Film maker Eoin Ross told David Hennessy about his appeal to raise funds for his comedy short film that deals with themes such as grief and family.
London-based Irish film maker Eoin Ross is aiming to bring the world of cinema to his native Tipperary with a story inspired by personal loss.
The company Black Road Films are also crowdfunding for donations to make the vision a reality.
Good Grief centres around Danny who is in his 30s and still lives with his mother. The only thing wrong with that is that his mother died when he was 15.
Danny made a wish when his mother died and it came true, the only problem is that he hasn’t been able to move on.
The film is inspired by Eoin’s personal experiences.
Eoin Ross moved to London nearly a decade ago.
He studied film making in Ealing Studios honing his craft directing shorts and feature length projects.
Eoin has already got his cast with Thomas Fitzgerald in the role of Danny and Catherine Tomelty set to play his mother. The supporting cast includes Andrew Cusack.
The Irish World saw Thomas in TC Murray’s Birthright at The Finborough Theatre back in 2023.
Eoin Ross told The Irish World: “It’s really very, very loosely based on me.
“I don’t usually, as a writer, put myself in stuff.
“This is basically like a story of a child who loses his mother but is then left picking up the pieces and feeling guilt. That manifests itself in the ghost of his mother staying with him.
“It’s his very small journey- because it is still a short film- to move on himself.
“It just so happens that it’s taken 17 years to do so.
“I lost my mother when I was 16 and I think at this point in my life I’ve spent half my life without her now.
“It’s basically like, well how do you actually continue to move on when you’ve got this sort of milestone? You can’t really keep looking at the past.
“I moved over 30 a year and a half ago. I was just like, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m in my 30s now. It’s time to move on, it’s time to move into a different part of life’.
“Because I spent my 20s studying and I moved to London. I’ve been here for nearly nine years and I was just sort of having fun.
“Obviously once you go through certain milestones in life, you sort of look at the world differently, and you want to take stock of where you’ve come from as well.”
I’m unsurprised it comes from your true life loss as it comes across as very authentic in that way..
“Everybody takes personal experience and wraps them in whatever sort of packaging they want but as a guy that leans heavily towards writing comedy, I always try and bring something a little bit comedic.
“If you look at a film like this, I don’t think you’d necessarily always say, ‘Well, let’s put this in a comedic lens’.
“But I felt like that’s the only way that I can do it, not that I don’t want to take it seriously but that’s the only way that I can tell that story.
“It’s not so different to Taika Waititi taking on JoJo Rabbit which was not some comedy of a book. But he said to the writer, ‘I can only make this a comedy’, and he takes it and basically runs with the joke of the Third Reich and making jokes about how many ‘Heil Hitler’s you can get in one scene.
“For me, that was it and I think the sort of tone of projects like Martin McDonagh’s work being tragic but also comedic, especially Banshees fits the tone of it.
“Maybe it’s just the Irishness in me coming out.
“I think the Irish have a very unique outlook on death.
“Every culture has but the Irish, between wakes and how they mourn and all that, they’re very sort of closed in and they won’t talk about their mourning, they would rather celebrate the life of the other person, the person who’s just passed.
“So I think it works as an Irish piece personally.
“There’s some new shows as well.
“The guys that made Ted Lasso for Apple TV, their show Shrinking is about a family getting over the death of a mother as well.
“It’s a father and a teenage daughter and you’ve got the supporting cast of characters around that which is his colleagues, their neighbours and everything.
“That’s very good.
“I think there are similarities to it, but I’m just telling it through an Irish vein.”
You gathered the cast for a read through at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith in November 2024, how did that go?
“We got a lot of laughs.
“To have a table read- whether it’s theatre or whether it’s a film like this, it’s good just to have that jumping point, to have it performed in front of an audience however small.
“We had an audience of about 10, 12 people.
“I think we got the laughs where we wanted to get the laughs.
“There were things that maybe needed to be tweaked.
“There’s a lot of maybe wordy dialogue in there but it still worked, it worked for the audience.
“Speaking to them afterwards in the Cultural Centre, they were very complimentary.
“They like the fact that it’s funny.
“A girl said, ‘It’s genuinely heartbreaking by the end’.
“And I was like, ‘I suppose it might be, yeah’.
“She seemed to have a very sort of strong connection to it so that was good.
“We had only read through it ourselves, me and the three guys, maybe four times before we actually performed it like that and we still have a lot of work to do in terms of getting the entire film rehearsed and on its feet.
“That will be great once that can happen.
“But with Tom and Andrew and Catherine, they all gel well together.
“They’re all Irish.
“Tom I met years ago when I was still in film school and he had just finished a master’s in acting in Arts Ed in Chiswick.
“We worked together on a short film probably six years ago now and we’ve kept in contact since.
“When I wrote it, I knew that he would be able to do it and the same with Catherine.
“I worked with her when I was working with Slàinte! theatre company last year and I’ve seen her perform many other things and she can play a mother quite well.
“She did a really good short play for Slàinte! theatre which is not dissimilar.
“She plays a mother and the whole play is based around the mother and daughter in a church discussing the loss of their husband and father.
“When I wrote this I was like, ‘I know who’s playing these characters’.”
Eoin hopes he can help elevate Tipperary in the world. While it has a great tradition of theatre and other arts, it has been neglected by cinema.
“Everybody who is working on this is currently based in London.
“We could try and film this in the UK but we’re actively trying to go back to Tipperary to do it.
“This is what we’re raising money for because we need to raise money in order to pay for flights etc.
“Flights online are pretty cheap but we’ve got maybe six, seven people that we need to fly back.
“It’s insurance as well because we need to film in public in Clonmel.
“That’s just public liability insurance and we don’t have an estimate for that because we don’t have scheduling yet and we need schedules to know how many days we need the public liability insuring for.
“We’re hoping to be supported by the community, especially people from Tipperary but they don’t have to be from Tipperary.
“It’s not just about like me saying, ‘Oh please help me live my dream and make this film’.
“If the film didn’t get made, it’s fine.
“I’ll move on to the next project but in terms of bringing more investment and bigger things to Tipperary, Clonmel and North Tipperary, then if I can just help and be a part of that, I’d be happy with that.
“We’ve got a lot of stuff planned already.
“We’ve even scouted locations.
“We’ve been in contact with the Tipperary County Council.
“They’re not charging us to film.
“They just need a copy of the public liability insurance.
“A lot of this stuff is done through a producer, Maria, who is based in Ireland at the moment.
“She’s been invaluable.
“She’s very good at being able to organize a lot of these things so a lot of stuff is already done.
“Obviously, we’ve got the cast as well.
“They’re all excited to do it.
“Our tentative date is the week beginning on 3 March to film it for four or five days so a lot of this stuff is in place.
“We have a DOP who is a guy that I went to school with film school that is in Ealing studios.
“That was the reason that I moved here, to go to film school.
“I studied my degree there and then I did a Masters in screenwriting for a year afterwards.
“He most recently was working on Ryan Gosling’s new film which was shooting somewhere in London.
“So we have people who are experienced and ready to go.
“All we need now is just the finance to do so and finding finance is a tricky.
“You can always take the route whether it’s Screen Ireland, Channel Four, many of these different bodies that will give certain projects financing and while that is good to go through any of these, a lot of them are restricted.
“Sometimes you get restrictions like it needs to be three people and the script has to be 10 pages or less.
“And that can be good in terms of creating or creatively solving problems but this is vaguely my story, I would rather keep it the way that I see it.
“It makes me sound like a purist, I’m not.
“That’s the selling point of the film and why we’re looking for crowdfunding rather than any funding from screen Ireland or anything.
“Most of the time these things don’t cost all that much money in the sense the most money that things cost is probably locations because a lot of people are working on it for very little, or promise to work on it for very little because they just want to be part of the project.
“That does help.
“That’s really sort of where we’re coming at it from.
“It’s about bringing a certain level of my experience back to Tipperary.
“Me and Tom are both from Tipperary so you’ve got people in front of the camera and behind the camera who are from Tipperary.
“Tipperary hasn’t really been known as a film hub in the last 50 years.
“It has a culture of arts that is still alive and well especially amongst younger generations now.
“We’ve had the Clonmel Junction Arts Festival which happens every July and they put on live theatre, live music, art installations and other art forms.
“So it is there but in terms of film, there’s not much.
“It’s sort of about that.
“There’s a lot of things happening or proposed to happen in Tipperary.
“I hope they do, because it would really help out the local economy as well as many other things but if I can be just a little bit of a little part of that and bring the community in to get them to just help donate in any way to the crowdfunding, that really helps us out.
“It helps out the production and it helps out Tipperary, just my hometown as well as the surrounding areas.
“And it’s not just Tipperary, we’re on the border of Waterford, Kilkenny and Cork.
“There’s many other places around there that are being used.
“The last major thing that was filmed in Tipperary- In fact, one of the only things was Ridley Scott filmed some stuff in Cahir Castle for his film The Last Duel with Adam Driver, Matt Damon and Jodie Comer.
“There’s big plans for Tipperary- Proposed plans at the moment.
“There are plans and planning permission in place for new studios and many other things besides in Nenagh in North Tipperary that is still waiting to get the go ahead.
“I’m just one of the people who were trying to take what I know, bring it back to Tipperary and be able to use that as a hub.
“You can take the boy out of Tipperary but you never take Tipperary out of the boy really.
“That’s what we’re trying to do.
“Of course it’s about the film as well but in terms of the grand scheme, it’s also trying to use Tipperary as a bouncing board and bring the community into it in terms of if a film does well going to festivals in Ireland or the UK, you can find many different positives around that and then more people might come and more people might want to film and then that just helps investment.
“Like I said, I’m just one of the people that are trying to help out, one of the filmmakers that wants to shoot more stuff in Tipperary because everything I’ve done has been in the UK.
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