous literary work is problematic in that, in the compression to a manageable cinematic shape, inevitably certain characters and situations will be excluded. I met with Frank for lunch and talked about the pitfalls of any screenplay and he was, as he always is, most generous, constructive and totally unprecious with his words. Frank is a delight to talk to. A natural raconteur, articulate and witty, it has been said that, if conversation was a category of the Olympic Games, then Frank would talk for Ireland.
In Limerick, I walked the streets many times from South´s pub to Leamy´s National School to the General Post Office, retracing Frank´s own steps as we tried to piece together Frank´s life and figure out just how to replicate his world on film: the Limerick of the thirties and forties. Although Leamy´s building was intact, it had been closed down as a school in 1952 and its interior converted to modern offices. Roden Lane itself, in many respects the heart of the story (the book´s ‘Ireland´ and ‘Italy´), had long gone, as had most of the worst slums mentioned in the book. However, the elegant Georgian crescent on O´Connell Street, just down from South´s pub, is remarkably period-correct, dominated as it is by the imposing statue of the great Catholic liberator Daniel O´Connell now standing atop a column originally built for some forgotten English king. We filmed much that revolved around Frank´s world here.
Once I had finished my draft of the script, my next priority was casting. I met with Emily Watson in New York, where she was filming Tim Robbins´ Cradle Will Rock. She was the only actress I had in mind when thinking of Angela: I had greatly admired her wonderful ‘nerve-end exposing´ performance in Lars von Trier´s Breaking the Waves, and her powerfully subtle work in Jim Sheridan´s Northern Irish film, The Boxer. At the time, I hadn´t yet seen her as Jacqueline Du Pre in Hilary and Jackie - a performance which would bring her a second Oscar nomination. After a short meeting (and the bonding revelation that we both support the same soccer team), I was convinced she was our Angela. Emily´s complete lack of pretentiousness is quite compelling. The part of Angela meant that she would have to look less than glamorous, wear distinctly unbecoming costume and make-up, age 15 years over the course of the story and chain-smoke nasty Woodbine cigarettes. This didn´t phase her one bit.
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