Actor Paddy Considine talks to Taragh Loughrey-Grant about stepping behind the camera for his feature directorial debut, Tyrannosaur, which he also wrote. The low budget (£750,000) film follows Joseph, a broken widower, ravaged by rage who is wracked with guilt over how he treated his wife before she died from a diabetes related illness. He reluctantly befriends Hannah, who has dark secrets of her own.
Joseph is a man plagued by a violence and rage who is driving him to self destruction. As he falls further into turmoil, Joseph scours the landscape in search of a single grain of redemption that might restore hope to his fractured life.
TLG: Did your short 2007 Dog Altogether help in the creation of your new film Tyrannosaur, both of which shared the same basic story arc and key cast?
PC: “Hugely, when I wrote the short, I only had one actor in mind for the lead role [of Joseph] and that was Peter [Mullan]. The other role of Hannah wasn’t cast and I’d gone through the usual route of thinking who would be right for that particular role and I happened to meet Olivia Colman on Hot Fuzz, of all things and the moment I met her I just had this instinct that I couldn’t describe really. But I rang my wife and I said, I found her, I’ve got the girl.
“Luckily my wife knew who she was because I hadn’t really seen her work, I just knew her face so she came and did the short and over the years we became friends.
“When it came to taking that short film [Dog Altogether] and making it into the feature film [Tyrannosaur], this character we discover her home life and see what she’s dealing with and there’s some tough moments in the movie.
“I realised that Olivia had not been anywhere near this kind of terrain as an actor but I was still driven by my instinct which was that she was right for the role. She had the right qualities; she was easy to love, she’s a very selfless, generous girl and that’s what that role needed. That’s why I think she’s such a revelation because no one expected this from her. The minute you meet some actresses you know where you’re going to go with them and I’m guilty of that too as an actor.”
I disagree, as most people who have seen Paddy in such diverse films such as Dead Man’s Shoes, In America, Hot Fuzz and Submarine would.
You dedicated the film to, Pauline, who sadly has passed away.
“Pauline’s my mum, she’s kind of the ghost of the movie in a strange way and parts of it are a little love letter to her and a realisation to her and kind of an apology in some ways.
“She was never nicknamed the Tyrannosaur but she did have diabetes and she was a big gal and she did lose her legs and her sight. She became the character in the film that Joseph talks about and I don’t mind saying that because it was the basis.
“I suppose, in the dialogue scene, it’s a beautiful scene where he’s very true about his wife and she [Hannah] asks would you treat her differently and he says: “No, I’d still treat her like a dog.” I think that was a brutal admission, not of my guilt but of that characters and I think when he says: “I thought she was dumb but she wasn’t, she was beautiful”.
“I think that that’s the sort of thing I felt about my mum, she had a huge capacity for forgiveness and a very loving woman and I thought at times that people took advantage of that so I saw it as a weakness, I saw her love as weakness. You know like ‘Why wouldn’t she just toughen up?’ and the fact that she didn’t toughen up meant that she was far more beautiful and had a better sort of angle on humanity than I had at that time in my life.”
Read our Tyrannosaur review here
You have collaborated with writer/director Shane Meadows on a number of films (Dead Man’s Shoes, Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee) and were you influenced by him as a director?
“I’m influenced by Shane as a person. We collaborated, I’d say Dead Man’s Shoes was the collaboration, [A Room for] Romeo Brass was a different sort of relationship then, that was the first thing I’d done.”
I remind Paddy of Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee which Olivia also worked on.
“Yeah, for some reason I always forget that one and Olivia came in for a day to help us out. I think that people are surprised when I say ‘No’ [that Meadows wasn’t a directorial influence] because I think there’s people that have been on both of our sets and they would say that I’ve a totally different working method to Shane.
“I work with actors different, my technique of going about creating the drama is very different but the stuff I learnt from Shane is bigger stuff. It’s almost bigger than movies in a way so it’s hard to equate it down.
“We met when we were seventeen-years-old so I’d like to say the influence is bigger. I was never on the phone for advice to Shane because I knew the film I wanted to make, I wasn’t on the phone to anybody but Shane’s one of those people whose influence was really big, inherently for lots of different reasons.”
Your friend and In America director Jim Sheridan hosted the recent Q&A that you did after the Tyrannosaur screening in the IFI. Has he influenced you as a director?
“I think he influenced me hugely. He has a way of creating a world for you to go to and explore with him, he’s like another character off camera, and he’s like the soul of the film. He was on In America, he was the soul of that film, he was always off camera and he’d talk through takes and feed you reactions and instincts.
“I’d never had that before and it puts you in this state as an actor, I find it quite free and enjoyable - some actors, it might mess with their process. It’s kind of how I worked with Olivia on this film, I suppose I was another actor off camera and the more I look at it, the more I think we had the closest relationship, like actors in a way. I was sometimes the voice of her conscience but I was off camera and we were like two actors playing off each other, which is interesting. It was probably the most powerful collaboration I’ve ever had.”
How did you help Olivia through the violent scenes of disturbing, domestic abuse?
“I was always in the scene; I was always lying on the floor, just out of shot. I don’t like being away behind a monitor, out of the action. I’m thrilled to be amongst them, you can’t get me off set.
Doing a six-day, four-week shoot I presume there wasn’t much room for improv?
“No, that’s one of the places where Shane and I would differ because Shane creates the world for you to go off page and he’s very good at taking that stuff and trimming it down to its best whereas that would drive me nuts. It [Tyrannosaur] didn’t need to be improvised, it was written. I’m not leaning over these actors telling them to stick to every word, like I’ve had on some things, with someone with a clipboard saying ‘You forgot to say because’! Gimme a break – they were allowed to own them but great actors will take your script and make it work. They threw the odd thing in there. Ned [Dennehy] threw in the odd piece in there and it was great."
Dennehy was perfectly cast as the much-needed light to balance out the dark themes. How did you cast him as Tommy?
“I met Ned briefly on a film we’d done a couple of years before, Blitz and he did an audition tape and I always had this idea that he [Tommy] has got to be Irish because he was sort of loosely based on one of my uncles. He sent an audition tape through and he was absolutely brilliant and it was as simple as that.”
You’re currently working on your next film, a ghost story?
At the minute, its call The Leaning, I didn’t want to go over the same terrain as Tyrannosaur, that’s story’s been told. So this is a ghost story and it’s about a woman and her past. She can’t grow in the present because she hasn’t come to terms with what happened in the past. How do you forgive someone who isn’t here anymore? It’s about lies and legacies and something that happened in her past. She thinks that if she reveals it that it would destroy the foundations of her family, so she’s carrying all this weight with her. There’s this ghost in, what we’ll call, purgatory who is trying to free her, it’s the ghost of her father who is trying to communicate with her. I’ve written it and I’m going to try to do some work on it. I sat with Jim [Sheridan[ last night and as usual he blew my head off and I’m going to have to go back and have another go at it!"
