Rising Star writer/directors Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair and Katie McNeice talk to The Quiet Girl’s director Colm Bairéad and producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoi about making their first feature, shooting during Covid, and the long journey towards an Oscar nomination.
It is exactly one year since Irish-language feature The Quiet Girl premiered in Berlin’s youth-focused Generations sidebar. To say it has exceeded expectations since it won the Grand Prize there is an understatement: it has notched record-breaking grosses, awards, Bafta and AMPAS nominations, and the enduring pride of a nation, where it is still in release.
The Irish have made a beeline for awards this year with The Banshees of Inisherin, but The Quiet Girl, a €1.3m ($1.4m) independent production from an Irish-language initiative, is the success story that is energising young filmmakers and storytellers in its home country right now.
Rising Star writer/directors Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair and Katie McNeice sat down to talk to The Quiet Girl’s director Colm Bairéad and producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoi about the last year. The Quiet Girl wasn’t just Bairéad’s feature directorial debut, it was also the first feature out of the gate for Inscéal, the production company run by this husband-and-wife team. They share their experiences here.
KM: If you could go back to your premiere, knowing what you do now, what would you tell yourself? Would you give yourself a bit of advice, or would you brace for something in particular?
CB: I remember Rosa [Bosch, the film’s producers’ rep] said to us, when we…
CNC: When we locked the picture, she said, “You think you’re finished. You’ve only just started,” and that was so right. We had no idea what was involved in the whole promotional and sales end of things, no idea. We look back sometimes at the pictures from Berlin and go, “Wow, that was kind of an innocent time.” Because we didn’t know what was ahead and how intense everything would become. But in a brilliant way…
CB: We’ve come of age in a way over the course of the film’s journey.
KM: Word of mouth has really been such a key component to the momentum and the success of your film. That through line between what you wanted to share and how it was received I think was so perfectly materialised.
CB: Not that you’d know that when you’re finished. You have confidence in that you really want to make this, but in a strange way we almost didn’t think that much of the audience in the beginning. You’re almost just selfishly trying to make this thing that you really feel this desire to do. And then afterwards, you think, “Oh, I hope people like this beyond ourselves.” You never know what way it’s going to be embraced. And neither do others, because if they did, people would be jumping all over your film from the very beginning, which is not what happened with us. It took a while for us to build, for Bankside to come on board as sales agent, for Super in the US.
RNG: So if we go back a year ago to Berlin, how was it then?
CNC: Well, we were working with Rosa Bosch, and she was representing us for sales. We had just signed up to Breakout Pictures in the UK and Ireland. So we did feel like we had people around us that were real champions of the film. And as soon as we premiered in Berlin, Breakout organised for some UK distributors to come and watch the film. Curzon was one of them. And Curzon then bought the film, or decided to jointly release the film in the Ireland and the UK with Breakout, so that was amazing. I remember thinking, “A UK distributor is going to buy our film!” That was a real breakthrough moment, because it hadn’t happened to an Irish-language film before — a full UK release. [It broke through the €1m ($1.1m) barrier in October, a record for an Irish-language film.] And distributors do absolutely talk to each other. Rosa negotiated a deal with the Australian and New Zealand distributor Madman Entertainment, so then they bought the film. And it did very well there, too — it grossed over AUS$700k [$484k]. We have still to open in a lot of territories.
CB: The fact that our film was theatrically successful was a huge thing, and I think that brought attention on us in an international level within the industry, that — in a time where independent cinema is undergoing kind of an existential crisis in terms of exhibition and audiences — it stood out as, “Well, here’s this funny film in a minority language that people are really going to see in the cinema.” There would have been no awards campaign without that.
CNC: That’s the beautiful thing: audiences have really helped our film in a huge way; Irish audiences in particular. So we feel really grateful to people who bought a ticket. It’s our first feature film. And it’s our own production company behind the film, so we’ve been learning on our feet. We do our own social media, which is a job, just to keep it all going and keep the film relevant all the time. The sheer volume of legal documents and paperwork and everything that goes with distribution and sales agent agreements…
CB: And deliverables…
CNC: And we always had awards in the back of our minds.
KM: Everyone hoped you’d get an Oscar nomination in the Best International Film category. But at what point did you start to feel it might happen? At what point did people start to talk to you about strategy?
CNC: Super came on board in September last year, so it was huge for us because we absolutely needed a US distributor if we wanted to make an Oscar campaign. But we had already been thinking about it long before that. We knew there were only going to be a few films in contention to be Ireland’s entry, so we hoped we’d have a good shot to be selected. Because we’d premiered in Berlin, we had a long lead-in. Sometimes that can work to a disadvantage, but in our experience that was crucial. Even going back to when we found out we were going to be selected, we asked the ITFA [Irish Film & Television Academy] to get our announcement out first, to be the first country to announce their selection for the Oscars. We were trying to capitalise on exposure. It was on your birthday, Colm, August 3.
CB: Afterwards, when papers would write about the international race, they’d tend to use our image because we were the first. And when Super came on board, it was straight into campaigning. There was no time to sit around and have strategic meetings. It was just, like, straight in.
FH: It’s a long way from the start of the project, a short story in The New Yorker by Claire Keegan that later became the novella The Quiet Girl. You shot it during the Covid-19 lockdown, and, in a way, it was a race against time.
CB: I do remember the very first day of the shoot, walking in, and this is my first feature film, so I’ve never been directing on a shoot where you had trucks for makeup and costume and all that kind of stuff. There’s something a bit daunting about that day, walking in towards the centre of things. But then I realised that all the other stuff is obviously a necessary part of the machine of a film being made. But no matter what film you go onto to, you’re always walking towards this central space, which is just you and the actors and the camera. And there’s a real safety in that to me — this nucleus at the centre of all the craziness. That’s where I want to be and that’s where I enjoy walking towards. And when you feel as strongly as I do about the source material, in a weird way you have that confidence. There’s a fearlessness when you know, when you are striving for something so fervently because you believe in it so much.
KM: Could I ask you both though, as a producer and as a director, at what point did you decide that you were ready, willing, and able to do your first feature drama? That’s a dramatic decision to make in the middle of a pandemic. Was it that you found the source material or were you just at a point where you were always going to be ready, and no one was going to stop you?
CB: I don’t think you’re ever ready. I had an overwhelming emotional response to [the source material]. Everything from the language to the point of view, to the fact it was so small. But I still don’t think you ever come to a point where you say, “Right, I’m ready to make a feature film.” A combination of having the rights to the source material and it having been translated into many languages gave us a certain confidence, I suppose. I read it in 2018 and we originally were trying to shoot it in the middle of the summer of 2020, but then Covid-19 made us push it back, but that drove us even more, you know?
CNC: Got us even more motivated not to leave such momentum behind during pre-production. And it was a race against time because the story is set in the summertime, and we just missed the whole summer. We were calling Screen Ireland every day trying to get the go-ahead.
CB: I’ve never paid so much attention to foliage and when the leaves turn. The danger was if we missed that window you’d have to wait until the following summer, and Catherine [Clinch] would have lost maybe just a little bit more of the innocence. We had [DoP] Kate McCullough, the whole team on board. It’s like a house of cards, even if one small trick, everything can fall down.
KM: Yet the end result feels so serene.
CB: It was just a magical experience working with Catherine. It’s all about patience and creating a safe space for her. I know the film feels quite calm and long takes and all that. But at the same time, it’s precisely the same as any other shoot in the sense that time doesn’t move any slower because of your shot design. So you’d be shooting a long take and there’s a part of your brain that’s going, “This is really eating into my schedule.”
CNC: We’ve become like a family almost, like this little film family. We all know each other really well and we’re very close. We have a WhatsApp group and we talk every day. And so, everybody is so invested in it. Because, I suppose, we were a small team and everything, and it’s a small film.
CB: Yes, that’s what it’s all about.
CNC: And so, it feels like everything that’s been achieved feels so much greater because it started off in a very small place. It’s been incredible. What a year. The most amazing year of our lives, is that fair enough to say?
CB: Life-changing — completely life-changing.
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