‘In the creative field… you need that affirmation’

Star of a new Dublin crime thriller, Tristan Heanue is also winning awards for his directing, writes Hilary A White

‘FINGERS crossed,” is about all Tristan Heanue can say right now. The Connemara actor and filmmaker has been summoned to Germany in late September to collect an award at Film Festival Cologne for his most recent short film, Ciunas (Silence). Who knows how the world of international travel will look by then?

We’re sitting in Heanue’s Dublin city flat, where he and his fiancée spent a frankly “very enjoyable” lockdown, the pair operating to a workday timetable from different rooms before convening on the couch to watch films. Broken Law, a crime saga directed by Paddy Slattery that he is starring in, is finally in cinemas. The conversation, however, is being dominated at this juncture by Ciunas, a 12-minute Irish language short that Heanue wrote, produced and directed himself.

The Ifta nomination that it has just received is one of many accolades this unassumingly powerful drama is collecting around the world at Oscar-qualifying festivals in the US, Russia and Belgium, not to mention across this island. After the Grand Prix award for Best Irish Short at Cork last year, Heanue became the first short-film maker to be nominated for the prestigious Bingham Ray New Talent Award at the Galway Film Fleadh. The prize in Cologne suggests Ciunas isn’t done just yet. Talk of Oscar contention is not unreasonable.

“People seem to have really connected with it,” the 40-yearold says. “Older, younger, Irish, international. It’s just gone from strength to strength. I couldn’t have imagined it would be so well received, and it’s opened a lot of doors for me. Most of all, it’s the confidence something like that can give you. I was really starting to question myself. You can feel so isolated in the creative field sometimes, especially right now. You need that feedback and that affirmation. The main thing for me is that it might make it easier to get funding for other projects, that stamp of approval. I’m developing a script for a feature film, for example, so we’ll see. But it’s so hard right now to know what way things are going to turn out, especially in the arts sector.”

There are people we can meet at key moments in our lives who can divert us away from inertia and help us live up to our potential. In the case of Heanue, Paddy Slattery was that person. The pair met in 2012 after Heanue got a tip-off from an industry friend about a lead role in a short film of Slattery’s called Runner. It sounded right up Heanue’s street, and it was. They hit it off, and on the final day of shooting, Slattery approached him about a feature-film script he was working on.

The result, eight years later, is Broken Law ,a thumping gallop of a film about brothers, one a garda, one an ex-con, facing off in a city broken by the housing crisis. After a triumphant Dublin International Film Festival premiere, it is finally showing in cinemas in this strange new world.

Slattery, who is quadriplegic and helmed the entire production from a wheelchair, has been a driving force in getting Heanue airborne as a writer and filmmaker. When I ask Heanue what it was that Slattery saw in him all those years ago that made him want to help nurture his emerging talents, he is at a loss to fully pin it down. When I contact Slattery that evening, he is resolute about the impression Heanue made.

“I saw depth and sincerity in his eyes,” Slattery tells me, “and he reminded me of a young Henry Fonda. Classic, morally ambiguous, yet charismatic. The kind of actor who could inhabit any character and type. What I saw next was his passion and commitment to his work — he cancelled his holiday to Italy in order to work on our film and lost the price of his flights.”

Heanue, meanwhile, refers to Slattery as the most inspiring man he has ever met, not only in how he has surmounted the hand life has dealt him, but also his attitude.

“Shortly after meeting him,” he recalls, “I accompanied him on a school talk he was doing. He talked about his accident and the rehabilitation process, lying on his back for a year. I remember coming out that day and thinking of all he had been through and how positive he was, so driven and determined. He makes you question the little things you moan about. I was at a real crossroads at the time, just really sick of the way I was living my life, not very productive, not very happy, nothing going for me. I stopped drinking and then I met Paddy shortly after. I’m very lucky to have met him when I did because he changed everything for me, gave me belief in myself.”

Ciunas tells of worried parents visiting their daughter in the ward of a psychiatric facility and all of the pregnant stillness of Irish families unable to express themselves emotionally. A Break in the Clouds, his previous short, looks at the mental health strain experienced by first-time fathers, a topic rarely given airtime. The subject of parenthood is obviously circling, I put to him.

“Definitely,” he says. “A Break in the Clouds was my own fear of watching and asking would I be able to handle it, would I be okay. Ciunas is then the fear of having to protect them in the world and how mad it is right now. At the same time, it wouldn’t stop me. It’s a big thing but everyone tells me it’s the best thing.”

By extension of these internal processes at this point in his life, Heanue says he has written a new short film that’s a subconscious love letter to his mother. Having come up to Dublin for the DIFF premiere of Broken Law, both parents are proud of him in their own way, he says, his father very much of the “dig-in-the-arm” generation of Irish dads.

“My parents loved it. We had a lovely couple of days during the premiere. All this would be quite new for them, posing for photos and that, and sometimes they didn’t know how to react!”

Heanue is, he feels, in the most enjoyable period of his life since those carefree years when he was a teenager in Connemara. While Slattery played a starring role in Heanue’s self-belief, the graft and the foundation originated from his parents.

“It all started with them really,” he says, “the amazing work ethic that I saw from them growing up. And that meant I was in turn always working from a young age myself. They didn’t force me into things I didn’t want to do either. If you ever lose your way in life a little bit, a good upbringing at home will always bring you back onto the right road.”

‘He reminded me of a young Henry Fonda. Morally ambiguous, yet charismatic’

Broken Law is in cinemas nationwide. See review, page 7