Conor McPherson's film, 'The Actors', starring Dylan Moran and Michael Caine, is his most cheerily low-brow work to date. But little is sweetness and light in the world of this writer of dark tales, writes Donald Clarke
'I've always had this existential feeling that everything is just so wrong," says playwright and film-maker Conor McPherson. "I look around and think, this is all lunacy. It makes me sick." He speaks slowly and quietly, his eyes fastened to a spot on the floor several feet behind me.
McPherson is a serious man, but then he has plenty to be serious about. Two years ago, he nearly died when his reckless drinking habits landed him in hospital with pancreatitis. Yet, despite this crisis and his continuing fury at the universe, his new film presents us with his lightest, most cheerily low-brow work to date. Starring Michael Caine and Dylan Moran, The Actors, which McPherson both wrote and directed, is very different in tone from his measured, controlled writing for the theatre in plays such as The Weir and Dublin Carol.
"There seems to be two sides to my personality," he says. "And when I first started writing a film, with I Went Down, I suddenly found myself putting more slapstick into it. Some of the humour here [in The Actors] is very similar to I Went Down." There are indeed reminders of Paddy Breathnach's raucous 1997 comedy, which marked McPherson's first work for film. But The Actors is broader still.
Featuring a great deal of falling over and silly voices, the film has some of the joyful abandon of Ealing comedy, but with shades of the familiar McPherson pessimism. Yet the piece originated as a story by Neil Jordan.
"Neil saw I Went Down and really liked it," he says. "He phoned me up. He had this idea, which he was originally going to do as a novel, about these two actors in Dublin. The beginning was similar to the way it turned out two actors in Richard III but very dark. When the script was finished, Neil felt that he wasn't the right director, and I said I'd like to direct it."
Dreamworks, the studio attached to the project at this point, was wary. But on seeing McPherson's first film as director, Saltwater, the company decided to give him a chance. As is so often the case when commerce meets art, conflict ensued. Dreamworks tried to impose American stars on the director (among them Dustin Hoffman), egos were flexed and eventually the studio passed on the project. Shortly afterwards, as the movie was finally coming together as a Miramax production, McPherson's lifestyle caught up with him.
"It was no secret to people I was working with," he explains. "I would get up in the morning and go straight to an early house and drink until the horrible feelings of alcohol withdrawal, paranoia and terror went. Then at lunchtime off I'd go again, come back and do the work. The work was still fine."
The work was indeed fine. When This Lime Tree Bower was staged at the 1995 Dublin Fringe Festival, the 23-year-old philosophy graduate immediately became a figure to watch, and duly went on to become one of the country's most lauded playwrights. The Weir, in particular, was a worldwide success, and was followed by further exercises in coiled rage such as Dublin Carol and Port Authority. But his dizzying rise was halted in February 2001, when he began to suffer serious stomach pains while working in London.
"I went to the doctor," he explains. "And he called an ambulance, because he thought that I might have pancreatitis, which I did. I just wanted to come home, but they brought me to St Thomas's Hospital and I was admitted to intensive care. I don't remember much about it, because they medicate you very heavily. I just remember horrific nightmares, terrible dreams; it was disgusting."
"Eventually McPherson, four stones lighter, was discharged and he returned to Dublin to recuperate with his parents. Having spent three months in hospital, he had effectively already dried out and was ready to begin a life without booze.
"I am a bit calmer now," he says, with an unconvincing intensity. "I'm an incredibly angry person. I'm sure that contributed to the drinking. I was trying to calm that down." So what is he so angry about? "I look around and think, this is crap. We are so lucky where we live and with everything we have, but I feel so powerless. What can I do? There's nothing I can do. I want to escape into a fantasy world, and that feeling is so strong that I make my living by making things up."
He adopts a peculiar tone when engaging in these tirades against everything and everywhere. There is laughter, but it's not happy laughter. I am, however, still surprised when he reveals boyish enthusiasms, as he does when discussing the origins of Saltwater, his 1999 refashioning of This Lime Tree Bower for the cinema.
"I only did it because Handmade Films had expressed an interest in making a film of it, and Handmade was set up by George Harrison. I did it because I thought I was going to meet George Harrison." However, Harrison was no longer involved with the company and McPherson became engaged in a series of increasingly bitter negotiations which ended with him having to buy his own script back from a Canadian financial institution.
The film, more breezy in tone than its source material, was generally warmly received in a limited release. But The Actors is a much more mainstream enterprise. As you read this, the faces of Dylan Moran and Michael Caine are plastered on the sides of dozens of London buses next to the film's priceless strap line: "Thick as thieves, only thicker."
Moran is the picture's great revelation. Playing an actor of questionable talent who gets persuaded into helping Caine's fruity old ham evade a gangland debt, the befuddled stand-up adopts a series of outrageous disguises. Given that in his television performances Moran always appears to be playing a version of himself, he would not be an obvious casting in the role of a quick-change artist.
"That's what I thought," McPherson says. "I thought we really needed a technically brilliant actor like Peter Sellers. So we saw all these brilliant people and then the casting director said we should see Dylan. I was sceptical. He was the last person we saw. I cast him because he had this great shambolic quality to him; that's the guy in the script."
As McPherson points out, Moran is not called on to be a chameleon; nobody could expect his absurd disguises to work in reality. But he brings his eccentric intelligence to bear on the material to comic effect.
"He has a huge, big brain. Dylan is a heavy, intellectual guy."
Caine exhibited his legendary artisan-like approach to the work. "He's a real professional," McPherson says. "He wants to do the job and leave. So he really wants to be directed. He has a life. It is really just a job to him. He has an amazing talent, though I don't know if we had to tap it all for this film."
As The Actors opens, its director finds his career at a curious juncture. This will be the third film he has written, the second he has directed (the third, if you include his Endgame for the Beckett on Film collection), yet he is conscious that there is a feeling abroad that his true métier remains theatre.
"There is this huge divide between theatre and film," he says. "It's very hard to be taken seriously in film when you've had a career in theatre.
People think you're just having a go or whatever." McPherson is ardent that he will not desert either medium, and is currently working with Jordan on a script inspired by the journey of the Magi.
"The Three Kings: it's like a big epic adventure that hasn't been made," he explains. "What an amazing world to travel through. I just thought it's a great idea for a buddy road movie. It's still in its very early days though."
But, after all he's been through, doesn't he deserve a rest? "Well, for me just writing for a year would be a rest." And he unveils something not unlike a smile.
The Actors goes on release next Friday