This boy’s colourful last days
HAVING acted in Father Ted and Ballykissangel, Dubliner Ian Fitzgibbon has blossomed into one of Ireland’s foremost film and TV directors. His resumé includes RTÉ hits Paths to Freedom and Showbands, as well as impressive films like Perrier’s Bounty and A Film with Me in It.
A recurring element of Fitzgibbon’s work is absurdist black comedy. Yet while that tendency is not absent in his new film, Death of a Superhero, it has a more sensitive narrative than the oddball films that have been Fitzgibbon’s bread and butter.
The film, based on the novel by New Zealander Anthony McCarten, relates the story of a 15-year-old boy dying from cancer. Played with great understatement by English actor Thomas Brodie Sangster, Donald is stony-faced about his condition, channelling his rage at death, as well as his confusion about sex, into his sketched adventures of a superhero alter ego.
With Andy Serkis (Gollum in The Lord of the Rings) playing a counsellor who helps Donald break through his suppressed rage, Death of a Superhero treads a well-worn path at times, yet Fitzgibbon pushes the story in surprising directions. Donald’s fatalism is intriguing, and Fitzgibbon elicits nuanced turns from Michael McElhatton and Sharon Horgan, as the boy’s parents, and from Aisling Loftus, as the object of his affections. Each actor brings a complex humanity to the story.
“When I became involved in the project, it had a screenplay that I didn’t like,” says Fitzgibbon. “So I rewrote it with Mark Doherty. I retained core elements, but Mark and I set it in a world that we both knew — which is south county Dublin.
“That’s where I live and I have two teenage children. So I thought the language stood a good chance of being authentic. All the extras are my kids’ friends, essentially. Once we felt that world was truthful, I felt much happier about where the story was going to go.”
The young protagonist’s icy adjustment to the prospect of death is one of the things that drew Fitzgibbon to the material.
“The fact that a 15-year-old kid is prepared to stand up to something that the adults around him aren’t, I just found that truly heroic,” Fitzgibbon says.
“The other thing that I really liked was that he is very curious about death, how it might be, and how he might be in facing it. I suppose there’s a part of me that wonders how I would be in that situation. So I found that interesting to explore.”
It wasn’t just the script that Fitzgibbon rejigged upon getting involved. Expensive animated sequences for Donald’s superhero sketches had been created by then, yet they didn’t meet with Fitzgibbon’s vision for the film. So they had to be redone.
“The original animation was stunning,” says Fitzgibbon. “That was the problem. It was 3-D, photorealistic, extremely detailed. It was ‘wow’. But I looked at it and I wondered, ‘How do I connect this to the mind of a 15-year-old boy?’. So I broke their hearts and I asked them to go back and make it less accomplished, more visceral, more energetic, rougher, sexier, and much crueller.”
That Fitzgibbon had the nerve to insist on that matter suggests the assertiveness and self-assurance of a director confident in his own skill.
“When you say it like that, it does sound like I have real faith and confidence,” he says. “But actually I’m crippled by doubt most of the time. While I was saying it, inside I was thinking ‘What the fuck are you doing? They’ve spent a lot of money. It looks brilliant. Just settle’. But, I suppose, you can only follow your instinct. And if you can’t make sense of something, then how the hell are you going to make a cast and crew make sense of it?
“So, to that extent, I am confident and assertive. But only because I’m lost if I’m not.”
Since completing Death of a Superhero, Fitzgibbon has been busy in TV work. In addition to directing two seasons of Comedy Central’s sitcom Threesome, starring Amy Huberman, Fitzgibbon has just wrapped up shooting the second season of Moone Boy, the hugely popular Sky comedy penned by Chris O’Dowd and set in Boyle, Roscommon. The new series will run on Sky 1 next year.
“I loved the first season,” says Fitzgibbon. “And I think the second season is going to be as good, if not better, hopefully. The scripts are certainly even more ambitious and there are some very funny things in it.”
O’Dowd and Fitzgibbon have known each other since O’Dowd was cast in Showbands in 2005.
“He played a very funny, psychotic character,” says Fitzgibbon. “I struck up an empathy with Chris then and we recently worked on a documentary together about whiskey, which is the great love of his life, apart from his wife, Dawn.
“And then he rang me about Moone Boy. I was post-producing the second series of Threesome and I told him I didn’t know if these dates were going to work. But he’s very headstrong and he said ‘No, we’re going to make it work’.”
The first season of Moone Boy was directed by Father Ted director Declan Lowney, and Fitzgibbon is also an alumnus of the Father Ted universe, having played the sarcastic Father Jessup, whose grim fate it was to inhabit Father Jack’s underpants hamper. Similarities between the two comedy shows have already been drawn and Fitzgibbon can see why.
“I think Chris and his co-writer, Nick Vincent Murphy, would tell you that they have been influenced by Father Ted and it’s one of their references,” he says. “But, then, so is The Simpsons, which Chris talks about a lot. But you can certainly see traces of Father Ted in there. There’s a generosity in the comedy and a slightly surreal aspect to it.”
Though Fitzgibbon is developing a number of film projects, among them collaborations with playwright Deirdre Kinahan and novelist Kevin Barry, his release after Death of a Superhero will be The Awkward Age, a one-off comedy with Dylan Moran, which airs this Christmas on Sky 1.
“It’s a Little Cracker, which is the series of one-off Sky shows that led to Moone Boy,” he says. “I’m hopeful we’ll make a series from it. It was great working with Dylan again. It’s not about mid-life crisis but about mid-life massacre. Everything goes wrong and only as Dylan Moran could do it. It’s black, but very funny.”
Sounds like perfect Ian Fitzgibbon territory, then.
* Death of a Superhero is released on Friday
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