‘As a mum, there are times you bend truth’
My Father’s Dragon director Nora Twomey on how breast cancer gave her f irsthand experience of protecting children from troubling facts
OSCAR-NOMINATED director Nora Twomey has revealed how all her work contains some of her own ‘experiences as a mother as well as everything else’, including beating breast cancer.
The director of My Father’s Dragon, in cinemas now and on Netflix from this Friday, told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘There are layers in My Father’s Dragon [about a young boy who runs away to find a dragon after a difficult move to the city] where Elmer looks up into his mom’s face, knows she’s not telling him the absolute truth, but doesn’t want to know the absolute truth and doesn’t know that he can handle it anyway. That came from moments in my own life where I’ve had to protect and love in ways that might have bent the truth, let’s say.’
The mother-of-two learned she had cancer as she came to the end
‘That came from moments in my own life’
of four years of development and production on the Oscar-nominated animation ‘The Breadwinner’, of which Angelina Jolie was the executive producer.
Determined to see the project through, she underwent chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation treatment while working on the film, finishing treatment two months before the final edit was completed. The film was released in late 2017.
The Kilkenny-based Cartoon Saloon co-founder also said Ireland’s burgeoning animation scene could be made stronger, with better linkup between colleges and studios. She says we need to ‘strengthen connections’ between education and industry to get the best out of our ‘absolutely incredible’ local talent.
‘There is nothing like dipping your toes into an actual work environment to really make you adaptable and able to hit the ground running a little bit more,’ she told the MoS.
The co-founder of the fourtime Oscar-nominated Cartoon Saloon (she was director or producer for three of those) said her two-week stint at Disney in Paris during her own education was invaluable.
‘I remember going back [to Ballyfermot College] and throwing out all the work that I had done in the previous six months, and just redoing it way better and faster and with more energy in a number of weeks.’
Given the astonishing global acclaim and award success of Cartoon Saloon’s four Oscar-nominated features (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, The Breadwinner and Wolfwalkers), is there any ‘always the bridesmaid…’ syndrome creeping in for never having landed the biggest one?
‘God no!’ Ms Twomey insists. ‘To be there at all is just incredible. Yesterday I got onto a Hollywood Reporter roundtable with [acclaimed animation directors] Guillermo Del Toro and Henry Selick – incredible directors. Just to be part of those discussions is utterly amazing.’
She said the distinctive style of Cartoon Saloon – started in 1999 with her Ballyfermot classmates Paul Young and Tomm Moore when a career in animation seemed like a pipe dream – came from ‘a similar love for 2D animation and a love for indie film’.
‘Had we made [their first features] in 3D for the amount of money we had, they would look extremely dated now. They’d look like whatever the software was capable of 15 or 20 years ago. And even if you look at large budget films that had $100m behind them from 10, 15 years ago, a lot of them you can see the edges of the technology at the time. So we’re more interested in what it is that craftspeople can bring to the screen – animators who animate by hand and whose experience and compassion you can see through their work.’
Her latest film counts Whoopi Goldberg, Chris O’Dowd, Ian McShane (Lovejoy) and Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things) among its stellar cast. She ‘loved’ directing them and called them ‘childlike… in how they approach their own imaginations and their own gifts and talents’.
And, she adds, the stars ‘love that they can turn up to work wearing sweatpants if they want’.
‘Stars love turning up to work in sweatpants’