Irish director Niall Heery is likely to change our impressions about country music with his first film. Aisling Ryanmeets him at the Nashville Film Festival, where he scooped the top award.
When Bob Dylan recorded his album Nashville Skylinein 1969, his record label pleaded with him to change the title, such was the lack of cool associated with country music at the time. Decades later, country music still tends to get a bad rap, despite the many musical greats who grace its hall of fame. So, when Irish director Niall Heery set out to make his first feature film as a visual narrative of a great country song, his was a difficult script to pitch. Like Dylan, however, his visionary thinking paid off. His independent movie, Small Engine Repair, has won a string of awards in Europe, and recently inspired critics at the Nashville Film Festival, where it scooped the overall award for best feature. In Ireland, it is likely to change our perception of country music for the better when it goes on general release.
In the background of Tootsie's bar on Nashville's Broadway Street, a man in a Stetson belts out a Hank Williams classic. It is not yet lunchtime, but Music City is already warming up its vocal chords for another day of wall to wall music. Although Heery's own attire is decidedly more urban than country, he looks at home, and it is obvious that he is happy to be back in Nashville. "I was here about two years ago when I was trying to get the film up and running. I decided there and then if I ever got the film made, I'd come back. It kind of seemed like a natural home for it. So many of the guys who feature on the soundtrack are from here."
Irish talent has been passing through Nashville since 1936, when the Ryman Auditorium booked Irish tenor John McCormack for an exceptional fee. Heery, who is originally from Portmarnock in Dublin, brings a different Irish voice to Nashville with this low-budget film. Starring Iain Glen, Steven Mackintosh and Lawrence Kinlan, the film - which takes its title from a Tom Russell song - is a surprisingly tender character study of a group of friends facing into middle age in a rural Irish community. Aspiring country singer Doug (Glen) - too shy to sing in public - is constantly down on his luck, and it is his enduring misfortune which cements his relationship with best friend Bill (Mackintosh), a small engine repair man, who is similarly disposed. Described as a comedy drama, the film has an offbeat humour, which cushions the pervading despair with a sense of the ridiculous. The result is a poignant nod to the country genre.
Having worked in script development previously, Heery began writing the feature a few years ago while directing shorts and music videos. "I think I very much made the film that I set out to make. I wanted the experience of watching the film to be similar to the experience of listening to country music," says Heery, who this year won the Breakthrough Talent Award at the Irish Film and Television Awards. "I wanted to make a film about the meaning and value of friendship. I was drawn to this notion of a bunch of guys whose lives hadn't really worked out they way they had hoped and what happens to you when you approach middle age and you realise that all your dreams aren't going to come to fruition and how you deal with it. The lead character suffers immense hardship, his life is falling apart and I suppose that's the way most good country music came about."
Shot in Co Antrim on a budget of just €1.85 million, the film's visual depiction of Ireland is fresh and affecting under his direction. He agrees that although Small Engine Repairis an Irish film, its cinematography does not necessarily reflect that. "I didn't want to disguise that it was Ireland, but neither did I want it to be a traditional Irish landscape. I did want this Americana ethos to filter through." Similarly, the characters have an everyman quality about them, which transcends location and time. "They are the type of relationships that are common among teenagers and people in their early twenties; [I wanted] to transplant that on middle aged men to try to create the sense that they had been trapped in a really small village and nobody had really progressed as a person."
A thoughtful country sound track, which includes contemporary artists such as Bobby Bare Jr, John Prine, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Todd Snider and The Silver Jews, is undoubtedly a highlight. "From pretty early on I knew it would have a country soundtrack. Originally I thought I would use older country from the seventies, but a lot of that music was proving quite expensive. There also came a point where I felt I didn't want to use too much old-school music. I wanted to keep it quite contemporary. I wanted, when people saw the film, to hear these songs for the first time. Yet, I wanted these songs to be accessible enough that you could enjoy them on the first listen."
Now aged 33, Heery discovered country music in his late teens when his father gave him a spare ticket to see alternative country legend Townes Van Zandt in Whelan's in Dublin. "It was just this old weary guy on stage with a guitar, but I never heard songwriting like that before. Up until then, I'd considered country music to be very conservative - I'd only been exposed to mainstream commercial American country which was very formulaic, very safe. It got me listening to Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Steve Earle."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film attracted a crowd of curious music industry folk at the Nashville screening. But Heery does not rely on the music to drive the narrative; rather he leaves that to a remarkable cast, which includes Irish actors Stuart Graham, Gary Lydon and Tom Murphy. "These guys were across the board really talented and totally able to run with what was on paper. Casting is the most important part of film-making. If you have a good script and you cast your film well it's quite difficult to go wrong. Actors bring things to the part that I could never think of. You write this character but you want to hand it over to an actor to turn this character into a person with soul, so it takes on a life of its own."
For four months prior to filming, Heery worked with lead actor Iain Glen who recorded all his own music for his role. "My situation with Iain was absolutely amazing . . . he was excited about expressing himself musically, while for most other actors it would have been hard work. By the time it came to stepping on set, myself and Iain had been on quite a journey with this character, through the music alone."
He agrees that as a first-time director, he was fortunate to have a chance to direct his own script. "There is something very nice about directing your own material on a quite self-indulgent level. It very much comes from within you so the prospect of getting that out onto the cinema screen in front of hundreds of people is very appealing. I put a lot of work into the script and got it to a stage that I was extremely happy with it and treated that to some extent as a gospel."
Although it took some time to get the project off the ground - "nobody wants to finance you because you're unproven" - filming went smoothly. "There wasn't really any melodrama. I was very fortunate with the weather. The cast were all very prepared. My director of photography I had worked with before. Iain I had worked with four months prior to shooting, so we all knew each other really well. It was a really positive and enjoyable experience."
However, he concedes that when it comes to film-making, time and money are generally not on side. "Time is the most valuable commodity on a film set and it would have been great to have more time, and to have had more money and equipment. But I knew what I had to deal with from the outset and that to some extent dictates the style of the film. You make the most of it."
Having just finished writing his second film, and with other directing projects in the pipeline, Heery is set to have a busy year ahead. Despite the buzz his film has generated, he remains focused. "It has picked up quite a few awards which has been really good in terms of increasing the profile. People have responded very favourably to it at the festivals. So, when it goes on general release, if people respond in the same way I will be delighted."
Back in Tootsie's, the singer in the Stetson is taking requests. "Johnny Cash", shouts a guy at the next table, and he is duly obliged. It's hard to tell whether he is from Nashville or elsewhere, but easy to imagine that the music is his own small dose of engine repair.
• Small Engine Repairgoes on general release in Ireland on July 13. See www.subotica.ie