Terry McMahon and Moe Dunford heading out of the green, into the red
WEEKS ago, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with some of Hollywood’s biggest names, director Terry McMahon felt light-headed.
“It was at the Woodstock Film Festival. Jennifer Connelly and Darren Aronofsky were beside me. There must have been hundreds in the room. Out of the blue, I thought, ‘I am literally the most broke person here’. I didn’t even have enough to pay for the next day’s breakfast. It was bizarre.”
He may be one of Ireland’s most talked-about filmmakers — well into his 40s, he is probably a little too craggy to be an enfant terrible — but film-circuit plaudits have done little to alleviate McMahon’s money woes. In a sumptuous interview suite in Dublin, where he is promoting his new feature, Patrick’s Day, the director speaks about his battle to retain ownership of the family home.
“They are trying to repossess my house. And I am trying to put food on my kids’ table. It stinks. Sometimes, you are driven by a private desire your family doesn’t understand. I can see them thinking, ‘Oh, Christ, here’s another movie, two years of our life down the toilet and he’s not going to bring in a cent’.”
McMahon, a former Fair City actor and scriptwriter, isn’t bitter or angry (which is how he is caricatured in the media). He is resigned to the fact that, to create art, he must suffer. He went through the grinder in 2012 with his first movie, Charlie Casanova, a strange, anti-capitalist polemic that many people found unmatchable and which was considered infantile and nasty.
“It was intended to be a certain kind of film — a hand grenade. If it didn’t generate the response it did, it would not have done its job. What I didn’t know is that things were going to degenerate into a personal indictment of me. Everyone presumed I was an a-hole. I remain unapologetic. Charlie Casanova is what we wanted it to be,” he says.
Still, the criticism stung. He felt demonised. People were projecting their dislike of the movie onto him, and they had never met him. They were shooting the messenger.
“Those things hurt. I have a family. They were listening to all this. At the same time, I had put myself in that position. I had to be John Lydon — to be the crazy frontman,” McMahon says.
With Patrick’s Day, the response has been the opposite. Chronicling a relationship between an emotionally unstable young man and a suicidal flight attendant, the movie has been praised for spotlighting mental illness (it picked up three awards at Woodstock and was named best Irish feature at the 2014 Galway Film Fleadh). “I used to work in a psychiatric hospital,” says McMahon. “That was one of the inspirations. I’ve wanted to write about this for a long time.”
It amuses him that Patrick’s Day has been perceived as a chastened response to the backlash against Charlie Casanova. He wasn’t seeking forgiveness or rehabilitation: he simply wanted to tell a story that spoke to him. “I wrote the two scripts at the same time,” he says. “They are two different films and required two different approaches. Both are coming from me.”
The title character of Patrick’s Day is played by Moe Dunford, a young actor from Dungarvan who has recently been cast in the hit historical drama, The Vikings. Patrick’s Day was his first major role, following smaller parts in The Tudors and Game Of Thrones. “It came out of the blue,” says Dunford. “It was a miracle finding this story. Just when I needed something to come along, it did.”
Dunford empathises with Patrick and his struggle to fit in. He was sharply reminded of an episode from his own life. “I studied arts in UCC and never set foot on campus. My parents don’t actually know about this. I didn’t go into college once. I lived in a house with eight friends, had parties, all of that. I think I was experiencing some kind of anxiety. Eventually, I realised this wasn’t working. So I used the last €50 euro I had to apply to the Gaiety School Of Acting. I had doubts: at the back of my mind were these voices: ‘You’re not going to be an actor — who do you think you are?’ I had to push through that.”
He laughs as he recalls two days on the set of Game of Thrones. “They asked ‘Can you ride a horse?’ I couldn’t. I said ‘yes’ anyway. It was the very next day, so I didn’t have time to learn.
“They used an extra on a horse for the wide shots. I remember sitting there, looking around, thinking ‘I’d love to have a job like this — to be on Game of Thrones for a few months, a couple of years. That would be amazing’.”
Coming from what is often referred to as ‘small-town Ireland’, Dunford understood the themes in Patrick’s Day, in particular attitudes towards depression and mental illness. “Suicide is a problem,” he says. “In Dungarvan, young men have taken their lives. People feel they can’t speak out and so they suffer in silence.”
McMahon’s route into cinema was as peripatetic as that of his leading man. He started off as an actor and became a regular on Fair City (playing criminal mastermind, Terry), and then graduated to writing scripts. Then, he lost his job. Middle-aged, with a family to feed, it looked like he had no future. So he created his own, with Charlie Casanova.
“I wrote over 100 episodes of Fair City,” he says. “It was a wonderful time. You had financial security, and you had to deliver, which is a great regime. You learn a lot. It’s just a shame the situation changed and it became a different kind of thing. You were dehumanised because of economics. I don’t think I was special in that regard. It seems to be happening everywhere nowadays.”
- Patrick’s Day is released today
