Charlie Casanova is a hardcore tale of a post-Celtic-Tiger sociopath. 'We've had profoundly extreme responses,' writer- director Terry McMahon tells TARA BRADY
WHEN A SMALL, low budget, independent film makes a splash on the festival circuit, it’s a cause for celebration. And when a small, low budget, independent, Irish film makes a splash and gets picked up by a major distributor, that’s even better news, right? Not always, apparently. The hardcore content of Charlie Casanova, a controversial new Irish indie, was never likely to attract a street parade or a feel-good following. Still, by now the makers have become accustomed to metaphorical missiles and figurative rotten fruit.
“We’ve had profoundly extreme responses,” notes director Terry McMahon. “We’ve had standing ovations. We’ve had walkouts. There have been awards. There have been fights and spitting fury. We’ve had it all.”
A pointedly amoral polemic rooted in the same sociopathic framework as Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, Terry McMahon’s debut feature re-imagines Cathleen Ní Houlihan as a privileged, moustachioed, middle-class murderer. The film’s titular protagonist, as energetically essayed by Hollyoaks’s Emmett J Scanlan, allows the turn of a card to determine every action. So, by Charlie’s reckoning, if the devil’s picture-book produces anything between an ace or a five then sleeping with his best friend’s wife or even killing a random stranger has to be okay. “When I created the character I thought he was a grotesque,” says McMahon. “The notion of being a sociopath, the idea of being somebody for whom everybody else is a mark, and is there to be exploited, I thought that I had exaggerated those aspects of his character to an operatic degree. And now look at where we are. Look at the lies that were told pre-election and post-election. Charlie’s not an exaggeration – he’s a poster child for a generation.”
For its detractors, notably Variety critic Andrew Barker, McMahon’s abrasive creation is just that: “A film about an intolerable man who does intolerable things to his friends while pontificating for intolerably long periods, Terry McMahon’s Charlie Casanova is a punishing experience,” wrote Barker in March, 2011.
Last weekend, Donald Clarke, writing in one of this imprint’s more grown-up sections, dismissed the film as “ . . . the deranged, over-reaching ramblings of a glue sniffer who has read the jacket blurbs – but no more – of too many Albert Camus novels”.
McMahon, a softly spoken and articulate father of three who could not have less in common with his demented, misanthropic anti-hero, is philosophical about the negative notices.
“If I had set out to make a romantic comedy and you didn’t have a bit of a giggle then we’d have a problem,” he says.
“Charlie Casanova was always intended to be a divisive film. We got murdered in Variety. But I always knew as I was writing it and executing it, that everything about it – from how I directed the actors to how we edited it – was difficult and confrontational. I wanted Charlie to be abrasive. I wanted it to be punk rock. It’s meticulously structured but that structure is concealed. I didn’t want it to give any answers. I wanted it to provoke nothing but questions. And some people adore that about it and some people fucking hate it.”
The film’s admirers include the judging panel at the European Independent Film Festival in Paris, where Emmett J Scanlan picked up the award for best actor, and the Galway Film Fleadh, where Charlie Casanova shared the best first feature award with Darragh Byrne’s Parked. Meanwhile, across the pond, McMahon’s scathing satire became the first non-American title to make it into the narrative feature competition at the SXSW Film Festival.
Indeed, festival programmer Janet Pierson, an industry maven who helped to bring She’s Gotta Have It, The Blair Witch Project, Clerks and Slacker to the big screen, is one of the film’s most vocal champions. “Janet Pierson stood up in front of the world’s press and said ‘My favourite film used to be Mike Leigh’s Naked but now my favourite film is Charlie Casanova’,” recalls McMahon. “This is a woman who is legendary. The things that she has done, the films she has been involved with are remarkable. And she puts her reputation on the line for this tiny film from an unknown film-maker featuring an unknown cast. What she did was incredible.”
For all the haters, Charlie Casanova, the movie, has led a charmed life to rival that of its unblinking protagonist. Terry McMahon – a veteran actor who turns up in Batman Begins, who featured alongside Paul Bettany and David Morrissey in The Suicide Club, and who appeared with David and Robert Carradine in Dangerous Curves – has written for Irish soap Fair City and has a mantle of awards at home. He’s won the RKO Pictures Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Prize in Cannes and Los Angeles and the Tiernan McBride Screenwriting Award. He’s been commissioned to write screenplays for Daryl Hannah and Paddy Breathnach. Crucially, however, none of these projects have made it into a multiplex near you.
“I had had three films that were green lit by the Film Board that had fallen through,” recalls McMahon. “They’ve always been generous towards me but they hated Charlie from day one. I was writing for Fair City and that was paying the mortgage but as I approached 40 I started to ask myself why I got into this business in the first place. And it wasn’t to make money or get famous or get laid. It was to make films like the work that had hit me hardest growing up — work like that of Alan Clarke or early Ken Loach or Alan Bleasdale.”
Frustrated by his experiences in development hell, McMahon had the words, "The Art is in the Completion. Begin." tattooed on to his arm and threw down a gauntlet on his Facebook page: "Intend shooting no-budget feature, Charlie Casanova, a provocatively dark satire, in the first couple of weeks of January. Need cast, equipment, locations, and a lot of balls. Any takers? Script at terrymcmahon.org. This is sincere so bullshitters f**k off in advance. Thank you." Within 24 hours, McMahon had received 130 responses and had assembled a skeletal virtual cast and crew for Ireland's first Facebook film.
“I was surprised because it was such a hard sell,” says McMahon. “Bizarrely, it attracted very experienced people from across the industry who understood its Brechtian nature. A reference point that keeps popping up is American Psycho but even that allows you enough distance to step away from the main character and look at his grotesquery. With Charlie every time you think you know where you are – fuck you, and every time you think you’ve recovered from that – fuck you again. This guy is a liar. This guy uses language and physicality and emotional cues to manipulate you. I wanted to reflect the way that our leader and politicians appear on TV to talk bullshit and yet always get away with what are obvious lies.” McMahon, who had worked with Roger Corman at the uber-producer’s Irish operation, went to work with not much more than wishful thinking.
“Corman is one of my heroes,” says McMahon. “The Corman studio in Galway was amazing – and frowned upon by the snobs of course – but I had a ball. I worked on four films up there. He had a house built with four different facades – each from a different era. Inside, every stairwell and corridor was built to accommodate cameras. The experience taught me about film-making based in the practical realities. It’s not about needing half a million to build a set; it’s about walking into a room and deciding what the available light is and what do we have that we can use to make this happen.”
Three weeks after the writer-director’s Facebook post, once he had rooted out the “whack jobs”, he was on set. On the first day of principal photography, they shot an astonishing 23 pages of the script. They completed the screenplay within 11 days; the cameras had to be returned by midnight on day 11.
“That’s what was so exciting when we were accepted by SXSW and by the festivals at Edinburgh and Krakow,” says Ireland’s newest mumblecore filmmaker. “They didn’t know about Facebook or the budget. They just watched it as a film and accepted it on those terms. Our budget was €1,000 or maybe less but that figure is disingenuous because the film, in reality, represents two-and-a-half years of my life before we started shooting. And I had to drag it back up out of the grave so many times. Because a film like Charlie Casanova is going to be dismissed. And aggressively dismissed at that.”
Having failed to attract an Irish backer, Charlie Casanova went one better and was picked up by Studio Canal for European distribution: “I’ve always known that the likelihood of the film attracting a broad audience was very, very slim. It has taken astonishing courage for someone like Studio Canal – this legendary, major distributor – to pick it up. They have a long-term plan for it. They think it’s going to be reassessed and looked upon in a very different way over the next decade.”
McMahon smiles. “Studio Canal have just got their reports back from film magazines in the UK. Some are saying Charlie is an unprecedented new voice in cinema; others are saying it’s absolute dirt. So it’s complete division. Once again.”
