Award- winning film maker Dónal Foreman spoke to David Hennessy ahead of a programme of his films set to screen at The Irish Cultural Centre this weekend.
The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith is dedicating a weekend of films to the work of Dónal Foreman.
After graduating from the National Film School at IADT, Dónal made his name in 2013 with Out of Here, his debut feature film about Ciaran, a young man who has returned home from his travels but before he was ready. Although he is home, he can’t feel at home. The film boasted emerging Irish acting talent such as Fionn Walton, Emma Eliza Regan and Roxanna Nic Liam.
Debuting in 2017, The Image You Missed was his first feature documentary and a memoir of Donal’s complex relationship with his filmmaker father, Arthur MacCaig.
MacCaig, the son of Irish immigrants, was a documentary filmmaker who centred much of his work on the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
MacCaig made 20 films between 1979 and 2005 and died in Belfast in 2008 at the age of 60. After his father’s death, Donal went to Paris and immersed himself in his father’s private archive.
The final film in the ICC’s programme is 2022’s The Cry of Granuaile, the story of a grieving American filmmaker who comes to Ireland to research a film on ‘the pirate Queen’ Grace O’Malley. The film stars Dale Dickey and Judith Roddy.
How does it feel to have a programme dedicated to your work at the Irish Cultural Centre?
“It feels great. It’s exciting.
“Really the last ten, 12 years of my life were spent making those films, and the three of them have never screened together before.
“It’s really nice to have them screening together.
“I think the three films are all very different but they have a lot in common as well.
“If anybody has the patience to go see all three, I think it’ll be interesting to see what connects them.”
I was thinking about the commonalities, what do you think they have in common?
“I guess I thought of them all being very different and in some way a reaction to the previous one where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m tired of doing that, now, I want to do something that has a very different flavour’.
“I think there’s things in the visual style and the rhythm of them and attention to certain kinds of detail, probably also a sense of place because I think they’re all very connected to particular places and kind of capturing what the sense of a place and the place being a character.
“But that said, I haven’t watched them all together and I haven’t seen any of them in a couple of years now so I’ll probably be surprised myself what they do or don’t have in common.”
Let’s start, as you did, with Out of Here. Where did the idea come from? What inspired it?
“I was just a couple years out of film school, out of IADT National Film School in Dun Laoghaire when I made that and I’d had the idea for years.
“Since early on in film school, I’d had the idea and been taking notes on it and writing versions of it.
“I suppose one of my motivations was I felt like I hadn’t seen any films that captured my experience of being young in Dublin and what the city felt like and what the social scenes were like and just the atmosphere of it.
“I was excited to try to make something that captured that and felt real.
“I think it took me several years to figure out how I would do it because I was very young and inexperienced and I knew that I wanted the performances to feel very natural and lived in.
“It was a very kind of a crazy ambitious project to make for a first feature film because the received wisdom is you should pick like three characters and one location and keep things contained, but we had a dozen or more central characters with a lot of dialogue and six big crowd scenes. We had a nightclub and a gig and a house party and all these different scenarios and then 30 or 40 locations all around the city night and day and then we shot the whole thing in 20 days.”
It came out in those years that saw masses of young Irish leaving home for other shores, do you feel its themes of emigration and immigration really struck a chord for that?
“Yeah, it seemed to.
“We got a lot of very positive passionate responses at the time which was very encouraging and it seemed like a lot of people related to it and recognised the feelings in it.
“I remember one person described that the feeling of the film was, you can never really come home again. Once you’ve gone and have these other experiences, you’re coming back but you’re not really coming back to the same place because you’re not the same person so it’s always going to be different.”
After that you made the very different The Image You Missed, by far the most personal of the three films I would think….
“The Image You Missed was one that I’d been thinking about for a long time as well.
“It was 2008, just after I’d graduated from film school that my father died.
“I hadn’t really known him. I only met him a handful of times but he was a filmmaker, an American documentary filmmaker who was living in Paris and made a lot of films in Northern Ireland about the troubles.
“After he died, I ended up inheriting a lot of his films and a lot of the raw footage, film reels, old videotapes of his films.
“I had that for several years and I thought there could be a film there or there could be something interesting to do but it was four or five years before I started kind of coming up with a concept of how I might approach it.
“I had this idea to kind of make a film that would explore him and his work and at the same time, the history of the troubles. The third element was kind of investigating the idea of political filmmaking or the political uses of images and sort of comparing how he thought about that and how I think about that.
“So I had these three layers of the personal and the political and the cinematic questions.
“I spent a few years just trawling through his archive, watching all this stuff and making this documentary. A lot of it is made up of his archival footage but I also used my own personal archive of things that I had shot because I started making films when I was 11 so I had a lot of footage from my childhood.
“That was a very different experience.
“Coming off the back of Out of Here, it was very satisfying to be able to do something that I could basically do all by myself, it was just me in a room with the footage editing.
“Towards the end, I had great collaborators working on music and sound but for a lot of the process, it was just me in a room which at first was very refreshing because Out of Here had a crew of 20 people and dozens of actors and this very tight schedule, and it’s very pressured.
“Whereas this, I could kind of just take my time and explore it by myself.
“After about two years, that didn’t seem so refreshing anymore and I was going a bit stir crazy being by myself.”
Personally what did that experience feel like? Did you feel like it was a monument to your late fathers’ work? And what do you think he would have thought of the film himself?
“I think he would have been pleased with the attention.
“Whether he would have liked the film in total or not, I’m not sure but I know it’s led to a lot more people seeing his films and going back and like watching The Patriot Game, so I’m sure he would appreciate that.
“But I didn’t see it as a monument or a tribute or anything like that.
“It was a very rewarding experience for me because I wasn’t close to him and I didn’t know him very well so it was a way of getting to know him and learning more about him and engaging with his work, engaging with him in a way that wasn’t possible when he was alive.
“That was something I was very glad to have the opportunity to do and it was very intense at times, there’s something that could feel a bit morbid when you’re just kind of spending so much time with the dead watching all this old footage.
“But I’m very glad that I did it, it was a unique experience.
“I had the chance to make the film that no one else could ever make which is pretty rare.”
How did you find the reactions to that film?
“It’s been really interesting because that’s the film that I got to travel with the most, I went to like film festivals all over the world.
“I was able to go a lot of places with it and there was a real diversity of reactions.
“The film is very dense.
“There’s a lot of stuff in there.
“As I said, there’s these three layers of the personal and political and cinematic, so you’d find some people gravitating more towards one or the other.
“I think surprisingly in Ireland, people responded to the personal most of all, there was less discussion of the political stuff, maybe because people are so familiar with it anyway.
“But there was just a lot of questions about my father and how I felt about him.
“But when I screened in Mexico or Argentina, a lot of the questions were more political, they were interested in the nature of the troubles.
“The film has a lot of different entry points for how people can engage with it.
“It is a funny thing to share a film that is so personal and autobiographical because sometimes, people feel like you’ve shared something so personal, they want to share with you.
“I’ve had people coming up after screenings wanting to tell me about their relationship with their father, or sometimes feeling like they can ask me really personal questions that you would never ask a stranger.
“But because I made this film, they feel they can.
“Sometimes that can be intense because I wouldn’t naturally be someone who’s sharing my personal life to the world.
“I’m not that kind of person on social media who’s showing everybody how I’m feeling or what I’m doing all the time.
“But in the context of the film I was just like, ‘Okay, the film will be better if I put this personal stuff in it’.
“You have to do what the film wants.”
What was it like to, in the context of the film and through your late father’s work, return to those dark of Northern Ireland?
“It was something that I never experienced firsthand so it’s really fascinating to kind of explore it through the footage.
“I kind of talked about it a bit in the film, but Dublin and Belfast are so close to each other and yet it is, to some extent still but especially like when I was younger, such different worlds.
“The first time I ever went to Belfast was for my father’s funeral because that’s where he died and was buried, and that was when I was 20 or 21.
“The whole time growing up, I’d never been to Belfast and that was partly because my mum was involved in activism around the north when I was younger and she had all these friends in Belfast so she would go, but she didn’t think it was safe to bring me.
“She kept me separate from that so it felt like it was this kind of world that was like very close but very far and the film was a way of engaging with that.
“And not just through the footage because I did shoot some new material for the film.
“I went to Belfast and I went to Paris as well.
“I interviewed people who’d known him just for background on the film, made friends in Belfast and got a bit closer to the history of it.
“It’s changed so much but I think the legacy of it is still there.
“It still has real effects.
“I think there was riots in the north just this week. wasn’t there?
“So I think it still casts a long shadow.”
Do you feel you got to know your father through the film? Do you feel you got to know him better than you ever did when he was alive?
“Yeah, I absolutely did get to know him more.
“I mean, it’s never the same thing.
“Perhaps it’s fair to say I got to know more about him, that I got a better understanding of him.
“I think it gave me some closure around my feelings around him.
“We all need to find our own rituals to deal with grief.”
The third film in this trilogy is The Cry of Granuaile. Were you always captivated by the story of Grace of Malley?
“Yes. Since I was a kid, I was fascinated with it and I’d been thinking for a few years there never had been a film about her and it would be a great subject.
“Then I kind of thought to really do it in a period accurate way would be such an epic, expensive production so I was kind of thinking for years what would be a weirder, more low budget way to approach it.
“I had a meeting with a producer in New York that I was pitching another idea to and he said if I came up with an idea for a film that could be a vehicle for an American actress set in Ireland that he thought he could raise money for that.
“I thought, ‘I don’t want to do that’.
“But then it got me thinking, could I subvert that or do something a bit different with that framework?
“I am really fascinated by outsider characters.
“Out of Here was a version of that. Even though he’s from the place, he doesn’t fit into the place.
“Then The Image You Missed was also a version of that because you had my father, this American filmmaker coming to Ireland as an outsider.
“The connection is kind of obvious now, I wasn’t specifically thinking of my father but obviously the story of The Cry of Granuaile is also an American filmmaker comes to Ireland who has this connection to the place but is also not really from there.
“I started thinking about this American filmmaker who would come to Ireland to try to make a film about Granuaile, have this kind of friendship with an Irish woman who was helping her research the film.
“I got excited about that idea and then emailed the producer about it.
“He didn’t reply after I’d gotten excited about this idea so then I was like, ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna try to make it anyway’.
“I was definitely kind of thinking about grief and how people process grief.
“The main character Maire is grieving the death of her mother and sort of processing that through her fascination with Granuaile.”
The Dónal Foreman film season takes place at the Irish Cultural Centre on 27 and 28 July.
The Image You Missed screens at 7.30pm on Saturday, Out of Here is Sunday at 3pm and The Cry of Granuaile is Sunday 7.30pm.
For more information and to book, click here.
