`Cute was the last thing we wanted," comments director Alan Parker on the casting of the key juvenile roles in his film version of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning, autobiographical best-seller, Angela's Ashes. Working with Hubbard Casting, Parker embarked on an exhaustive search to find the right young actors for his film, which starts shooting in Dublin on Monday.
That quest took him to towns and cities across the country and involved auditioning thousands of youngsters. "At least 15,000 kids," he says, "and Ros Hubbard thinks we may have met as many as 17,000."
It's obviously an arduous process, going through the same short scenes with a succession of children, one after another. Does he not find it mind-numbing by the time it gets to the 100th audition of the day by late afternoon? "Of course, it gets monotonous, but in the end it's my job to look forward to four o'clock in the afternoon, to anticipate the excitement when the words come alive and there's another likely contender for a role. And remember, every audition is taped, so no matter what stage of the day the audition was done, I watched those videotapes over and over again afterwards."
The central youngster is Frank McCourt himself, who will be played in the film by three different young actors - one from the ages of five to eight years, another from eight to 13, and a third from 13 to 17. In Parker's shorthand they are known as Young Frank, Middle Frank and Older Frank.
Having three actors playing the same character at different ages creates problems of its own, given that all three must resemble each other convincingly as the film charts Frank's early life in a poverty-stricken Limerick family; the film spans 15 years onwards from 1935.
"The eyes have to match, and the skin colouring, bone structure and some mannerisms," says Parker. "The hair you can deal with. In an ideal world, I would have cast three brothers from the same family and that would have solved the resemblance problem, but that opportunity never realistically presented itself."
So, as he narrowed down the contenders for the key roles, Parker patiently explored the casting possibilities, littering the floor of his Dublin hotel room with pictures of young actors and agonising over which ones might match up best. Eight years ago he pored over dozens of pictures on the floor of the very same hotel room while he matched up the actors who made up the band members in his film of Roddy Doyle's The Commitments.
"I zeroed in, first of all, on the character who has the most scenes, the most screen time, which in this case is Middle Frank, and decided to cast him first," he says. He chose Ciaran Owens, a 13-year-old from Killeshandra, Co Cavan, who happens to be the brother of Eamonn Owens, Neil Jordan's casting discovery who played the title role in The Butcher Boy.
"It's funny, because I wanted to use all newcomers in the children's roles," says Parker, "but I ended up casting Ciaran, who has some experience. He's just finished working on Anjelica Huston's film of The Mammy. I think Ciaran is brilliant. For every other character I had four or five options, but Ciaran was head and shoulders above everyone else. He's such a natural actor, completely natural, and I want the kids to be very naturalistic in the film."
The role of Young Frank will be played by an inexperienced eight-year-old, Joe Breen, from Wexford. "As a father of four, I found Joe reminded me of my own kids when they were little," says Parker. "He's so real, not like some eight-year-old American who would have done 28 commercials at this stage in his life."
The part of Older Frank went to Michael Legge, a 19-year-old from Newry, who has worked as an actor in theatre and television. "He came back twice for auditions," says Parker. "He's a talented boy. The subtlety he adds, you don't feel he's acting."
Parker is undeterred that casting three boys from different parts of the country will cause problems with them achieving consistent Limerick accents. "Accents are a problem, whatever film you do," says Parker. "Meryl Streep got her Irish accent right, so why can't these kids do it with a Limerick accent?"
The pivotal role of Angela McCourt will be played by the English actress, Emily Watson, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance in Breaking the Waves. This will be her second Irish film, following Jim Sheridan's The Boxer, in which she featured as the Belfast lover of the former Provisional IRA man played by Daniel Day-Lewis.
"She was in my mind from the beginning," says Parker. "I met her in New York and we had breakfast for about two-and-a-half hours. We talked about Arsenal for about two-and-a-quarter hours. We're both Arsenal supporters.
"Angela is a survivor, a very strong woman, yet in many ways a very sad woman, and I think Emily is going to be amazing in the role. It's a hard span for her. At the beginning Angela is the same age as Emily is now - around 30 - so she's got to age 15 years during the film. But Emily's not vain in any way. She's completely unpretentious. She doesn't care what the hair and make-up people say. Unlike some other people I've worked with in the past!"
Parker has cast the versatile 35-year-old Scottish actor, Robert Carlyle as Malachy, the drunken husband and father of the McCourt family. Although he is best known for playing the amiable policeman, Hamish Macbeth, on television, and the unemployed steelworker turned male stripper at the centre of The Full Monty, Carlyle has specialised in playing more intense characters, most unsettlingly for audiences as the violent, hard-drinking criminal, Begbie, in Trainspotting.
"I thought Robert was the best thing about Trainspotting," says Parker, "and I loved him in Ken Loach's Riff Raff. I phoned up Ken to ask him about him and Ken said he's brilliant. Well, Ken is my hero, so as far as I was concerned, that was it.
"Malachy is a very interesting man. An alcoholic primarily, but a man with great dignity. Every day he gets up, shaves, dresses, collar and tie, looks for work, doesn't get it, goes to the pub. Utterly useless, but the kids never had a bad word to say about him. They loved him always."
The adult cast members will also include a slew of Irish actors - among them Ronnie Masterson (as Grandma) and Pauline McLynn (Aunt Aggie), along with Liam Carney and Eanna MacLiam, both of whom were in The Commitments.
Angela's Ashes will be Alan Parker's second film of Irish working-class life after The Commitments; his other films as a director include Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express, Fame, Birdy, Angel Heart and most recently, the highly adventurous musical epic, Evita.
The new film is financed by the major Hollywood studio, Paramount Pictures, and the European-based PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, where Parker's production company, Dirty Hands, is based. Alan Parker is producing the film with two of Hollywood's most powerful producers: Scott Rudin, whose many credits include Sister Act, The First Wives' Club and the current hot hit, The Truman Show; and David Brown, whose productions have included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Jaws and Deep Impact.
"First of all, Angela's Ashes is set in Ireland, and I've been looking forward to working here again ever since I did The Commitments," says Parker, explaining the attraction to his latest film project. "I've always loved the book. It's a classic workingclass story, so well written by Frank McCourt. I tried to buy the film rights when it was published, but Scott and David had bought it when it was in galley-proof. They saw its potential long before it was a bestseller. I wonder why they waited a year-and-a-half to offer it to me."
The task of finding the right locations to shoot the film proved almost as arduous as the extensive auditioning process. "We looked all over Limerick and there's nothing left from those days," says Parker. "Roden Lane, where the story is set, doesn't even exist anymore. Everything is changed in Ireland in its headlong attack on affluence and modernity.
"So I've got to put together a patchwork quilt, a mosaic of different places, rather like I did when I was making Angel Heart in New Orleans. Limerick is the heart of the story, so we will be shooting for a week there, and for about eight days in Cork. We're going to build Roden Lane on a building site in Dublin and we'll stage the interiors at Ardmore Studios. This big family lived in tiny rooms, so the only place to do it is in a studio. You're got to break in walls and put in lights."
The film's budget, in the region of $20 million, is "modest for a period picture such as this", says Parker. It will reunite him with many of his regular collaborators, including lighting cameraman Michael Seresin, camera operator Mike Roberts, film editor Gerry Hambling, and production designer Geoffrey Kirkland. The newcomer to Parker's key creative team is the film's Irish costume designer, Consolata Boyle, whom he describes as "incredibly sensitive and conscientious".
"In the end, the film is about survival," Parker says. "It's Frank's voice. This unique voice. This 60-year-old man, a schoolteacher all his life, and he found the voice of this boy, how he thought and spoke, seen from the wisdom of this 60-year-old man."
Angela's Ashes begins filming on Monday and will be released next April