Like his accomplished television dramas, director Declan Recks's first feature film tells a story set in a small Irish town, writes Peter Crawley
Declan Recks carries his new film around with him in every sense. By the time Edenreceives its premiere as the closing film in this year's Dublin International Film Festival, it will have been occupying the director's mind consistently for one year - although he has been working on the film adaptation of Eugene O'Brien's 2001 stage play, on and off, for more than seven years, having read it before it reached the stage. A tall, unassuming man with neat glasses and a frequent, nervous laugh, Recks now keeps the film in his pocket, stored on his iPod for quick reference.
In fact, the film isn't even finished yet. With just days to go before the premiere, Recks is still making alterations to the colour grading to correct minor imperfections and as he explains the tweaks, he strikes you as a man accustomed to the obsessive practices of film-making and, as a consequence, currently less accustomed to the phenomenon of daylight. He jokingly offers to let me watch Eden on his personal gizmo when a preview screening has proven impossible.
It's a tempting offer, although it seems wrong to reduce a film that he fought hard to shoot on 35mm to the dimensions of a 3.5-inch screen. An easy negotiation between the big screen and the small screen is typical of Declan Recks, however, who has honed his skills on short films and films for television since 1989, and brought that sensibility to bear on some of the most accomplished small-screen dramas of recent years - notably RTÉ's Pure Mule(also scripted by Eugene O'Brien) and TG4's recent political satire The Running Mate, which won the award for best drama serial at last Sunday's IFTAs.
BOTH OF THOSE series had distinctive, different tones, but each was marked by a fluid understanding of place. The Running Matemay have been acknowledged as the first Irish political drama to actually name the parties depicted, but it engendered a further reality by lensing scenes between the Dáil and Buswell's Hotel or the Co Kerry Gaeltacht.
"I've always preferred to shoot on location if I can," says Recks. "And I love to find the right location. I've spent months looking for places, because it's all part of the texture of the film or the show. And if it's the right kind of location, it makes you feel at home when you're watching something. It makes you want to come back if it's a TV show. And it's very hard to replicate that in a set."
Eden is slightly more coy about its setting. Although the title and O'Brien's clear Irish midlands references suggest that Edenderry forms the background to the sad tale of Breda and Billy, the couple whose 10-year marriage slowly implodes over one weekend of fizzling hopes and crossed desires, the town is never mentioned specifically. "It's an anonymous midlands town," says Recks.
That may be because, otherwise, it would be a little too close to home. Filmed in Tullamore, it sidesteps both O'Brien's native Edenderry and Clara, where Recks grew up, a place he does not characterise as an anonymous midlands town, although admits: "I would never shoot in it."
"The town we set it in is on the edge of becoming a city. People don't know everybody anymore. We wanted it to have that post-Celtic Tiger feel to the town. As for not naming the town, we just didn't want to label one town. And after our experience in Banagher during Pure Mule, the locals weren't particularly enamoured with us."
Pure Mule, a critical success that secured Recks the award for best director at the 2005 IFTAs, proved controversial among some Offaly locals for its unvarnished depiction of sex, drugs and despair, while also provoking more nit-picking assaults on the verisimilitude of its midlands accents. Recks still recalls, with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement, the displeased comments of Banagher's village elders broadcast on the Tubridy Show, which had temporarily relocated to a local supermarket for the programme. One person, complaining about the show's depiction of sex, insisted that that sort of thing didn't happen there. He was asked, po-faced, how many children he had.
"He had something like eight kids," Recks guffaws. "It was mind-boggling." Small towns are so rarely represented in mainstream culture, however, that you can understand a community's zealousness in preserving the tourist board-approved sheen of its self-image. "Myself and Eugene were talking about this the other day. Anyone growing up in Ireland during my time" - Recks is in his late 30s - "didn't see depictions of Ireland on the screen. And you didn't see much of it on TV until The Riordanscame along. I remember when Eat The Peachcame out, which was shot in and around the midlands, on the bogs. I remember going to see that and it was amazing to see an Irish film set round the corner." From his first film, the midlands-set short comedy Big Swinger, locality has been important to Recks's work, and later films Quandoand Soaphave been no less infused with an understanding of the warm absurdity of provincial life.
I wonder, between the enjoyably scabrous turns of The Running Mateand the raw depictions of Pure Mule if he has a love-hate relationship with small-town Ireland.
"Absolutely," he says. "I love the idea of a small town. I just don't want to live there the whole time. It's great to spend a couple of months at home, but it does begin to get in on you after a while. It's the same for a city, though, after a while I just get kind of restless." Although he relocates to Dublin whenever he is working, he returns to his home in Clara when the job is finished.
"I think it would be difficult to make stuff about Offaly without actually living there. Because otherwise I'd be working from memory and I feel the place is changing. You need to keep up to date with the goings on, the shenanigans behind the scenes." That's as good a summary of Eden as you are likely to need, which, in its original stage production, revealed the interior lives and follies of a town, conjured up with just two intertwining monologues delivered by Don Wycherly and the peerless Catherine Walsh.
NOW RECONCEIVED FOR a different medium, Recks explains that the agenda has been to translate the articulation of the play into the visual grammar of the camera. "We fought really hard to shoot it on Super 35 [ a relatively expensive film format], so it's widescreen, to take advantage of the landscape and also to take it away from TV."
This is laudable, but it suggests a greater ambition for the film than its funding conditions will allow. With its budget of just under €2 million financed by the Irish Film Board, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, Section 481 and RTÉ, the film will be aired by the national broadcaster at the expense of a domestic theatrical release.
For all his enthusiasm for O'Brien's facility with dialogue - "No actor ever says: 'I don't think I can say that'. They trust the work and they trust the words" - Recks says Eden's agenda was to pare back as much text as possible. "The play was going to be impossible to film. I worked for a few years trying different approaches. What threw us about the play was Billy's character because he's very likeable and he tells stories all the time." Outside of the monologue, however, Billy is rarely a vocal presence in the scenes he describes. "Billy doesn't actually talk that much. He doesn't talk to his wife, he doesn't talk to anybody. He watches people, he listens to people. So the Billy in our film is very quiet. He doesn't say a whole hell of a lot."
Instead of replacing the intimacy of the monologue with something as facile as a voiceover, Recks chose to film Billy and Breda's largely separate stories with distinctive, tailored styles: a handheld roughness accompanies the chaotic, priapic pursuits of Billy, played by Aidan Kelly, while Breda, played by Eileen Walsh, is presented with more stately composure.
Although he reserves special praise for Walsh, who would not read for the role without the blessing of Breda's original stage performer, her sister, Recks speaks of a new ability in Irish film-making, where performers, writers and crew have gained confidence in the medium. "There's only now a new generation who are beginning to figure it out now because there hasn't been a history of even television drama in this country. The last four or five years it's picked up. The opportunities weren't there before. Although, to be honest, the first couple of steps were pretty ropey."
He does not excuse his early forays into television. "On Home Ground- I put my hands up - technically it was very proficient, but the scripts were appalling. Once we had the technical end of it nailed though, people like Eugene or [ The Running Mate's] Marcus Fleming emerged, who just have an ear for writing for film."
HAVING PRESIDED OVER the better recent examples of television drama for the country's public service broadcasters, Recks admits that he would like those shows to find a bigger audience, but he has also seen major film projects founder under commercial expectations and never make it into production.
There are benefits to a modest approach. When Edenfinally reaches the big screen, Recks can imagine it disturbing the peace of Offaly once again, but he is determined that small town Ireland should be seen and heard, and that its specificity makes it universal.
"Part of the problem with the Irish film industry has been trying to be too universal, whereas what they really needed to do was to be really Irish. I think Kings. . . and Adam and Pauldid that really well. Garagedoes it really well. The more parochial they are, the better chance people will have an interest. I think we should try and present a view of ourselves that only we can . . . There's enough stories to be telling here."
Eden premieres at the Dublin International Film Festival tomorrow at the Savoy cinema and will be broadcast on RTÉ1 on March 16th