As Mister John gets set for it’s UK theatrical release, we had the opportunity to sit down and discuss the forthcoming feature with its director – and married couple – Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy.
Mister John tells the story of Gerry (Aidan Gillen), who flies out to Singapore following his brother’s untimely death to take over his business and accompany his grieving family, where a crisis of identity ensues. Lawlor and Molloy discuss the casting of Gillen for the lead role, as well as how working so closely together affects their personal lives, while the former also tells us exactly what he thinks of Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln…
The film begins with a dead body floating in a lake. Can you tell us about the decision behind that as an opening shot?
Christine: Well John is such a powerful presence in the film and there is an argument that we should never see John and that he remains this mysterious, elusive presence and not there, but we decided no, we want his corpse in the lake, and then we want it laid out in the morgue. We want to see John and we want to see Gerry engage with John and make that connection. But you know, it sets up a tone and a mood and an atmosphere right from the beginning. There is kind of a mysterious element to it as well, and if that doesn’t get you interested and in the right frame of mind, then we’re screwed. Another really important aspect to that is the music that plays in that opening sequence, to maybe give you a few clues as to what kind of experience you might be in for with this film. But you know, a body, an absence, I love films that start that way [laughs]. We’ve got another film that starts with a hint of a body, but not an actual body, and we never find out if they died out or disappeared. But you know, how do you enter into the world of a film? I think there’s a compelling aspect to it.
Talking of your other film ‘Helen’ – you didn’t use any professional actors at all. How was the difference this time around where you used, established, experienced performers?
Joe: In reality, without any derogatory comments towards Aidan, not much difference at all. I mean what you do find, with both the people we worked with on Helen and those on this film, is that they’re all equally as generous and open-minded, so we wouldn’t want to work with anybody who wasn’t those things. Often you find yourself on a set and you’ve got a scene that might not work and you need to try it out, or you need the actor to try something out. You’ve got the lines written but they don’t need to be said, so you know, you need an actor who will be responsive to that and generous and not fussy or overly prima donna-ish and somebody who is courageous as well, and I think Aidan is all of those kind of things. The one key difference in this, is that you’re asking somebody to, almost like a musician, play along a certain kind of scale, and a non-professional actor actually doesn’t have the technique to play a range of things, so you have to choose the kind of range that does suit them, and then keep them within that range. One of your jobs as a director is not to make actors look bad, or do something that exposes them, and so obviously that’s a lot easier with somebody like Aidan Gillen, because his range is immense. However you might just want a performance like Annie Townsend’s in Helen, you just want that particular range and that’s perfect. If you have a professional actor they may want to show you all the gears they can do and you don’t want that. Sometimes you see films and you see somebody acting their cotton socks off and you think, I don’t want to look at you doing all this big acting, just keep it subtle, and you don’t see enough of that. Aidan is incredibly subtle in this film.
Christine: There is such a preconceived idea of what acting is and what good acting is, and how the awards system very narrowly defines that. In a way that it’s almost like one size fits all, whereas films aren’t all made in the same way and the intention from one film to the next can be very different, and I think that if you’re able to find the level of performance that works for the world you’re creating, and if you’re allowed the space to do that, that’s great. A lot of the times that’s not the case and there’s a really narrowly defined understanding of what performance should be, or what good acting is or isn’t. It’s almost like, if it’s not in your film well then somehow you have a problem.
Joe: It’s like the Oscar for editing is normally not for best editing, it’s for most editing. It’s a little bit like with all the other departments, particularly acting. The idea people have done well because they’ve made themselves look really ugly…
Suppose it’s a bit like with Daniel Day-Lewis playing Lincoln. You know he’s going to win Best Actor for it before it’s even gone into production…
Joe: Yeah, yeah. And actually it’s a terrible performance and it’s not a great film, and his performance is not that great. He has been brilliant in other films, and even though the acting in There Will Be Blood is amazing, there’s a level of subtlety to it as well.
Christine: That’s acting that serves the film and the vision of the film in There Will Be Blood. It’s not just really good acting, it’s like, this is what the film demands, and it’s fucking perfect for it. As long as it works with what the film sets out to do and belongs in the world of that film, that’s when it’s really as its most satisfying.
Joe: In terms of subtlety, and maybe I’m particularly drawn to it, is that it’s not often given its dayin terms of film, and I think someone like Joaquin Phoenix is a brilliant actor and he’s incredibly subtle and very watchable, but you don’t often see it. It’s a great shame. It’s often acting by numbers, and it’s not really the actors fault always, they can pushed by the direction – but Aidan was really great to work with and he’s a really compelling actor.
This film is so much about Gerry that it must have been a huge decision casting the role, especially as so much of this is subtext and what’s going on in his mind. How did Aidan come to be involved?
Christine: We had a real strong sense that Aidan was who we wanted to work with, so we approached him first and very, very early on in the process, before we even had a first draft of the script done. We gave him what we had and talked to him and he watched some of our films and then came back to us and said he was really keen. What we were thinking of was his performance in The Low Down, his performance was great and that’s what we wanted as a reference point for him. I didn’t actually see Queer as Folk until recently, but I really, really loved it and I really liked Aidan’s performance in it as well and I can see from that why he has gone on a certain journey as an actor, and a film like The Low Down kind of gets lost in his output, but I find his performance in that really interesting, and we asked him because of that film, not because of anything else he’s done.
Joe: We were looking for an Irish man in his late 30s, early 40s, and there are only two or three really, but we had him as our number one choice.
We were really impressed with some of the performances from the locals, how did you go about casting them? Was it all done out there?
Joe: It was very tricky.
Christine: We were there for most of the casting sessions, but there are no real casting agencies so it was hard to get people.
Joe: For example, there are two sound recorders in the entire country, so it’s kind of amazing. Whereas here, if I wanted a sound recorder tomorrow, there would be tons to choose from.
Christine: Our co-producer did a lot of the casting and open calls and put the feelers out. But as for Kim’s part, we met a number of women, maybe eight in total, and we wanted to work with somebody local and that was a priority of ours. It was tricky, because there isn’t a range of experience there and most of the actors are involved in TV and not film, and we wanted somebody who was comfortable with English as well, again that was tricky – and finally we wanted somebody in their mid-40s, so it was all really, really difficult. But Zoe Tay – she is the most well known actress in Singapore, she is the Queen of Singaporean TV. Some people thought, what are you doing working with Zoe Tay? She’s going to be really hard to work with… But she was absolutely brilliant from the get go.
Joe: It’s very hard to get Asian actresses over 40, because you’re either playing granny roles or young, beautiful women. So, and I imagine it’s like this with actresses over here and in America, but you enter into a certain age range and there’s a massive drop-off. It’s a great shame, and age seems to be even more of an obsession in Asia that in the UK or America. So it’s very tricky to get the role as well as that, especially as it’s such a tiny country.
You shot a short movie in Singapore – was it always your intention to return one day?
Christine: No, we were already working on our script, we were hoping to shoot it in Thailand where Joe’s brother lives and works, and that’s what we were going to do. But having worked in Singapore, we met people who asked us to reconsider setting the story in Singapore, and we weren’t sure about that initially and it took some convincing, because it’s a big thing to embark on, to totally rewrite the script for another location, but we did a lot of research, we talked to people and when we began the process we though, actually, this is really great, the film is going to benefit from this transporting. It opened things up for us and got rid of a lot of the baggage that was clinging on to it from it being in Thailand.
There are various themes at play in Mister John, you’ve got his relationship with his wife and daughter, overcoming his brother’s death and of course adjusting to a whole new culture. Was it a challenge for you to share the emphasis between all of these themes?
Christine: I guess we kept our eye very closely on Gerry and what is happening inside his head, and the baggage he comes over to Singapore with. Somehow the unpacking of that and the journey that he goes on is a very subtle, small journey and you could almost say it’s a journey in which he has his back to us at the beginning and turns around and faces us. It’s a small, contracted journey that we wanted to expand on and that’s what we were really keeping our eye on. It’s interesting for Aidan as an actor that something he really wanted to draw on, was being a foreigner in a different country, and that is there as well. If you take people away from things they know and transport them somewhere else and particularly if they’re on their own, things happen. It’s inevitable that things will happen and Aidan focused on that a lot, but what we were concentrating on was the other journey Gerry was on. But of course placing him in a completely different country, where it’s hot, humid, steamy, bright, sun-drenched and the language is different is just part of that journey.
Just finally, as a married couple, how was it at the end of a working day on set, to come home and be husband and wife again and not co-directors?
Joe: Really easy [laughs]. No, on the shoot it was very, very tough. In our projects, when we were here or in Ireland, we had our daughter with us. Filming is one thing, but parenting is another – and doing the two together was almost impossible.
Christine: We were living in a hotel and it was a nightmare, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I wish we had stayed in an apartment, and there are loads of things I wish we had done differently, because it was difficult from beginning to end, because you need to reflect and prepare for the next day, and it was really challenging to make all of that work with a child there.
Joe: Yeah it was very hard. But in general, we’ve been working together for 25 years and I think we kind of know how it’s functioning. Every time it’s different, but this was particularly difficult bloody hell. Our daughter really suffered as a result of hardly seeing us for weeks on end.
Christine: It’s taken her almost a year to actually think, ‘I’d love to go back to Singapore’, because when we left she was like, ‘I am never, ever going back there again, don’t ever make another film’.
So the next one will be set in London then?
Joe: If we do make a third film, which we’re working on, it will definitely be closer to home. You might end up with similar problems if you’re not careful, but it will be closer to home But she’ll be older by that point anyway, and at this stage, probably in her 40s.
Mister John is released on September 27, and our review can be read here.
