The Bleak Hereafter

“Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Fuck this bulllshit!’” Terry McMahon declares, sipping a cup of coffee in the Twisted Pepper on Middle Abbey Street. Dublin. “Honestly, I don’t care if people like the film, or if they hate it. I know it’s a divisive film. You have to embrace that.”

It’s a lesson that’s been hard-learned by the Irish director. Having poured his heart and soul into Charlie Casanova – a dark, twisted tale of a murderous sociopath that acts as a commentary of Ireland’s class divide – his script was rejected again and again. In desperation, the director posted a plea for volunteers on Facebook. “Immediately I was mortified, thinking, ‘God, what if no-one replies, I’ve made a fool of myself!”
Within 24 hours 130 people had responded. Charlie Casanova was on its way. With borrowed equipment, a frankly insane two-week shooting schedule and Hollyoaks’ star Emmet Scanlon playing the bombastic, arrogant titular role, the pressure was on for the cast and crew to deliver the film that Terry had envisioned. Because for McMahon, this film isn’t just a thriller. It’s a much-needed commentary on society in Ireland.
“Everything Charlie says is a lie, designed to get whatever he wants out of you. And like every standard psychopath, he will fake an emotion and use words, an articulation, twisting his phrasing until it has the desired impact. I see politicians do it all the time. And I’ve seen a lot of Charlies, particularly in the past few years.
“And I’m not suggesting that working-class is good and upper-class is bad. That’s a load of bollocks,” he continues. “There’s great and shit in both classes. I did see a level of violence in the language of the upper class that I’d never seen before. It manifested in a couple of instances, like the death outside of Annabel’s nightclub. That’s a clear, obvious example but it’s also about that question of what it means to be a man, this white-collar boxing thing. Does being a man mean you’re a constant fuck-machine capable of beating the shit out of somebody? The working-class go through this from a very young age. Charlie’s class experience is later. It’s like a late onset maturity that allows them to go, ‘I want to feel like a man, to know what it’s like not to be frightened.’ To me, it was a very clear metaphor for what’s happening in this country. I wrote it five years ago.”
The result of the no-budget production and McMahon’s intense vision was an uncompromising, difficult film that’s aggressive in both style and substance and, as he predicted, it’s been a divisive force. The Irish Film Board remained, em, disinterested.
“They fucking hated it!” Terry maintains. However, it won ‘Best Film’ at the DMV International Film Festival and Janet Pierson, producer of the South by Southwest Film Festival, declared in front of the world press that Charlie Casanova was her new favourite movie.
Still, some critics were less enthusiastic. Variety’s Andrew Barker wrote a scathing review, describing it as a “punishing experience” and “aggressively abrasive” – not something most filmmakers would be bragging about. But then, McMahon isn’t most filmmakers.
“I did an interview for NBC and the first thing I did was I brought up the review, and I quoted it word for word. And then I turned to the camera and said ‘Fuck Variety!’ Sometimes you have to say that filmmaking is not about Variety.”
And now – finally – studios have come round to Terry’s way of thinking. In a final, triumphant chapter in this David Vs. Goliath tale, Paul Higgins, co-founder of Optimum Releasing, declared the film a spine-tingling “masterpiece”. Studio Canal are currently hashing out the details of an Ireland and UK release. With Hollywood directors such as Kevin Smith drawing attention to the powers of self-distribution Stateside with his horror film Red State, does McMahon feel he may be kicking off a similar movement here?
“Maybe there are accidental revolutions. I’m not trying to say I’m spearheading one here. But there’s no excuse anymore. There’s so much technology at our disposal it’s possible to make a film for next to nothing. So if the voice is singular enough, and the content provocative enough, it will stand against multi-million dollar productions. That precedent is incredibly exciting.”
My eye strays to McMahon’s arm, where the tattoo he had inked while working on Charlie Casanova peeks from beneath his sleeve. A once-personal mantra is now a war-cry for other aspiring filmmakers.
“The Art is in the Completion,” it reads. “Begin.”

Charlie Casanova will be released in Ireland and the UK in early 2012.