THANK YOU ANGELINA

Oscar nominee Nora Twomey opens up on the debt that she owes A-lister

WHEN Nora Twomey, 46, was diagnosed with breast cancer midway through directing her Oscar-nominated animated film The Breadwinner, her executive producer was perhaps more supportive and insightful than your average A-list superstar.

After all, Angelina Jolie – carrier of the BRCA gene, who had her ovaries removed after a double mastectomy to prevent the onset of breast cancer – knows better than most how the disease can upturn and complicate your life.

‘She lost her own Mum through breast cancer as well. She had been through a tough enough time at the time too with her own health and everything that was going on.’

Angelina’s marriage to Brad Pitt broke down in 2016, also while The Breadwinner – a five-year project from initial storyboarding to the screen – was being made.

When Nora told Angelina about her cancer diagnosis, did the star talk to her about it?

‘She did, yeah. And she just said, “This is life”. The truth of it is it’s just life, it’s neither good nor bad, things just happen and you just have to try and pull the people you love close around you and get through it.’

This was no small achievement for Cork woman Nora, mother of two boys, Oliver, 10 and Patrick, eight, with her Tipperary husband Michael McGrath, also an artist and animator, and stay-at-home dad.

Not long after her August 2016 diagnosis – which was followed by chemo, surgery and radiation – Nora’s white blood cell count was so low she was placed in isolation in Kilkenny hospital.

‘My husband brought me in my laptop and suddenly things made sense. I could log on, I could see the scenes in progress, I could Skype. It was something in my life that made sense when everything else had been tossed up in the air and I didn’t know where things were going to land.’ We meet in Kilkenny’s Cartoon Saloon, which she co-founded in 1999 and whose previous films The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea were also nominated for Academy Awards. Afterwards we walk the short distance to the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny Castle, which hosts a gorgeous exhibition of scenes from The Breadwinner until late July. She speaks of how the film helped her through those tough hospital days.

‘I could work and that gave me some sense of satisfaction. Because animation is something you can do sitting down or if you’ve got a line in one arm and your right arm is free. So all the way through I just found what I could do.’

HAPPILY, Nora was well enough by March of this year to thoroughly enjoy the Oscars. The Breadwinner, in Irish cinemas from May 25, is based on the Deborah Ellis book. It tells the story of Parvana, an 11-year-old girl who lives under Taliban rule in Afghanistan in 2001. After the wrongful arrest of her father, she cuts off her hair and dresses like a boy to support her family.

Working alongside a friend, she soon discovers a new world of freedom and danger. Drawing strength from the fantastical stories she invents, Parvana embarks on an epic quest to find her father and reunite her family.

You can see why the story appealed to humanitarian Jolie, whose passions are women’s and children’s rights in war-torn countries.

‘I was quite nervous, now, I have to say the first time I met her. I had got a phone call to say could I meet her if I was in LA. So of course I flew over and pretended I was just there on business anyway,’ laughs Nora. ‘But, yeah, I was quite nervous before that first meeting. Luckily I had managed to get myself lost beforehand so I was just so relieved to turn up that I kind of forgot who I was talking to until I was a good few sentences in.

‘But again she looked so familiar because literally I had seen pictures of her on magazine racks in the airport. She was very down-to-earth, very warm and friendly. Very intelligent as well. You get that sense that she’s a listener, you know? So that’s an amazing quality to have in an executive producer, that you’re being listened to as a director. So that was a great relationship.’

Jolie got stuck in at every stage of the film’s development.

‘She made a huge difference with the publicising of the film but also with the creating of the film as well,’ says Nora. ‘She helped a lot when we were back in script stage and animatic stage – the first rough parts of the whole filmmaking process. She was really instrumental in helping the sensibility of the film.

‘She’d been to Afghanistan on a number of occasions, she had set up a girls’ school over a decade ago there and she was very mindful of the sensitivities, I guess. So she helped to steer the project and guide it in that way. It’s also just wonderful to have another female film director to look for guidance from. She was great. I’d either meet her in London or LA or else she’d just ring me up.’

Jolie also had strong opinions about casting. Nora ‘really admired’ how she wanted to hire people who had overcome hardships in their own lives or who were from Afghanistan or whose parents were Afghani.

‘And to find a Muslim cast as well. So that our story could be as broad as it possibly could be, enveloping people from all walks of life. And then she came and stood on the red carpet with us all. She came to the Annie Awards which are the animation industry version of the Oscars and she came to the LA premiere with us.’

Most of us have seen red carpet pictures of one of the world’s most photographed women, but it is something else entirely to see the Angelina Effect in real life.

‘It’s amazing seeing how it changes the atmosphere. It’s one thing to talk to her in a room oneto-one but it’s another thing to see how people react to her. I mean, she doesn’t change but people change around her depending on what kind of a crowd it is and all of that. So that is amazing to watch. The cameras light up, the flashes are going and it’s quite dazzling. But she has a great presence of mind and she – and her children, actually – are very solid and steady in the middle of the whole thing.’

Angelina and Brad, who are now divorced, have six children: Maddox, 16, Pax 14, Zahara, 13, Shiloh, 11 and Vivienne and Knox, nine. Maddox, Zahara and Pax were adopted from orphanages in Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam, respectively. The remaining three are their biological children.

‘[They’re] lovely kids. They enjoyed the film. They sat through it and watched the whole thing, anyway! I think it was Shiloh [who] came twice to watch it.’

Nora hopes that families watch it together and recommends that children are 10 years or older. She herself appreciated the story on a deeper level while recovering from cancer.

IN A WAY it added a bit more understanding for what I was working on. In the film the character cuts her hair and dresses as a boy and while making the film I lost all my hair and my eyebrows and eyelashes. You know, so the idea of transformation and finding strength through adversity was a theme of the film but also in the film making.’

Nora had faced adversity before. Her father died when she was 14, she struggled at school in the aftermath and dropped out a year later. She says she wasn’t ‘academically minded’, was ‘doodling eternally’ and ‘unable to articulate the troubles I was going through’.

She worked in a factory for a while before being accepted on her portfolio to Ballyfermot School of Animation. After graduating, she worked for Brown Bag for a year before moving to Kilkenny to set up Cartoon Saloon with Paul Young, Tomm Moore and Ross Murray. Having grown up on a farm in