Writer/ director Marian Quinn told David Hennessy about Twig which is set to screen at Irish Film Festival London.
Twig, a retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone in gangland Dublin, will screen at this week’s Irish Film Festival London.
In Sophocles’ original, two brothers fighting on the same side in the Thebes civil war die fighting each other for the throne which leads King Creon to proclaim that Eteocles will be honoured while his brother Polynices will be publicly shamed.
Marian Quinn sees two gangland brothers Eddie and Paulie facing off and swapping bullets.
Gangland leader Leon, played by Brían F O’Byrne, gives the family his condolences for Eddie while letting it be known that Paulie is to be hunted down like a dog and left to the rats.
But Leon has not bargained on Twig (abbreviated from Antigone) who is played by Sade Malone in a breakout performance.
Twig mourns her brother Eddie and does what she can for Paulie before he passes too.
And although everyone else is too scared to go against Leon, she makes sure he knows she is not afraid of him.
The Irish World chatted to Marian Quinn and had to start with Sade Malone’s performance that has earned the Manchester- born actress who spent some time growing up in Dublin accolades including comparisons to Saoirse Ronan as Ireland’s next big star of the screen.
“Yeah, she’s absolutely great,” Marian said of the star of Twig.
“Well she kind of blew us all away when she came in for her first audition.
“It was almost as if she had a fully blown performance there on her first initial tape, and it was all during COVID so you’re just seeing a little thumbnail and a small pic of somebody on screen.
“She was just amazing.
“I think she’s one of those instinctive actors who just it makes it look really easy, and she can drop down into the depths of despair and then back up, and she wears it all really lightly.
“She was a real great discovery, to find Sade for this role.”
Where did the idea first come through to tell the story of Antigone in a Dublin gangland setting?
“Well, I suppose I’d always loved Antigone.
“She’s a great character.
“She’s the original girl speaking truth to power.
“I started out in acting and I think most young women love that role of Antigone.
“We’ve all done the monologues or we’ve done sections from it because it’s a powerful tale and I mean Sophocles wrote it 2, 500 years ago, and it still seems to have this resonance today.
“I suppose Sophocles and Aristophanes and the other great playwrights of the day were also generals and had been to war and been to battle.
“I believe that their message was to try to get us to look at war and the futility of it and the lives lost, and the young men’s lives wasted.
“That’s what I sort of take from it, and this idea, ‘What’s the right thing to do? Don’t bury your head, you can stand up and say it’.
“And then I love the series, The Wire.
“I really loved it.
“I think it’s probably the best thing that’s ever been made on television.
“I absolutely am a huge fan of it but while I was watching it, I was very curious about the women in that world in Baltimore.
“I was just curious to hear their stories and to know how the drug trade and everything affected the women.
“I’ve lived in Dublin’s inner city before and there’s just a lot of very powerful women there.
“There was Moore Street and these women who were a real force of nature.
“I suppose that combined with the love of the ancient tale, the women in these stories so the women and the stories, the ancient tale, this idea of, you know, speaking truth to power.
“I suppose that was my inspiration and then kind of looking around at the world and thinking like, where are we?
“I thought we’d all figured out that democracy was the best way forward and yet we have all these dictators and despots rising up and suppressing people everywhere so it felt like there was some real resonance with today.”
Were you inspired by other Dublin crime dramas like Love/Hate and KIN at all?
“I suppose for me it would be thinking more about Sean O’Casey or Juno and the Peacock.
“That’s a tragedy set in Dublin and this sense of a people suppressed and without opportunity.
“Rather than glamorising the violence and making it look appealing, I was trying to focus more on the effects of it for the women.
“With any war, whether it’s a so called ‘legitimate war’ or a drug war, older men are sending young men out to be killed basically, and it’s the women who are home: The wives, the sisters, the mothers, the daughters. They’re left at home to sort of pick up the pieces and to bury the dead and to grieve.
“That’s really more what I was looking at rather than glamorising the very real violence that’s inherent in that world.”
The story says a lot about dying and death and the dignity we give or don’t give to those who are dying.
Brían F O’Byrne turns up at Eddie’s wake to say that he’ll make sure Paulie is left to the rats..
“In the play, he’s Creon, not Leon, but he does say, we’re going to bury the one brother with this beautiful, elaborate funeral, and then the other one is going to be left out to rot.
“And the whole crux of the play is that she goes and buries her brother and defies the king.
“I think in Ireland we’re almost like Mexicans.
“We honour the dead and the ritual of the funerals and the burying and the coming together and the grieving.
“It’s a big part of the culture really.”
Twig is in a tough position of trying to care for her dying brother. She can’t take him to hospital, she can’t seek help from anybody. She also is grieving her brother Eddie but does what she can for Paulie, his killer, as he fades away..
“I think she just feels like, ‘This is the right thing to do and how can I not do it?’
“She’s one of those characters.
“I suppose we always have a character, some heroic person who will stand up, even though they might know that it means their life and the others are sort of keeping the head down to stay alive.
“I suppose that’s in her nature. She can’t help it.
“It is infuriating as well.
“If you were her sister you would be, ‘Just be quiet’.
“And she just can’t.
“Those characters are head strong and they know what the right thing to do is and they’re not going to be deterred from doing it even if it means their life.”
That’s the strength of Twig. She doesn’t just nurse her brother in his death but makes sure Leon knows it marching around to his house stained with Paulie’s blood..
“She cannot (hide it).
“The thing with Eamon (Twig’s brother, Leon’s son, played by Donncha Tynan) is there’s this hope that she could just run away. Why can’t she just run away with Eamon and let it all go, you know?
“But I suppose then there’s the ancient Greek, what’s her fate? They’re all living out their fates which are sort of being told by the blind prophet.”
An ever present theme throughout is how important the families we are born into are. That can almost seal your fate. The only thing that stops Eamon and Twig having a happy life together is the families they come from..
“Absolutely so are they doomed from the start? Even though you look at it and you think, ‘Well, why can’t they just get away?’
“But their families are pulling them back into it and I suppose that’s what makes it a tragedy.
“We hope that they get out and that something changes and then it’s played out..”
Another thing is the relationship between father and son and father and daughter.
We see Eamon and his father Leon.
Then there is Twig and her father who we don’t meet but hear of.
I think both Eamon and Twig carry a lot of ‘baggage’, I think the legends of who their fathers were and are follow them around..
“Yeah, and Eamon is played beautifully by Donncha Tynan.
“You can see how hard it is for him to stand up to his father in that final scene.
“He (Leon)’s so powerful but that he does that and then he knows he has to leave.
“So it’s those sort of twisted fates.
“I suppose I wanted a little bit of the wild and almost supernatural element with Teresa, the blind seer, the crows and what’s going to happen.
“It’s not just Dublin.
“It’s floating out of time in another slightly altered world.”
I think it is a credit to the film that the ending, although we know what is coming, comes a shock..
“Yeah, it’s the funny thing about tragedies.
“I teach as well and I often say to my students, ‘what film do you watch when you’re feeling sad?’
“And they’ll always say The Notebook or something really sad.
“It’s funny that we sort of sometimes watch tragedies to kind of assuage our own sorrows.
“But I also think that sometimes there’s something a little bit hopeful in a tragedy in that we can see the path and the journey that this character and these characters have gone on and the choices they’ve made.
“I think Greek tragedies, they’re always talking about the choices.
“Even the Shakespearean tragedies, if you think about Macbeth.
“And although they’re making these choices and then they come back to ruin them, so Creon makes these choices in this story or Leon in the film.
“I suppose I feel like they can be hopeful as well, a tragedy.
“You can come out and think, ‘Well, that was that person’s story, I could be inspired by that person’s courage and quest for telling the truth’.
“And for me I think watching a tragedy for me, is that you feel that sense of, ‘Okay, there is some hope’.
“And, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’”
Sade’s character Twig is fearless, would you say Sade has some of that fearlessness herself?
“I think she has it all inside her.
“She’s a little star and I just cannot wait for people to see her in this role because she possesses it all but when you meet her, she looks like she’s about 12 and she’s very sweet and lovely but she obviously has so much power and strength as a performer.
“She’s going to go very far, I have no doubt.
“She was a real delight to work with.”
The wider cast includes Brían F O’Byrne who is a Tony and BAFTA award winning actor.
There is also Jade Jordan who took the Suil Eile award for contribution at Irish Film Festival London in 2021.
Kate Stanley Brennan and Kwaku Fortune are also actors The Irish World has seen onstage and interviewed in Kwaku’s case.
What was it like to work with such an ensemble of an Irish cast?
“We were very low budget and we said, ‘Okay, with low budget, you don’t have the pressure of having to have huge names and you have the opportunity to discover fresh faces and new voices’.
“And so quite often we did make those decisions to go with somebody who was new and who hadn’t maybe done a film before.
“And then we had Brían which was great. I think to play a real bad guy like that, you need somebody who’s really lovely.
“That was my pitch.
“And I was really blessed because he works with this company called The Theatre of War.
“I had known that but I had never made the connection with the Greek tragedies.
“This is a theatre company that takes a lot of well known actors and they bring these Greek tragedies to places of conflict.
“They read the plays and then they have feedback sessions with the people.
“It might be soldiers. He’s been to Guantanamo Bay and Kuwait so they have this whole way of working with the tragedies to try to get people to talk about what they’ve been through.
“He said the sessions are absolutely stunning, just what comes back from people, from their experience and how they’ve been touched by the story.
“I didn’t realise that when I asked him to be to be Leon so that was great because he had a real understanding of the plays.”
We can’t talk about discovering new talent without mentioning Naoise Kelly who plays Mikayla, the very young girl who distracts guards for Twig and even drives a car as a decoy for her..
“Oh my god, Naoise.
“I could have made a whole film on Naoise.
“She’s just a little ticket, and you just want to watch her.
“She’s very funny and just a real natural.
“This obviously was her first film, it won’t be your last.”
Many have commented on the film’s diversity with it boasting a largely black Irish cast.
I’m sure it is not your aim in casting, you just want the best cast available to you or is representation a consideration?
“When we set out to cast we did say, ‘Open call, all ethnicities’ and Dublin inner city is very ethnically diverse, but I hadn’t really thought of the lead, I hadn’t written it that these characters would be mixed race so it’s really more about their class and that they’re Dubs and they’re these inner city Dubs.
“When Sade came in, nobody else did but I questioned just to make sure that that was okay.
“I talked to other people who are mixed race and I talked to people Zelie Asava who’s written the book Black Irish on Screen, and I really kind of wanted to make sure that that representation was okay and then when we cast Sade, we needed to make sure that her siblings were all mixed race as well.
“What I didn’t realise until they came on set was all of them said that it was the first time that they had ever been cast as a family and that they were only ever the single person of colour within a cast.
“It was very meaningful and that was really something I hadn’t even thought of.
“So it was very meaningful to all of us to see that and we made sure that behind the scenes we had representation.
“We’re changing slowly in the film business here but we’re, we are changing which is good.”
Film was obviously very important in your household as so many of you went into the business. Your brother is the well known actor, Aidan Quinn..
“Yeah and my brother Declan shot this film.
“It’s funny.
“There’s families of electricians or plumbers or something and most of us ended up in the same business in one way or another.
“I think Declan was the first because he went to film school and he’s the cinematographer, and maybe that had a strong influence on everyone.”
The film is dedicated to your brother, Paul who passed away in 2015 and was a film maker himself whose work included This is my Father which starred James Caan and your brother Aidan.
“Yeah, he was a writer and a director.
“But because Declan was shooting it, I felt like he was very, very much there present with us.
“He was incredibly supportive of me and he was always the first person I’d send a script to, just fire it off and he’d get back to me later that day.
“He was very, very supportive and very missed.”
Twig screens at 6.15pm at VUE Piccadilly on Friday 15 November as part of Irish Film Festival London.
The screening will be followed by a Q and A with Marian Quinn as well as star, Sade Malone.
Irish Film Festival London runs 13- 17 November.
For more information, click here.
