Director FINTAN CONNOLLY made a splash with his no-budget feature Flick, now he returns with low-budget romantic drama Trouble With Sex. PAULA SHIELDS talks to Connolly, producer FIONA BERGIN and the two main actors, RENEE WELDON and AIDAN GILLEN.

 

PAULA: You famously made your first feature Flick with no money on an 18 day shoot. What was the main thing you learned from such a baptism of fire?

 

FIONA: How do-able it was. When you’re making films on no budget it’s a different creature. When you’re funded it’s more orthodox. Expectations are more realistic about getting paid. There were good things about having money: you have more resources, more choices about what you can do. They were two different experiences.

 

The subject matter of Trouble With Sex couldn’t be more different than Flick. How did that come about?

 

FINTAN: Trouble With Sex coincided with the Irish Film Board announcing their low-budget initiative two or three years ago. When I was making Flick I really liked the idea of the relationship in the movie, but I didn’t have enough time to explore it. So after that, a relationship movie was what I wanted to make. The story is very straightforward, it follows the journey of a relationship beginning.

 

Casting the two lead roles, Conor and Michelle, was crucial. Do you have certain actors in mind when you are writing your scripts, Fintan?

 

FINTAN: Not really. When I wrote Flick I had no idea it was even going to be made. With Trouble With Sex, Renee Weldon came to an open casting. We went over to London, where she’s based, and we auditioned four actresses in an afternoon. She came in last and the light was kind of going down in the room. I really liked her. The same with David Murray in Flick, he just walked in the door. He told me afterwards he nearly wasn’t going to come in.

 

Renee Weldon and Aidan Gillen work really well together on screen.

 

FIONA: It’s funny that kind of alchemy. What’s the word ‘serendipity’?

 

FINTAN: We approached Aidan before Renee, but we got her first. Then Aidan came on board, he was still juggling a couple of things. When he came over he was straight off one shoot and onto ours, but he gave us an extra week and everything.

 

Aidan, what made you say yes to Trouble With Sex?

 

AIDAN: Ideally what you want as an actor is a good, interesting part you haven’t seen played 20 times before, in something that’s gonna be good. I’m looking for

stuff that’s not so straightforward or obvious. I’d seen Flick and I really liked it. I thought it really assured, there was something unusual about it. For a Dublin film it didn’t reference itself, people didn’t go on about being in Dublin ever. So I thought ‘well if it’s like that it’ll be alright.’

 

RENEE: That’s what I loved about the film: It wasn’t the West, it wasn’t the IRA, it wasn’t inner city Dublin – it was just about modern Ireland with all its cosmopolitan style, now. It could be set anywhere. It’s just a love story, it’s not specific to Dublin, I don’t think.

 

You were also taken with the character you portrayed?

 

RENEE: I just loved how strong Michelle was: how feisty, how independent, how intelligent – a modern businesswoman working in a very male environment, knowing what she wanted, very confident with her body. I thought I’d enjoy playing that – a bit of fun!

 

The traditional roles in this romance are reversed, aren’t they? Michelle is the go-getter in her personal and professional lives, the confident career woman, the sexual pursuer.

 

FINTAN: Absolutely! That idea emerged pretty early on.

 

FIONA: I think she starts out quite strident, but as the film goes on she softens up and you get to like her.

 

FINTAN: I think you start out wondering what is going on – hopefully! It shouldn’t be a rarity, on the other hand, because it’s a modern-woman idea. To be honest, they say that only 10% of roles are actually female and of that 10% a lot of them are just The Wife, The Girlfriend ot The Happy Hooker. The reaction to the screening at the Dublin International Film Festival was funny. Some of the older generation thought Michelle was quite voracious, whereas Aidan’s  character is a bit lost in his pub, in inertia almost.

 

I really enjoyed the fact that the film is not overloaded with backstory or unnecessary dialogue.

 

RENEE: If you look at the film as a whole, I don’t think there’s that much dialogue compared with how much screen time there is.

 

FINTAN: Someone pointed out a statistic that American movies have half the number of scenes of European movies, and they’ve got about two thirds of the dialogue of European movies. It’s an interesting contrast. Again, it depends on the actors. Aidan , unlike a lot of actors, likes to say less.

 

AIDAN: I’m usually trying to scrap tons of dialogue – there’s always too much. You read these scripts, and there’s about four hours of dialogue in them. Well there’s no way it’s all gonna to be used so why not be specific, pare it down to what needs to be said? I’m always happy to lose a line. We hacked away a bit, but we added stuff as well. I don’t think Flick was dialogue-heavy either – it was really fluid.

 

It was another quick shoot, wasn’t it, 28 days?

 

AIDAN: Everything is these days. The last few things I’ve done have been. It didn’t feel like a rush job though.

 

FINTAN: It was a pretty tight schedule. We were knocking off four or five little scenes or two or three big scenes a day, which was pretty good. Trying to keep them fresh, we didn’t do a lot of rehearsal (before shooting) because sometimes the first take I the most spontaneous. It allowed a certain looseness. It wasn’t the script verbatim, there was a lot of suggestions back and forth. You don’t get too precious once you get into it – whatever works!

 

FIONA: One of the good things was the small crew. The costs dictate a lot, but it’s quite a good thing, you don’t have that many people to move around. We were in main locations a lot of the time, which was also useful.

 

FINTAN: Also, we spent so much time preparing it when it came to shoot it went relatively quickly. We did on average three or four takes.

 

FIONA: The 35mm is good for that too. You know this notion that you can be shooting forever on digital or video?

 

And then you crucify yourself in the editing room…

 

FIONA: Exactly!

 

Trouble With Sex has a distinctive visual style. What kind of preparation went into that?

 

FINTAN: We were very fortunate in that we had a very good cameraman on both films, Owen McPolin. We know each other well, and we’ve worked together a lot. Even though we had done tests on high definition, we argued through Fiona to do Trouble With Sex on 35mm. It might be the last chance because high definition is taking over a lot.

 

FIONA: We did think that with this story that it would benefit from 35mm; there are a lot of things in the film that were slow and long, and that 35mm would really add to the mix.

 

FINTAN: We put a fair proportion of resources into the camera department, but Dublin is very photogenic. To be honest a lot of Dublin movies don’t really feature the city itself much – we know it quite well. It’s all shot in close proximity, except a couple of days in Wicklow.

 

FIONA: The apartment is down in the IFSC, and the pub is at the back of Holles Street Hospital. They were the two main city locations.

 

FINTAN: The pub had closed down a couple of years ago, and the license was gone. It was a long battle…

 

FIONA: …yeah, that’s one of the things that’s changed. On Flick, we had no money so we never paid any location fees, it never occurred to us! When we went round this time, it was much different. People are much more film-savvy now; they’d see you coming in the door and think, “Oh yeah, 10 grand.”

 

FINTAN: In the last five years, it has become like that. I’d be going to bars where, a couple of weeks before, a film like Laws of Attraction had paid maybe 20 grand for one night, and I’ve got maybe five grand for two weeks.

 

FIONA: So it was quite different, but persistence pays off.

 

FINTAN: Yes, on the other hand, people are still very helpful. With a good location manager you will get into places. There is still casual access here, and on the streets as well. You can put actors on Dame Street; people tend to be quite blasé; they don’t look into camera.

 

FIONA: They’re too cool to be looking into cameras, waving at their mothers!

 

The use of colours, the blues, reds and greens, is very strong.

 

FINTAN: Myself and Owen McPolin, without sounding too pretentious, looked at Hopper paintings and Caravaggio pictures. There is very little external daylight in the film, mostly it’s internal – same with Flick. I think everything always looks better at night-time. Dublin certainly does, anyway. When we were editing I thought it all looked good. I can’t think of a shot I didn’t like.

 

RENEE: Fintan and Owen really researched the look of the film. I remember them explaining to me the colour schemes for me and Aidan, the more we came together the more the lighting merged. I thought it was such a beautiful idea.

 

And what is the trouble with sex?

 

FIONA: A lot of the time it’s misunderstandings and missed cues that people fall out over, not the big stuff – particularly when people start going out.

 

FINTAN: The scene which drew some comment is the one where they go back to the apartment, they kiss and then he leaves. Some people liked that; some just didn’t get it. I like that idea of uncertainty.

 

FIONA: In that terrain, people are nervous.

 

FINTAN: The first love scene is a bit OTT, but I didn’t want it to be just hands on a bedstand.

 

FIONA: Or sheets pulled up…

 

FINTAN: Or just cut when they kiss!

 

FIONA: The post-coital sheet over the tits.

 

RENEE: The funniest thing was on the first day of my first sex scene, my parents decided to visit the set. I warned them, but they were very blasé about it. So Fiona tells me my parents are out on the balcony. I’m in my robe, Declan (Conlon)’s in his robe. I go out on the balcony – I’m mid-sex scene, the crew has stopped to change a light or something – and I say hello to my parents. Of anything she could have said to me, she actually said, “Now Renee, I hope you have brushed your teeth!”

 

What next then for Fubar Productions?

 

FIONA: We’re going down the country, I hope, for the next one.

 

FINTAN: A script called Blow-In, I started it a while ago. It’s essentially about a couple: he’s Irish, she’s English. They move from London down to a remote part of Ireland seeking a better life, but they don’t find it. Things go horribly wrong. It’s quite dark and sinister.

 

FIONA: A bigger story, bigger canvas.

 

Another 28 day shoot?

 

FINTAN: We might go to 30 days! I think if we all move to the country and camped out there we could do it very well in that time. We wouldn’t have the distractions of going home.

 

It would be like boot camp, wouldn’t it?

 

FINTAN (beaming): Exactly!