By re-visiting locations and delving into the RTÉ archives, presenters Carol Moran and Eoin Sweeney look at the stories behind the movies that put Ireland on the map in their new RTÉ Radio One series A Film With Me In It - listen to the show above.
In A Film with Us In It we’re on a mission to uncover the hidden and almost forgotten tales of the big film shoots that have happened right here in Ireland. With the focus not just on the professionals who have worked in front and behind the cameras but the people who, due to some quirk of fate have been swept up in the film business if only for a few heady days.
So, it’s to Waterford I head in search of the great auteur Stanley Kubrick, and the film locations for his 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon. Finding someone with memories of a film shoot from over 40 years ago seems unlikely but a few phones calls later and I’ve tracked down Mary Greene. Mary, along with the other girls and boys in sixth class at the national school in Rathgormack, was used as an extra in the film.
'Can I pop down at the weekend?'
We meet outside the church in the village of Rathgormack. I know it’s Mary because she’s holding a picture of her 12-year-old self dressed in full Georgian rig-out and then schoolpal Ann Prendergast arrives with a picture of her younger ringletted self seated in a beautiful carriage on the film set.
And we’re off, down to a field just outside the village – all rolling green and completely unspoilt – a time-forgotten place on the foothills of the Comeraghs. There’s a fence to be climbed. Then we’re in the very field where Leonard Rossiter and his fellow red-coats dance with the locals, including actress Gay Hamilton - the love interest of Ryan O'Neal in a memorable scene from the film.
All the years melt away as Mary and Ann tell me about the few magical days when they were kitted out in full period costume, describing the dresses, the hair, the pantaloons...
Once the carnival arrived in town, hundreds of extras and film crew crowded the village, catering trucks offered food to anyone interested regardless of their involvement in the film, there were free biscuits – as many as you wanted!
Ryan O'Neal was a huge Hollywood star after Love Story, but that film hadn't made its way to Rathgormack in 1973, still they remembered his tan and his perfect American teeth and that he said 'hi' when nobody was saying that then. Stanley Kubrick was directing him to look miserable while watching the dancers and the arm you can see on his right belongs to Mary.
'Thats my arm!'
And y'know, if it were my arm in a Kubrick film I'd be talking about it 40 odd years later, too.
Kubrick shot many locations throughout rural Ireland for Barry Lyndon, and some of the interior shots were filmed in the Ballroom of Powerscourt House just months before it was destroyed by fire but it’s there in the field in Waterford that I get a sense of the serendipitous events that brought the parish of Rathgormack into the Stanley Kubrick world if only for a few glittering days.
A Film with Us in It, presented by Carol Moran and Eoin Sweeney, is on RTÉ Radio 1 on Wednesdays at 10pm - find out more here.
