RTÉ.ie's Audrey Donohue speaks with John Carney, writer and director of new Irish film, Flora and Son, and one of its stars, 16-year-old Orén Kinlan.
John Carney has a reputation for doing us proud on the world stage – with much-loved films like Once and Sing Street under his belt, not to mention developing and directing Amazon Prime's hit series, Modern Love, it's safe to say that his latest feature, Flora and Son, is highly anticipated.
Flora and Son has been receiving praise from far and wide, so I start off by asking Carney the obvious - is he proud of the film - and his response lacked any sense of being jaded by the industry.
"Yes. I love it," he says, grinning. "I am really happy with it. I watched it in New York with a few people the other night and they were an interesting audience… there were grandparents and mothers, and fathers - an older crowd. Then a couple of them brought their grandkids with them, who were like 19 and 20."
The response blew him away. "They were coming out of this film talking about it in a way that you could sort of only dream of as a filmmaker, and I don't mean like giving it five star reviews, or, you know, saying it's the best film ever made or anything like that.
"They seemed grateful for an experience in the film in which they felt was kind of grounded and earthed and it wasn't a fantasy movie, but it also wasn't an action movie.
"Between these huge movies that have come out this year - that are by the way, great films and important films - we do need those films that just remind us of the small things in life and the small little mini triumphs, the daily triumphs… they're really important."
The film follows Dublin mother Flora, who lives in the Liberties with 14-year old son Max, and ends up going on a voyage of discovery when she learns guitar. A simple premise, this is the third of Carney’s films that he's set in Dublin, and has music as the heart. "I see that I now have a few similarly-themed films in Dublin at different times. It’s not that I have anything about Dublin particularly that I want to get off my chest, but I do have a thing about Dubliners."
He continues, "I think we are unique in the sense of it's a capital city, but it's a very small capital city and you can be a Dubliner from anywhere and you're likely to have had the same experiences as the Dubliner next to you on a bus - to have been on the Dart out to Killiney, to walk the beach there, to have gone out to Malahide… swimming at the Half Moon or Seapoint.
"And those things - the very fact that we as Dubliners are connected in that way because it's like a village, sort of changes the way we speak and I think those characters really interest me."
One such Dubliner who’s been sprung into the limelight after being handpicked by Carney to play the titular son in this film is 16-year-old Orén Kinlan.
Carney has shown in the past how he can identify unique young talent (case in point: Lucy Boynton and Ferdia Walsh-Peelo in 2016’s Sing Street) and give them a career launchpad.
He’s done it again here. With actress-of-the-moment Eve Hewson in the lead role, Carney needed a highly-able talent to play off her – and he found one in Kinlan, son of Love/Hate actor Laurence.
Carney reflects, "Orén Kinlan came in at the last moment and just kind of - I don't wanna put any other kid actors down - he was like an aul fella in a young person's sort of skin. Do you know what I mean?"
"He kind of walks on like he's done this a million times. And it was his first movie and I just love that about him."
He continues, "And he gave the character an extra little bit of depth because he is a weird little kid - not Oren - Max. He's an unusual guy, and Oren added to that.
"He gave the character sort of a sense of, oh, he's a plausible sort of character, I believe him."
Kinlan himself is nervous ahead of millions of eyeballs seeing the film both on the big screen and also on Apple TV+, a streaming platform that has 25 million subscribers worldwide, as well as 50 million additional viewers who have access to the platform when they buy an Apple device. Is there a sense of overwhelm for the school-goer?
Kinlan says, "It's a bit weird, you know going from like science [class) one day and maths, to the Flora and Sun Irish premiere or Toronto [Film Festival] or something like that. So it is a bit kind of crazy to the balance the two, but I think I'm managing alright."
On the enormity of potential streaming viewers, he says, "I'm trying not to think about it cos it makes me a bit more nervous in interviews!"
"But sometimes when I'm, like, lying in bed just before I go to sleep, I think to myself –'You're in a movie with Eve Hewson, Joseph Gordon Levitt and directed by John Carney’… it's just so kind of crazy to think about, but I'm managing all right so far."
The 16-year-old has not had any formal acting training whatsoever, but credits his love of acting to his father Laurence. "It was all through my dad, actually. I used to read lines for him when he did his auditions - I used to be in the background and I'd noticed that I'd get really into the characters that I wasn't even auditioning for.
"And I'd be doing over-the-top voices for them. That kind of sparked my interest in it, I suppose, and then I got into it from there and learned from my dad, because I think kind of the best thing for actors is to be is as natural as possible."
The film was a huge learning curve for the novice, between getting singing and rap lessons for the role, never mind having to deal with recognition.
The film had its world premiere at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Utah, and Kinlan says, "That was a surreal experience. I mean, the crowd that we had there was… it just didn't feel real. It felt like you were kind of dreaming… it was the first time I'd seen the film… [I was] just blown away by it."
When people came up to him afterwards to compliment him, he says, "It was very flattering but, I think like a lot of Irish people, I'm really bad at taking compliments. I was like, 'No, I wasn't that good in it' and stuff like that.
"It was very surreal. I got very emotional near the end hearing the audience clapping, it was just so amazing to be there."
With only a few roles in Flora, competition was rife, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, best known from major Hollywood pictures 500 Days of Summer and Inception, desperate to be cast as online guitar teacher Jeff.
Carney recalls, "Somebody had told me, 'He's read the script and likes it.’ I was, ‘Oh, I love that actor, but I don't think he's right for this’.
"I initially associated him with sort of button-down, handsome characters and Jeff is… very much LA, suntan, weather-beaten guy with his little mountain sort of shack or chalet up in the hill somewhere. He's given up on fitting into the music industry. He's calmed down in life."
A letter Gordon-Levitt wrote to Carney convinced him to take a chance. "I just didn't see how that would work with somebody like Joe, but then he made a great point to me in a letter. He said by all means, there's other guys, but I will give it this authenticity because I know that character, and I know Los Angeles - I've lived my whole life here and I know the canyons you're talking about… the slightly imperfect thing that you want to make, I'll make that with you."
Meanwhile, for Flora? "The second I met Eve about this, she was Flora, you know, after three minutes on Zoom."
Flora's impassioned speech on the loneliness of parenthood, where she bemoans the lack of support she had as a young mother from her friends, is a standout moment in the film, one that Carney said was partly inspired by guilt he now feels looking back at his relationship with friends who became parents 15 years before he himself did.
"We've [he and his wife, actress Marcella Plunkett, who has a role in this film] just become parents fairly recently and I think what I was trying to do with that speech was… I'm an old dad, so I didn't have kids until I was 44, and a lot of my friends have had kids back in the day, when we were in our 30s, or whatever.
"And I realize now that I was still having good fun and looking after my career and free to do all that, when lots of the creative people I knew had kids," he says, candidly.
He says, "I worried that I hadn't been there for them in the way that I would love people to be there now for my kids, and I felt bad at certain times that I just didn't understand what it would be like to have a kid.
"And so I thought that was interesting from Flora’s point of view to go, I had the kid really young and you were all going wild and having a brilliant time for ten years and I was basically tethered… and I found that that was my way of sort of forgiving or taking any judgement away because we're so quick to judge parents when we see them… and it's so unfair."
He also says, "The big thing that I’ve found as a parent [that helps] is when you know there's other people in it. It makes a difference. And Flora didn’t have that, and an essential part of being a parent is being able to not parent for five minutes and have somebody else look after this kid, just for a minute, to take a break."
He now realizes what he perceives as an error of his ways and recognises the challenge of rearing children while working. "Dublin's a village, and we should definitely double down on the idea of how do we make sure that parents can still work, but not have to not see their kid all the time, and to try and integrate work.
"I know I'm going to be bringing my kids to film sets, even if they run in and ruin a take."
Flora and Son is now in limited cinemas and will have a wider cinema release, as well as being made available on Apple TV+, from 29 September.
You can read RTÉ’s review of Flora and Son here.
