After impressing audiences with His & Hers and Mom and Me, Irish director Ken Wardrop has taken on a different subject for his new documentary, Making The Grade. Alan Corr talks to him
"I don’t play piano and I haven’t got a note in my head," says director Ken Wardrop. "I don’t come from a musical family. My sister, who is 14 years older than me, she was the only one of us who had an opportunity to go to piano lessons and she failed miserably so I think my parents abandoned hope for us, which was probably a good call!"
Wardrop, who made acclaimed documentary films Undressing My Mother and His & Hers, may not seem like the ideal person to direct a film about the 30,000 students who prepare for piano exams every year in Ireland. However, he is a director who has made a career from finding connections between people.
"My partner plays piano and we have a piano in our house now," he says. "It just got me thinking of pianos and I thought I could come up with an abstract film on pianos and the life of a piano and so forth but as I investigated further - I’m just someone who is drawn to relationships and connections - I thought maybe there’s something in piano lessons."
Over the course of the gentle and delightful Making The Grade, we encounter wannabe key ticklers of all ages, shapes and background, from the heavy metaller who wants to broaden his musical palette and maybe go a bit Deep Purple, to a precocious 10-year-old prodigy who seems destined for the stage, to a young girl with cerebral palsy who uses music as a way to deal with her daily battles.
And perhaps most charmingly, five-year-old Harry who is clambering onto the piano stool for only the second time when we first meet him.
They’re all here, from no hopers to high achievers. Wardrop frames the movie using the piano grading system, from Grade One to Grade Eight, as a way of examining the special bond that develops between piano teachers and their pupils.
"Across all our research we were looking for a diverse range of subjects and hopefully we found that," he says. "We have the rocker, we have someone who has decided to study piano through two teachers - one for performance and one for classical and it’s fantastic that someone would be so ambitious to do both."
So it’s not quite Whiplash for the middle classes. "I don’t think the stakes are too high," Wardrop says. "I would have been someone who’d be scared and anxious about doing any form of exam. I think some children take it in their stride and realise it is nothing more than progressing to the next stage.
"Of course, there are kids in the mix who are desperate to get the A grade and they’re the kids who intend to go a little bit further with it and there are one of two children in the film who’d you expect to go on and do piano and university level and then there are the kids who are use doing it for a pastime among all their other pastimes."
"I’m just someone who is drawn to relationships and connections - I thought maybe there’s something in piano lessons." - director Ken Wardrop
He found the many subjects in the film by breaking down the country into the four provinces to get a good geographical spread. Then he approached individual piano teachers from each province and he was also given strong support from the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
From students to teachers, there are 51 participants in Making The Grade and each represent a different stage in the learning process and a different technique in teaching piano.
44-year-old Wardrop, who is from Portarlington in Co Laois, says he never encountered any Mrs. Worthingtons during the process. "I think most parents are maybe a little bit too enthusiastic at times," he says delicately.
"It’s a mixed bag. When it comes to music and pushy parents, and by the way, this film is about every person’s journey through the music so we didn’t have the protégés of which you would be probably find that kind of parent. They’re students who excel and are competing in these musical competitions.
"This film wasn’t so much about that as the `every person’’s journey so I didn’t come across pushy parents that much but having said that I always found it encouraging if parents were interested because I think that’s no bad thing. If you were like me when I was a kid, your parents would have given up hope!"
There are some standout students, often for very different reasons. In Derry, the precocious and prodigious Rosa O’Reilly seems to leave her teacher, Mrs McGinley, more impressed with every lesson, while the sight of a hirsute rocker of a certain age sitting beside his teacher at an elegant piano and patiently and painstakingly coaxing out notes is an image to treasure.
"It’s a great cross section," says Wardrop. "Someone like Rosa just stands out because of her precocious and confident nature and she was exactly as she was on camera. She is someone who is at heart a performer and music means a lot to this girl. You can see her moving forward in life where music will be constantly with her and I would see her looking to be an entertainer later in life."
"When I starting making this film I thought it was going to be much more abstract but I was drawn to the relationships between these teachers and students."
Angela Morley is also an inspiration. She’s a young girl with cerebral palsy who spices up her scales and practise pieces by singing raps about the challenges she faces. "Music means so much more for her," says Wardrop. "It’s such an important part of her life because of the concerns she has in her day to day life and she turns to music and finds solace in that."
This is Wardrop’s third documentary film, following Undressing My Mother, which won a European Film Academy Award. He followed that with his debut feature His & Hers and Mom and Me, an examination of the bond between mother and son filmed in Oklahoma.
Making The Grade strikes the right note with his motivations as a filmmaker. "I’m all about finding connections, between people or between the audience and the subject," he says.
"When I started making this film I thought it was going to be much more abstract but I was drawn to the relationships between these teachers and students and this was a window of opportunity to explore those relationships and reveal a little bit about human nature.
"I went around the country for three months to make this film over one beautiful summer," he adds. "I went to Crosshaven in Cork up to Derry and over to Connemara and I met the most beautiful people. What other profession gives you those opportunities to record and be part of someone’s life for a brief moment? This is a film about the celebration of music."
Making The Grade opens at the IFI, Dublin, The Light House, Dublin, and Pálás, Movies at Dundrum on Friday. April 13 and will be shown in selected cinemas nationwide.
