Wee Will Rock You - An Interview with Darren Thornton

A Drogheda native, lifelong film fanatic and youth collaborator, director Darren Thornton has combined all of his passions in his stunning film, A Date For Mad Mary. The story of a young Drogheda woman struggling to find herself when her one real friendship falls apart, the films taps into the subtle yet devastating ways that women can hurt each other. The complexity of female social warfare is portrayed with painful accuracy – so how the hell did Thornton manage to tap into it so readily?

“I don’t know!” laughs Thornton. “I just listen a lot. Growing up, a lot of my closest friends were girls and for some reason I remember becoming that person that girls told their problems to. We would have long, deep chats – the phone bill was always an issue in my house because of it! At the time, I just loved that I got to talk to girls! I found it easy to click into that frequency.”

Darren wrote the film with his younger brother Colin, adapting the screenplay from a play they had written with actress Yasmine Akram who’s known for playing Janine in BBC’s Sherlock. The director says that the theme of friendship and alienation always fascinated him.

“Many people have those really intense friendships when you’re young, particularly girls, where you kind of define yourself as a part of this unit,” muses Thornton. “So when that’s taken away from you, you don’t know who you are. In this film, Mary [played by Seana Kerslake] really doesn’t know who she is if she’s not the crazy girl in partnership with this other crazy girl, where they’re both hellraisers causing trouble. When her friend moves on, she’s left alone, and so is forced to confront those big scary questions about who she is, and what she wants her life to be. Can she move on, too? And Mary is someone who doesn’t have a lot of skills at connecting with other people – which is a literal issue, but can also be a stand-in for a time in many people’s lives, when they’re a bit older and it’s harder to make those lifelong friendships that were so available in school.”

The film is filled with salty humour, but also addresses class, sexuality and prejudice in a small-town setting – a beautiful result of Thornton’s varied influences.

“Me and Colin love John Hughes’ films,” says Thornton, “but we also love Ken Loach films, so we had this cinematic spectrum and wanted to draw from both sides of it. We wanted to tell a story that was uplifting in a real sense, but that was also about a true original, someone who was always on the outside looking in.”

Set and shot in Drogheda, Thornton says that the characters are fictional creations, but that he and Colin “did draw on our experiences of having a love-hate relationship with a town that can feel very oppressive at times when everyone knows all about you.”

He also drew from his wealth of experience working with young people in community outreach programmes. These often include disadvantaged kids and young offenders, who are helped through an involvement in theatre and film.

“One of the biggest programmes we do is Sharp Focus, where we commission four established screenwriters and four directors to work with communities in the border regions, to create work around the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland. So each team works with ten students over six months, and the result is the young people starring and working on their own short film which is produced by a professional crew.”

It was through working with young people that he noticed that gay women face a particular form of prejudice, which influenced his decision to make Mary fall for another young woman during the film.

“We noticed that young women can be much more homophobic towards other women than young boys can be now,” the director comments. “Colin was doing a workshop with a group of young women in Belfast and LGBT stuff came up, and they were so homophobic. Even though they had a lot of gay friends who were boys, there was a real resistance to being friends with gay women.”

Mary’s tender and slowly building relationship with Jess (Tara Lee) thus further alienates her from her old friends; a romance and a friendship break-up, all in one.

“LGBT characters absolutely do need more representation onscreen,” says Thornton, “but we didn’t go in to writing with that as an agenda. We just thought that for this character to connect with a woman would be really hard for her to deal with on her own. Also we thought it’d be something that her old friends would be uncomfortable with, further alienating her. Though if it helps open up conversations about young LGBT people and supporting them, all the better.”

A Date For Mad Mary is in cinemas now.