The Odd Couple

An early runner for homegrown film of the year, When Brendan Met Trudy sees Booker Prize-winner and celebrated screenwriter Roddy Doyle return to contemporary Dublin after his acclaimed historical novel A Star Called Henry.

The movie sees ineffectual schoolteacher and film bore Brendan (played with assured deadpan wit by Peter McDonald) have his world turned upside down by feisty blonde Trudy (big-screen newcomer Flora Montgomery). As it turns out, the personality clash is the least of Brendan's problems, with Trudy's regular nocturnal absences seeming to hint that she may be a serial castrator stalking Dublin after dark...
The project marks quite a new departure for Doyle. Firstly - in accordance with social changes in his native city - it takes place in a considerably more cosmopolitan and affluent environment than that made familiar by the Barrytown trilogy. Furthermore, unlike The Snapper, The Commitments or The Van, this is the first time the acclaimed novelist has written directly for the screen, rather than adapting his existing works.
Directorial duties are handled by Kieron J. Walsh, making his cinematic debut with this madcap romantic comedy. While he had already established himself in television with hit series such as A Young Person's Guide To Becoming a Rock Star, it was after collaborating with Roddy on the short film Hell For Leather that the novelist became convinced Kieron was the right man to take the helm for Brendan Met Trudy. Following in the footsteps of Alan Parker (Commitments), Stephen Frears (Van) and Michael Winterbottom (Snapper), Walsh thus becomes the first Irish director of Roddy's work, and this instinctive familiarity aids the film's gentle irony at the expense of Celtic Tigerland no end. Doyle, it appears, wouldn't have contemplated entrusting the project to anyone else.
"I was invited to write for the Two Lives series," he explains, "it worked out at a 30-page project, and I had an idea pretty quickly about what I wanted to do. It seemed like a nice diversion from what I normally do, and then the invitation came from David Blake Knox at RTE, and he had a list of five directors, he showed me the work of some of them and it left me cold, and he showed me Kieron's work and it left me (pauses and laughs) hot. So Kieron eventually got the job, and we worked on it, and there wasn't really all that much work involved 'cause it was a fairly small job - but we had great fun, we got on very well socially and professionally, and then when I started writing what became When Brendan Met Trudy, I was very keen that Kieron come on board, I thought immediately quite very early on in the process that this would suit Kieron. So I finished the script - I think a second draft of the script had gone through with the producer Linda Miles - I asked Kieron if he wanted to read it, and we took it from there."
"To be perfectly honest," opines Walsh, "if it wasn't for Roddy and Linda's conviction that I was the right man for the job, I would have been dumped a long time ago, because I'd never made a feature film before. So you start to think 'How the fuck am I going to get in to making a film in the first place?' when you've never done one before, it's your classic Catch 22 situation. But Roddy and Linda were quite determined that I was going to do it, thankfully - and here we are."
Both A Star Called Henry and Brendan met Trudy seem a lot less reliant on the rhythms of speech that have made Doyle's work famous. How does this come about?
"Obviously one piece of dialogue is bigger than another piece of dialogue, but it's always work," says Doyle. "Sometimes it's easier than others: the most conscious work was with Trudy's dialogue. She drops out of nowhere into his life, and I wanted her - although she's very comfortable in Dublin - not to be self-evidently cool, that there was a timelessness to her language, and if you take out some of the expletives she could almost be speaking two hundred years ago. It's a language that's not cluttered by fashion or by the current buzzwords or phrases. I knew she was going to be from the west or the south of Ireland, and I love the speed of her speech and the music of it, and I was very keen that her dialogue would be different to a Dublin woman speaking. And so that demanded a lot of thought - but it was a joy, 'cause I love it. You've got two working-class characters, you have to take into account their age, for example - like a word like 'bowsie', which I would use fairly automatically - probably if I was ten years younger I wouldn't use it, and if I was 20 years younger I might not know what it meant." (It translates as 'scumbag')
Is Ireland, in Doyle's estimation, more class-divided now than ever before?
"I suppose it's a lot more stark in many ways, if you want to go looking for it, because it's very evident that there are a lot of people who have - and that means the people who don't have are proportionately a smaller group than they used to be, and relatively more desperate within the overall picture. One of the tyrannies of New Ireland - and I'm glad I live in it, to be honest with you, I'm not going to start sneering at it - but because things have gone well economically and culturally with Riverdance and the Corrs etc. etc. (laughing) - and Westlife of course! - this great outpuring of talent, but seriously, there is some great work as well.... there's a certain smugness abroad that 'Ireland is great, Ireland is sexy, Charlie McCreevy can go to Europe and tell them all to fuck off, don't we love it'. There's this theory that all our problems have disappeared, which of course they haven't. The term 'full employment' has actually been seriously used, I saw some politician on Questions ... Answers saying 'We now have full employment'. It's a statistic that hides the reality that there isn't full employment and never will be full employment.
"When Brendan Met Trudy, it's fair to say, doesn't tackle these problems. It looks at one or two of them, but it isn't exactly social comment. There's a lot of bleating in the press about how materialistic we've become and how greedy we've become, and it's as if they're fondly harking back to the good old days of the 1980's. My memories of the 'good old days' are pretty stark, I spent my time trying to teach miserable kids in the knowedge that most of them would be getting the boat and going to some place like Luton or Coventry, or illegally going to America because there was no work for them here. I wrote a book about an unemployed plasterer, and there's no such thing at the moment 'cause they're all employed, we've got middle-aged men on speed trying to plaster as many things as possible before the end of the week - and it's great! How can you argue with it? People like money in their pocket - and we're supposed to feel guilty about it? It's supposed to be a bad thing?"
When Brendan Met Trudy touches briefly on immigration, although Doyle denies any deliberate issue-tackling intent.
"It's not necessarily focusing on immigration as such, it's just attention to detail. It's an acknowledgement of the fact that in 2001 it's very lazy to have a street scene in Dublin with all-white faces. If you're doing a documentary, it may well be that you'd put your camera on O'Connell Street for ten minutes and by sheer coincidence nobody from outside Ireland would walk by - but it's highly unlikely. So it was a tricky one to work into the script because it is after all a romantic comedy; so it had to fit into the storyline. It couldn't be just an insert or an afterthought: 'hey, let's do this because we disagree with the way refugees are treated'. But if I'm writing about a contemporary world, I'd like not so much to celebrate multiracialism - although I'm personally happy about it - as to acknowledge it.
With its constant shifts in mood from romantic comedy to dark thriller and back again, Brendan Met Trudy must have been difficult tone-wise to direct?
"I suppose the most important thing was that we decided that the relationship be real," Walsh replies, "and that the two main characters were real and that it would be a real relationship with real concerns," he testifies. "And then the world around them could be as wacky as need be. The intention was to be playful - the script was playful, and I wanted the film to be playful and anarchic and irreverent. Essentially it's a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back-again story, but it's the small stuff surrounding that central story that makes it original. I mean at one stage you start watching the film and it could be a dark thriller on a rainy street in Dublin, then there's the hint of a castration story, and then it's two lovers on the run robbing stuff...it just snakes, twists and turns, and in that way it's playful.
"One thing I was very careful of also was that the whole movie-reference thing didn't drown the film, so that people who weren't up on their movie references didn't feel alienated by it. In some cinemas, when they see the A Bout de Souffle reference with them walking down the street speaking French, it will go straight over their heads and they'll think 'why the fuck are we listening to someone speaking French here?"
Doyle had stated that after a Star Called Henry he wanted to do something that was very familiar, so he wrote something about a teacher who is also a film bore. Everyone knows he was a teacher: is he a film bore?
"Well, that depends first of all on whether you like films," Doyle laughs, "and secondly, whether or not you want me talking about them. I love film, and I love talking about them and I love watching them, I've been inflicting them on my kids of late and they seem quite happy about it. Yeah, I love films - the idea sort of grew when I was on the last run of A Star Called Henry and I was keen to do the antidote, to write something that didn't have any research in it whatsoever. Teaching, obviously, was very familiar to me, and also the comic possibilities in teaching - it's a funny job, inherently, although it doesn't feel like it at the time. In a way, you know that even if you think you're a relatively good teacher, and you dress in a way that isn't absurd, you still know you're a figure of fun, essentially. If you're lucky it's a benign type of slagging that you get, but you know that you're an absurd figure and you always will be. And I was actually quite happy with that when I was a teacher myself and actually played on it quite a lot, and I just knew that teaching - even though it was the only job that I was familiar enough with to write about - that the comic potential was there as well. So that's where the autobiographical stuff ends, actually - because he's a teacher and he's a film-lover. After that... my wife, as far as I know, was never a professional thief."
You've never suspected her of castrating men on the sly, either?
"No, I haven't! I can say that with my hand on my heart... I can say that with me hands on me bollix!"
Are there any plans to film Paddy Clarke or The Woman Who Walked Into Doors?
"The next will be A Star Called Henry, and Michael Winterbottom will be directing it, I hope. If it's made, 'cause you're talking about vast amounts of money and all sorts of different factors that have to come together, and I have to write the script first. The thing about Paddy Clarke... when I won the Booker Prize, there was huge interest in it suddenly from the film world, and a lot of it seemed to be just people wanting the property so they could put it up on the shelf to make sure nodody else does it. So I was keen that, if it was ever to be made, it would be made by people who genuinely wanted to make it. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was inspired by a television series (Family) and I think it would be creative suicide to make it a film script."

When Brendan Met Trudy is currently on nationwide release.