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The Interview Martina Niland’s film Once is a worldwide hit, but she remains proud of her Westport roots.
Stories on screen
Martina Niland’s film Once is a worldwide hit, but she remains proud of her Westport roots
The Interview Aine Ryan IN the opening scene of Martina Niland’s critically acclaimed movie Once, there is an attempted robbery. The sequence is slapstick hilarity at its best. Ironically though, it proved so convincing for one concerned citizen – who happened to be passing the low-key shoot on Grafton Street – that he intervened and kneed the actor-robber in the groin. That’s just one of Martina Niland’s reams of yarns about making the low-budget movie, currently taking America by storm. Martina and I are sitting in a sun-baked corner of Westport’s Linenmill restaurant with Bart Piano Solo tinkling the ivories in the background. She has just arrived in her hometown by the morning train, her first trip to Mayo since last March. Officially, she’s home for the screening of her movie as part of the Westport Arts Festival’s busy programme. The DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology) Communications and Broadcasting graduate is a busy girl these days, with a huge slate of possible films on her cluttered desk at Samson Productions. She is bemused when this writer turns on her tape recorder and immediately zooms back to her childhood, spent on a dairy farm in Garrew, on the outskirts of Westport. When did Hollywood first beckon? Were those early years suffused by fantasies of cameras and sets, rushes and cuts? When did she first know she was bound for the big screen? “No. I wasn’t enthralled by how movies were made. But, I loved anything with Bette Davis, those films noir. I particularly loved Mildred Pierce [a 1945 film noir in which Joan Crawford won an Academy Award]. It was all very much on the surface level, the stories, the characters fascinated me,” she recalls. “Another big thing I remember is Sunday afternoons, after coming home from Mass. It’s a shame they’re gone now, but there used to be great old movies on RTÉ 2, old 1940s and 1950s films. I’d be glued to the telly. We were all very close in age and the others would be coming in giving off about me hogging it,” she says with a smile. Martina is the third eldest of Mary and Patsy Niland’s seven children, two boys and five girls. A self-confessed tomboy, she had ‘a very normal and very good childhood’, and warmly extols her parents’ ‘grounded attitude’ as being a major contributory factor. “I was very happy as a child. Wandering and running around, a bit of a tomboy. I was very close to my brother Pádraic, in particular. Still am. Pádraic is younger than me by a year and a half and he’s a plumber. His first-born, Emma, is my godchild,” says Martina, her deep voice straining over the increasing din of lunchtime festival goers. “I’m a Pisces, a bit of a dreamer. I live in my head. I’ve always lived in my own head. As a kid I’d wander off across my Dad’s farm. I’d wander off and make up stuff. Live in a pretend world, after watching those movies. Then I’d go off wandering through the fields and I’d be talking to the characters.” Naturally, those odysseys and idyllic indulgences, through the fields of Aughagower, led to the occasional parental intervention. “They may have been grounded but that doesn’t mean they didn’t chase us around with the wooden spoon, but they never did anything with it,” she smirks wryly. “They trusted us to do the right thing and we trusted them.” After attending the Sacred Heart Secondary School in Westport, Martina set off on the lonely pilgrimage across the country to university. Even though it initially broke her mother’s heart when she left, when she wanted to pack it all in and come home two years later, it was her mum who convinced her to persevere. “I wasn’t lonely, I had lots of friends, it was just that I was a home bird,” she explains. At secondary school, Martina had loved English and history. For her, history was nothing more than individual stories stitched together through time – she was fascinated by Bismarck, the World Wars, the Northern Troubles. “I remember for a Leaving Cert essay, picking Seán Barry – he was a kid caught up in the Troubles and involved in a riot. Essentially films are about individuals, families, their stories. Take Some Mother’s Son, it’s about people’s stories,” she explains. Imperceptibly putting on her producer’s cap, Niland then adds, emphatically: “When you’re pitching your concept for a movie, if you can’t tell it [the story] in a couple of sentences, don’t bother. You don’t know what it is yet. “It’s always about telling stories. If you pitch an idea and you’re trying to get money for it, you need to present its appeal within a few sentences. Or you’ll see the executives’ eyes glazing over pretty quickly.” Meanwhile, Niland’s temporary homesickness hadn’t clouded elemental decisions that would influence her career path, and, moreover, contribute to her meteoric success, about which she is both blasé and utterly humble. She chose DIT over DCU because the course at DIT was 50 per cent theory and 50 per cent practical. “I was studying all these great film-makers but I wanted to get my hands on a camera,” she explains. “I wanted to just get out there and make some shorts. I suppose the first two years I had a general grounding in broadcasting and radio and for the last two, I could choose. There were far less students doing the film than the broadcasting because, I suppose, there are more jobs in broadcasting. At this stage, all the other students [who chose the film modules] wanted to either direct or be behind the camera. So I’d say ‘I’ll produce it,’.” “The producer is involved from development management [of the raw] script to fixing its flaws, to bringing it to where you say ‘This is fairly good’, to going out there and looking for production money, wherever that is in Ireland or the UK. “I’m a hands-on producer, but not too much, because you can’t smother a director. You work through a collaborative process, which involves the development, the financing and, of course, who’s going to be in it. At the end of the day, the end product is about the 90 minutes on the screen. People don’t care about whether it cost €2 million or €200,000,” explains Niland. Both Pavee Lackeen – Niland’s other high-profile award-winning film, co-produced with Perry Ogden – and Once, were low-budget movies. For example, Once had a tiny budget of €185,000 – €100,000 from the Irish Film Board’s Micro Budget Scheme, €50,000 from Samson, the film production company where she works and €35,000 from RTE. The simple love story – with its seven songs – was shot over 17 days in Dublin in January 2006. The quirky sense of serendipity so beautifully realised in this sensuous snapshot of two lives that become intimately intertwined is wonderfully echoed in the real lives of those involved. “I had a phone call from [director] John Carney in 2005. I knew him through [the RTÉ series] Bachelors’ Walk. He said ‘I’d love to talk to you about a project’. So we met in a pub over a pot of tea and he showed me the 40-page script. I said: ‘John, I’m not making anymore short films’,” comments Martina. In another life Carney was a bass-player with The Frames. So enter stage right: Glen Hansard. Once’s leading man ‘is a gem’, according to Niland. The Frames’ lead singer was also the teenage actor called Outspan in The Commitments. “And when I saw him and Marketa [Irglova] playing one of the songs together, Falling Slowly, I was immediately convinced. She’s a classical pianist. Of course, little did I think as we shot the movie with Sony DVDs (tiny tapes), taking serious risks all over the place, that it would win the Sundance [World Cinema Audience] Award,” reflects Martina. We are now standing outside the restaurant in the scorching afternoon sunshine. Her sister has phoned to check if she’s ready. The modest movie-maker is anxious and excited to get home to see her parents. Later that evening she will answer audience questions at the Westport Film Club’s screening of the film. Before she leaves, she declines to elaborate on the off-screen relationship that developed between Hansard and Irglova. (They’re touring the US at the moment, and word is that Bob Dylan has asked The Frames to play support to his upcoming tour.) “They don’t talk about the relationship but they were always hugging and laughing on the set. Very sweet,” she concludes. Martina Niland was already looking forward to dressing-down for a late afternoon walk through the fields. During her pastoral reveries she admits she still smiles at how it all began and the serendipity of the pure Sundance award. “I would love,” she says, “if somebody handed me a script on Mayo.”
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