Lighten Up: It's a wrap (a silage wrap) for Brad Pitt in West Cork
While on the farm, Brad Pitt learned all about the driving skills associated with loading and unloading a cock lifter.
At the moment, when people talk about "the pit" in West Cork, you can't be too sure if they mean silage or Brad. We have only three more days of shooting left, and then it's a wrap for myself and Brad.
Auld Brad just needs to go to Macroom Mart on Saturday to film a car chase scene in the mart yard, and then we need to film a fight scene down outside Barryroe Co-op. Of course, I did the prep work, and I've a few lads I bid up for a couple of batches of calves a few weeks ago, primed for it.
Yerra, Brad's West Cork film-making adventure has gone down very well — bar the incessant rain. Indeed, I have little to complain about. And yes, you guessed right!
Once again, auld Lehane was in the thick of the action.
Involved in the film and all the glamour attached to it. Sure, where else would I be?
Anyhow, it might surprise you to know that the film Brad is working on, the film that has the whole of West Cork so intrigued, is loosely based on my farming life right here in Kilmichael ... very loosely based, it has to be admitted.
Yerra, the whole thing started when Brad approached me years ago, asking if he could play the part of me in a movie. And, of course, he knew all about the adventures of Auld Lehane from reading de paper.
The , by all account, is as popular up there in the highlands of Hollywood as it is up in the snow-covered peaks of Mushera.
And while admittedly he had the looks to play the part of Auld Lehane, I wasn't sure if he had the farming skills necessary to pull off the feat.
So for the past year, or thereabouts, Brad Pitt has been with me here on the farm in Kilmichael, learning all the skills of the trade.
I forgot to mention all this earlier, with the rain and so on, my mind was elsewhere.
Anyhow, he was here, and that's as true as anything else you will read today.
While on the farm, he learned all about the driving skills associated with loading and unloading a cock lifter.
He also learned how to dose cattle as fast as myself, in no time at all.
But what impressed Brad most of all was the silage.
"The round bale," Brad Pitt said to me one fine evening last September, "is the grandest thing entirely. How on Earth they came up with the ingenuity to wrap plastic around grass is beyond me.
"The pit," says he, laughing to himself for his own name is Pitt too, "is no match for the silage bale."
Pitt was greatly taken with the bale, and that's no word of a lie.
"If I could live my life again," says he, feeling nostalgic, "I'd forget all about this acting crack and become a round bale silage contractor.
"That's where the real money is," Brad declared. And Brad was right.
Yerra, the man was besotted with the plastic, the silage, and the diesel, no word of a lie.
Anyhow, after months of hard farm work, he finally looked the part, and so the shooting of the movie began.
The first bit was shot up in Dublin in Bullock Harbour (appropriately enough), with a great deal more filmed down here around Timoleague.
The movie is now tipped for Oscar glory, even before the story is finished at all.
But that's no surprise. For, as Brad Pitt said to me over the pint the other evening: "The true story of auld Lehane is a remarkable one, and when it finally gets up there on the silver screen, it's bound to sweep all before it, just like a hand-held yard scraper."
