Making the film was so tough, I thought it was cursed
Black 47 director Lance Daly reveals how creating an 1847 Ireland pushed him to his limits...
LANCE Daly appears to be one of those creative types who never stands still. Even amidst the jittery bubble of a promotional tour for long-awaited famine biopic Black 47, he is questioning Stephen Rea’s decision to pass up on his pitch for his next film.
The plot is based around a child being kidnapped in the west of Ireland, Daly reveals, and Rea has already passed on the offer, insisting that having such an act happen to him would be his worst nightmare.
‘Plus Liam has already done that genre,’ he muses, attempting to put that matter to bed. But you get the impression that such constructive criticism won’t deter Daly. Just take a look at his latest film, Black 47, a cold revenge western based in the bleakest period of Ireland’s history, the famine-ravaged west of Ireland in 1847.
It is the first major cinematic project to shine a light on a cataclysmic event that decimated our population and sent the Irish diaspora across the Atlantic in a bid to survive. The fact this dark period of Ireland’s history had never been tackled cinematically did not put him off.
‘There was a show in the ‘90s called The Hanging Gale on the BBC but nothing has been done about the famine for cinema,’ he says. ‘Absolutely nothing, which is bizarre really.
‘There were challenges. We had to use CGI to take things out of course for the landscape, and use it to put in stuff too. When you go to Connemara now all you see is empty landscape but there was a time when it was the most overpopulated rural region in Europe and there was people living in every outcrop of land and everything was planted.
‘What the famine did was change that. Most people’s homes were built out of turf or bog wood and over the years they have fallen and the whole footprint of that time is one. So that was a challenge to recreate — and then we had to remove the roads, the walls, the electricity poles and wires and the white holiday homes,’ he continues, explaining just how tricky this project was to film.
‘When we were scouting it, we saw that bogs had been dug up by machines and when they had finished they planted pine forests in circles and squares and then built holiday homes. It’s like, how else can you monetise this land?
‘And the story mirrors that, wealth removed by the British and people scrambling around trying to survive. The famine is the ultimate telling of that story.’
The film is essentially this Irish Braveheart story of brutal revenge. It follows Australian actor James Frecheville as Martin Feeney, an Irish Ranger who returns home to Connemara after service overseas with the British army to discover his homestead destroyed, his family scattered or dead.
Meanwhile, a former army colleague called Hannah (Hugo Weaving) has been ordered to hunt Feeney down. Few punches are pulled as the anguished brother and son wage war on the British society that has plundered the West and taken the lives of his loved ones.
It is a tour de force performance for the Aussie actor who went so far as to learn old Irish for the production.
‘I think when people see this character blasting away all these people who have wronged his family, they might like history a bit more,’ says Daly. ‘What we were trying to do is to walk the line between popularising something with a story that is historically accurate.’
Costume was important, he says, as was the Irish language.
‘There is this powerful voiceover at the beginning which changes Feeney’s performance because it tells you where he comes from,’ he explains. ‘People understand that he has returned home from the British army and was treated like a traitor and he is carrying this shame and it makes sense. This story is very important for the Irish audience.’ And because of its emphasis on heritage, there are subtleties in this film that will be lost on anyone but an Irish audience, admits Daly.
‘Look, we want it to play in America but I refused to make compromises that would have made the film more accessible to an American audience. ‘Hopefully people will see it and take ownership of it. It is fiction but historically, it is very close to reality,’ he says.
‘We were so careful with how we built that world and I am proud of that. And there is a fear when you make a film like this that there are loads of people out there that know better. Well we called them all and most had a chance to voice their opinion so I think historically we have done it justice.’
If the story doesn’t lure you to the film than the strong supporting cast most certainly will.
The aforementioned Stephen Rea, who plays a brilliant canny western peasant, shines — as does Sarah Greene, Moe Dunford and Jim Broadbent, who plays Lord Kilmichael.
Even rising Dublin star Barry Keoghan is playing outside of his comfort zone, landing the part of a troubled English officer who struggles to stomach the treatment of the starving Irish population.
‘James (Frecheville) was incredible and learned both Irish and horsemanship for the film,’ Daly says. ‘He was so focused and serious with the part. And Moe and Sarah were so supportive, and you give Jim Broadbent discriminatory lines of dialogue and you know you are onto a winner.
‘Barry was listening to Stephen Gerard interviews before filming and that is where he got his English accent from.
‘I was a bit wary about that but I thought it was interesting. Hugo is Australian playing a Brit. Barry is an Irishman playing a Brit. I didn’t want to have foreign actors playing Brit villains but they are the redemptive parts of the film. And in a film like this it could have gone horribly wrong with the accents but it worked. When you get a team of actors of that calibre together they all raised the bar.’
For the actors and the director the actual shoot was a punishing affair. They spent their days in November and December facing bitterly cold weather in sparse clothing that made for miserable working conditions. They were also forced to fly to Luxembourg to film in even more extreme weather in order to capture the sheer desolate misery that the Irish peasants were forced to live through. This part of the project tested the cast and crew and pushed Lance to the limits, he admits.
‘It was so cold, really cold. But that helped with the tone of the piece I suppose,’ he says. There was no sunshine and happiness back in the famine. We did some shooting in Luxembourg and tem-
peratures dropped to -10C.
We had problems with the rain machines and the water would come out and turn to ice by the time it hit the ground; we had moments where we had to get people to clear the horses because they were covered with icicles.’
IT was a movie you couldn’t make in the summer, says Daly, and at one point, the tough conditions made Daly believe the film might be ‘cursed’.
‘I did begin to wonder was the project cursed because we were trying to make a movie about the Famine. It really did feel like that. I got pretty beat up by the whole process, and I remember doing the last shot in Connemara, and my wife had come down, so we went to Leenane and got out of the car and the sun was going down and I actually felt this tangible weight lift off my shoulders. I actually felt like I’d been carrying this, and I don’t know if it was just that the film was so hard: period detail, the weather, ensemble cast, resources, horses, action, two languages, kids — it’s like all the boxes that would tell you this is going to be a tricky shoot, they were all ticked.’
Daly believes that the movie will indeed be a success, and will break America, but admits he is nervous about getting to that sweet spot.
‘Hopefully people will like the film when it is out, and it will all be worthwhile and it will travel,’ he says. ‘It’s just getting them to hear about the film (in America) that’s hard — it’s such a big place:
‘It’s guaranteed 100 screens over there for its opening, so that’s good. Everybody always goes on about the diaspora, and apparently there are 40 million Irish Americans. Well if this doesn’t find that audience, given its subject, I don’t know what will.’ ÷BLACK 47, in cinemas from today. Read Philip Nolan’s review, right