Hats off to the busker man

ithout wishing to sound like a clap-trap merchant, or – heavens forbid – an astrologer, with certain projects, sometimes all the right stars come out.

Unspecified bodies in the cosmos must surely have got aligned for Once, a delightfully bittersweet micro-budget Irish indie musical. Huh? Yes, you did just read those words in that order.
Winner of the World Cinema Audience Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and recipient of the inaugural audience award at the recent Dublin International Film Festival, director John Carney’s film has cheered anyone lucky enough to have caught it. “The sort of completely un-hyped, unheralded little gem you go to a festival like Sundance hoping to find and, every once in a while, do,” said The Village Voice. “A true pleasure that only the rankest cynic couldn’t enjoy,” trumpeted Cinematical. Unsurprisingly, Fox Searchlight, the distribution division behind Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine, have snapped up the rights for North America.
It’s an unlikely reception for a production that cost €100,000 and features eight full songs. Even Glen Hansard, Once’s dog-earred romantic lead, expresses surprise at how well the movie came together.
“Yeah,” nods Glen. “If anybody had said to me that some guy had made a film about a busker and a girl he meets, I would have thought, ‘rubbish’. Loads of people in Sundance came up and said – ‘You know what? I read the synopsis of your movie and thought it was shit but now I’m impressed.’ So that was lovely because I wasn’t even sure how it would go. When John (Carney) kept asking for songs I was having a great time writing them. But when he told me he was going to use all of them I just thought there was no way we’ll get an audience to sit through eight songs. I just said ‘whatever’ and figured he’d come to his senses. But he was right. It worked.”
Shot in lo-fi verité, John Carney’s singular musical takes a naturalistic approach to a generally fanciful genre. Eschewing choreography and chorus line for knackered guitars and sing-alongs, Once succeeds as a grounded gritty operetta where similarly minded ventures Romance And Cigarettes and Dancer In The Dark have stumbled.
“So you want to make a tiny little Irish film that is also a musical?” says Mr. Carney. “Well, here’s the rules – everything has got to be in context so the film has to be about musicians. Rule number two – let’s not do scenes where people are running down the street joyously. They can walk down the street singing along with headphones instead.”
With this etiquette in place John, a former bassist with The Frames, approached Glen to write songs for his project. It was initially assumed that an actor, most likely Cillian Murphy (star of Mr. Carney’s debut feature On The Edge), would take the lead role. Happily, things didn’t go according to plan.
“I thought about a few actors to play the role of the guy in it,” explains the writer-director. “I had gone over to London to meet with some bigger actors and before I left I said to Glen – just as a theoretical thing – what about you? Would you think about? And after that it became very clear to me that the best person to sing the songs was Glen. You’ll never get anyone to sing a cover version in quite the same way. This film was all about authenticity – instead of walking from just off camera we’d make them walk that little bit further so they’d be out of breath. So why get an actor? They won’t really care about the material. For them it’s always part of a show reel.”
It also helped that Glen already knew the leading lady, Markéta Irglová, his real-life musical partner. Once, which traces the whirlwind relationship between a heartbroken busker (Mr. Hansard) and talented pianist (Irglová) recently arrived from Eastern Europe, is not entirely dissimilar to Glen and Marketá’s own story.
“We first met about five or six years ago when The Frames were over in my country, the Czech Republic,” recalls Marketa. “My dad was organising these gigs so we ended up meeting all these people at a party that my family threw. Glen was there and we were sitting around the fire playing guitar and singing. I had a piano in my room so we played around on that. And the next day Glen got me up to sing a song at the gig. I guess that was the start of something. Then it became me playing piano on some of the songs, then it became a kind of CD as a document of what we were doing.”
“Mar(kéta) has such an extraordinary talent,” continues Glen. “I was blown away by her and the influence she had on me. I was having a little bit of trouble here at the time between flats and Mar had said if you ever want to come back and spend some time. So I went there to write songs for a few weeks and Mar was accompanying me on piano. And it turned into something. We wrote ‘Falling Slowly’ that time and I remember thinking – piano is a whole different world, a whole new approach to writing songs.
“Before we knew it we were on tour. And it was the first time that I stepped away from The Frames and thought ‘I’m having a really good time doing something that bears no relation to rock n’ roll.’ We wanted to celebrate our friendship with The Swell Season but it just so happened that John was looking for a piano player from Eastern Europe. So I recommended Mar and she was cast and then I was cast. And now it’s a further document of our relationship.”
Though this tender romantic friendship at the heart of Once immediately recalls the unrequited dalliance in Sophia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, John Carney’s film is, unusually for a work so wistful, primarily mediated through a male gaze.
“I only heard ‘Lies’ after we had started,” says John. “And I thought it was really perfect for the film. There’s such a great male perspective to it. I could immediately see old movies of his girlfriend smiling into the camera. To sing the words “you’re lying” is so powerful. But it’s not an angry rock song – it’s a romantic sweet song. And that’s how Once is.”
Once is on general release now