David Puttnam casts his mind back to 'War of the Buttons' after 25 years
David Puttnam is at Fastnet Film Festival today to mark 25 years since ‘War of the Buttons’ was made. He tells about his fond memories of the West Cork movie
It was the bridge at Union Hall that clinched it. When David Puttnam first set eyes on the iconic structure against the picturesque West Cork countryside, he knew instinctively he’d found a key location for War of the Buttons and that it would be shot in Ireland.
Filmed in and around Skibbereen during the summer months 25 years ago, Puttnam, 77, has fond memories of producing the film in the place he calls home.
The movie about two feisty rival gangs of schoolboys who hacked the buttons off each other’s clothes became one of the most celebrated movies of Irish childhood and an international hit.
“It was the bridge at Union Hall that did it. I knew the French film, it was a remake of a French movie, and you needed a kind of flashpoint, and the bridge provided it. So the idea grew from the bridge,” he said.
“On any movie, there are two or three key locations and what they do is they help lock in the story. In a sense, the drama hinged around the bridge. I’d worked with (screenwriter) Colin Welland on Chariots of Fire and he came across and saw it, and sat down and wrote the screenplay, very quickly actually.”
The production caused a huge buzz in the community, with many locals hired to work on the film and cast as extras. Lifelong friendships were formed and young people who learned the ropes on set went on to have successful careers in the industry.
Today, Puttnam will join the cast and crew for a reunion and screening of the film at the Fastnet Film Festival.
It wasn’t the first time the producer, who brought us classics such as Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields and Midnight Express, stood in wonder at a West Cork location and made such a judgment call. Just a few years before, he’d fallen in love with a dilapidated house outside Skibbereen on his very first visit to the area with his wife Patsy.
“We were on a driving holiday up the west coast of Ireland and we had friends who lived in Union Hall, and we stayed overnight with them. The following morning, before we set off for Dingle, through a series of very happy accidents, I stumbled across where we live.
“It was the view. What happened was, because I’d spent so much time up in Scotland (looking for locations for the film Local Hero) I had something absolutely fixed in my mind that I was looking for, it was to do with water and being on the edge of water. The house was destroyed, an old farmhouse, no-one living there. And I walked around the brambles, though the back of it, and I was looking at exactly the view that I’d been looking for in Scotland.
“It was a quite extraordinary experience, actually. I had, in a way, stitched myself up by having a very, very clear idea of what I was looking for in Scotland.”
It was at first a holiday and later their permanent family home. And despite friends and associates advising him against filming in the place that had become his bolthole, he says the support he received locally throughout the production only solidified his affection for the people of West Cork.
It was phenomenal. I mean, absolutely incredible. I couldn’t have asked for more.
“We set a rule which was that every single department in the film had to have someone local working in it. So we had all these trainees, and what’s lovely is that all of them I think now, are significant figures in the Irish film industry. We had a big cast of kids, some of who we brought in, some of who were local. It’s things like transport — the whole town got involved one way or another.
“We were headquartered smack in the middle of town. We had quite a large transport fleet because you’re moving people and equipment around. We were very, very visible.”
Puttnam said that working with a cast made up largely of children that summer was one of his fondest film memories.
“It was joyous, but I’d done it before with Bugsy Malone. In that sense, I’d had the experience, and I knew you had to tie in with holiday periods, that there were a variety of constraints such as the number of hours a day you could work.”
Though children loved the film for its sense of mischief, Puttnam also appreciated its darker elements. “It’s a metaphor. The film is deliberately a metaphor, where you’re trying to use it to make a bigger point. It’s about north and south, and bear in mind when we were doing the movie, that was still a live issue.
The important thing about War of the Buttons is that nobody knows how that enmity started. There’s no reason. They know that their fathers used to go at each other, probably that their grandfathers used to go at each other, but nobody knows what the reason is — it’s just tradition. The reason I definitely went for that book is that I felt it was a really good metaphor for the world I was living in.
The Puttnams are now based permanently in West Cork, but David travels to London three days a week for his committee and other work with the House of Lords. He worked on a committee on artificial intelligence (“That was a very crunchy piece of work, I was working way above my brain grade,” he jokes) and is now focused on work related to Brexit.
“I am a passionate remainer and trying to find ways the government could change its mind or at least ameliorate the situation is a big, big job. I think the border issue will be solved because the ramifications of it not being solved are too severe. We’ve got a lot to play for.”
Using the power of the web, he lectures to film students in universities all over the world from his home. And he laughs when asked if it’s true that locals in the past didn’t tell curious reporters exactly where he lives.
It’s absolutely the case! ‘Somewhere around here’. It’s one of the things I love. The sense of privacy that people have, and secondly, I know that Jeremy Irons appreciates it, the fact that you are just a local bloke. No one takes any notice.
Actors’ bond remains strong
The kids in War of the Buttons may have gone into battle on the big screen, but lifelong friendships were forged on those summer days of shooting in Skibbereen.
Paul Batt, who played Gorilla, and Gerard Kearney, who played Big Con, become good pals over the shoot and remain so to this day.
“He was groomsman at my wedding and I was groomsman at his wedding. He’s my best friend,” said Batt of the man who is now a well-known Cork magician. The two have recently collaborated on a pilot for Epic Productions.
Batt is thrilled at the prospect of meeting other cast at the Fastnet reunion, and is the main organiser of a bigger reunion in Skibbereen on August 10 and 11, which will include a large public screening of the film.
I’m really enjoying it. I’m making contact with people I haven’t spoken to in 25 years and it’s lovely. And everyone I have spoken to, they’re all mad for it.
“It was my first time on a film, but I had worked on school plays, singing in choirs and things like that. Ros Hubbard, the casting agent, came into the school, looking for kids to audition for War of the Buttons and they sent me down. It started from there then.”
He has fond memories of shooting and the sheer impact it had on the town.
“The hype of everything. The amount of people who were involved. Skibbereen was closed down for the summer. Every person was involved. When we weren’t on set, we were brought to the beach, spoiled rotten. All the kids stayed in Maria’s Schoolhouse. If you put 15 or 16 kids in one house, you know there’s going to be trouble! But it was all harmless. We were all full of energy.
We were 15, we didn’t know what we were after getting involved in, how big it was. It was brilliant. I think back now and I go: ‘Jeez, did we really do that?’
Batt dreamed of being an actor but ending up loving army life, joining the UN and travelling the world, though he has returned to drama.
Still, that didn’t stop him being recognised on occasion, and as far away as the Big Apple. “I was in New York in 2001 and a guy in a bar recognised me.
He said: ‘War of theButtons. I’d love to see it’. And a guy on the other side of the bar went out and came back two minutes later with a copy of the film and put it on the telly for the whole bar. I’ve been recognised in Israel, it’s unbelievable.”
Fastnet will be followed by a two-day reunion in August which he says is for the people of Skibbereen.
We’re hoping to do an enactment of the bridge scene, at the line on the bridge where the two groups of kids were fighting. We’re going to try and film it with all the same characters, just 25 years older!
A personal project for director’s son
As a classically trained and award-winning film composer and performer, Sacha Puttnam has worked with everyone from Moby and Muse to the Moscow StateOrchestra.
But revisiting the music of his father David’s films has proven to be one of his most personal projects yet.
“What I’ve been doing over the past few years is I’ve been reconnecting with all the composers who’ve scored dad’s movies,” he tells me.
“A few years ago, dad and I did a concert in the National Concert Hall, a really lovely event in front of the President, which was a joy. I’d done some Chariots of Fire pieces and some MidnightExpress pieces.”
Sacha recently recorded a War of the Buttons suite which he intends to include on an album, Puttnam Plays Puttnam, later this year.
What I wanted to do was do a part two, and reconnect with some other composers, and one of those was Rachel Portman (who composed the music for War of the Buttons), the first woman to win an Oscar for a score.
“Fortunately she also let me do a medley. What I’ve done is I’ve taken the front titles which are absolutely gorgeous, with a wonderful Irish opening. Then gone into this lovely theme she had called ‘Chasing the Fox’. I think she did a wonderful score.”
He’s hinted he’ll perform some of the music at Fastnet this weekend. “If there’s a piano around I’m sure I’ll jump on it and play a few things.
I love seeing the movie, they’ve shown it a couple of times in Skibbereen Town Hall, and it reminds me of Saturday morning pictures when I was a kid.
Immersed in cinema as a child, he says his background influenced his decision to become a film composer.
“My sister and I were always put in the films when we were young. We’d make little cameo appearances and we were introduced to sets like that.
“I used to always love the props department, that was fun. The time they were doing Bugsy Malone in Pinewood, they were already prepping Star Wars. In those days they’d make models so they’d models of the Death Star, it was a young boy’s dream.”
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