Acclaimed filmmaker, editor, sound designer and sound recordist Tadhg O'Sullivan introduces The Swallow, his narrative feature film debut, which premieres at this year's Dublin International Film Festival.
There was a moment early in the making of The Swallow when I began to question, with a rising panic, my move to drama filmmaking.
I had made numerous documentaries - observational films, essay films, films made entirely of archive. Films about people, places, politics – a film about the moon. In each of them there was a wonderful lack of control – you just went with what the real world brought and improvised. Now I was standing in a bare house on the Co. Clare coast and a man called Tim was asking me what kind of curtains I was thinking for the kitchen. I had never chosen a curtain in my life and I had no idea.
This was pre-production on my first drama film and there were three weeks before the crew and screen legend Brenda Fricker would arrive. It wasn't just the curtains – the house needed to be transformed into a believable home for a believable character. A house deeply lived in, full of the clutter and artefacts of an elderly artist who had never lived anywhere else.
I had met Tim a few weeks before. Tim knew what he was doing. Tim had worked on The Banshees of Inisherin. Tim had filled my inbox with sketches and photographs, ideas and colours. Images of Louise Bourgeois in her studio. A remarkable sketch of Brenda Fricker sitting by the window of the room we were standing in, surrounded by the very things I had struggled to describe properly.
Over the following weeks he transformed the place. Walls were painted; furniture was borrowed; paintings were hung; borrowed bookcases were filled with borrowed books. By the time we were ready to shoot the house looked exactly like the house I hadn’t known I had wanted.
Art for me is about the human connections that are woven through it.
It was to be a film with a single character, who writes a letter to an unknown correspondent which forms the only spoken part of the film. The letter, and hence the film, would be about art, memory and the desire to hold on and to hand on. I had long felt an uncertainty about the treasuring of great works of art – I had questions about what is truly valuable. The film was to be a canvas to explore these questions through a character I would create with one of Ireland’s greatest actors. The scenes would be improvised – the idea was to create a character and a setting so true to life that my documentary instincts could kick in.
of an elderly artist who had never lived anywhere else.'
What nobody had ever told me was that art directors own the set. The film might have been mine, but the set was Tim's. He exuded charm, confidence and authority. He quietly, mysteriously created an atmosphere on set that made this small world by the sea entirely real in a way that allowed everyone to be their brilliant best. We quickly became friends in that way that can happen when you spend a lot of time with someone talking about what you find beautiful.
About a year after we finished shooting, I heard that Tim had died, suddenly and at an absurdly young age, while working in London. His heart.
As I struggled to finish the film in the months that followed, I began to understand my ambivalence towards the cult of preservation that surrounds 'great art’. I began to understand that while the objects of art do matter, and deserve to be treasured, so too do the human gestures in the making and in the sharing of art.
Art for me is about the human connections that are woven through it. The human connections between those who make it together; between those who make it and those who spend a brief moment with it. My hope is that the lasting part of The Swallow is the love with which it was made, and some small trace of the hands of those who made it real.
The Swallow receives its World Premiere at this year's Dublin International Film Festival, on Friday March 1st at the Irish Film Institute - find out more here.
