Flora and Son: Irish filmmaker John Carney on why he cast Eve Hewson in his latest hit movie 

A former member of The Frames, the creator of Once and Sing Street inevitably has a strong music strand running through his latest film, writes Esther McCarthy

Eve Hewson and Orén Kinlan in Flora and Son.  

John Carney has a vivid memory of his late mother, Frances Knott, handing him his first guitar. Fourteen-year-old him didn’t know it at the time, but it would be a seminal moment in his life.

Already inspired in his growing love of music by the records his siblings would play, his mother’s purchase brought his passion to another level.

“I think my mother recognised that I really wanted a guitar,” he says now. “It’s easy for a parent to write off things that their kids ask for as fads or passing fancies. She didn’t with this. And by giving me an expensive enough guitar at the time - it was 400 pounds - not only did she give me the gift that I really wanted, she put it up to me by spending money on it.

“I had to become good at this, I couldn’t just put this under the stairs. She took money out of her wallet. It was cash! That translated into the vocational feeling. She provided the tool.” 

In the years since her passing, Carney often recalls this moment and it has made its way into his latest film. 

The charming and funny Flora and Son tells the story of a Dublin mum (Eve Hewson) who buys a guitar for her wayward teenage son (Orén Kinlan). He’s more interested in mixing dance music on his computer, so instead Flora starts strumming herself, with the help of online lessons from LA-based Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who she cheekily flirts with.

“It had gotten to the stage in the process of losing a parent, for me anyway, that I could start to move away from just sheer grief into remembering and celebrating her personality and our relationship,” he says of the first fledgling ideas for the film. “I had been thinking about how actually just grateful I was to her for certain very specific things in my life. This film was a way of sort of looking at that, and thanking her.” 

Eve Hewson in Flora and Son.

The result is the kind of low-key delight that Carney excels in, following the success of Sing Street and 2007’s Once, the low-budget love story that went all the way to an Oscar win for Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s Falling Slowly.

Flora and Son returns to his hometown of Dublin and Eve Hewson is a revelation as the title character, a quick-witted single mum struggling to bond with her boy at a vital time in his life. Hewson has already shown her knack for comedy in Bad Sisters, but here she’s excellent, garnering some of the best reviews of her career so far.

“She made it impossible for her not to be in the film,” says Carney of their very first discussion about the project. “I don’t know how she did it. I still can’t figure out what happened on that Zoom call that we had, but by the end of it something she said about this character was so insightful.

“She told me: ‘I really want to do it in a funny way’. That was music to my ears, great, because I didn’t want this to be about Flora from the flats suddenly starts singing and she’s Beyonce and she’s going to the Grammys. I didn’t want it to be A Star is Born. I wanted it to be a more grounded, musically-themed movie.

“Eve was really insistent on playing that from a funny point of view. It’s very brave in a situation when you’re meeting on a project, when an actor is prepared to say to a director: ‘Here’s how I’m going to do it’. That’s a risk for an actor to take, because they may not get the role. But the honesty of saying: ‘I can do this’ is sometimes very, very engaging and convincing to hear.” For a time, a music career beckoned for Carney, who was a founding member and bassist with successful Irish outfit The Frames. 

But as the band established themselves amongst a loyal live following, Carney left the band to pursue a filmmaking career three years later.

John Carney on the set of Flora and Son.

Along with his brother Kieran and filmmaker Tom Hall, he developed the highly successful TV series Bachelors Walk, set around the lives and loves of a group of single men in Dublin.

Once, produced on a budget of just $150,000, went on to make over $23 million at the US box office and like Sing Street, has gone on to become a successful stage musical. The power of music to transform our lives is a theme he returns to again and again in his work. What is it about his own love of music that proves to be a continuing draw for him on screen?

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he says. “I think I’m a musician, an amateur musician, albeit, so my life is like a musical. If you have guitars and pianos around your house, and friends who are musicians, your life is like a musical. It’s not a Hollywood musical, because you’re not in Hollywood. You’re in a kitchen sink musical.

“Music with my kids is (that) constantly we’re doing musical things at home. The piano is always there and the guitars are always around. We’ll listen to music and dance around the kitchen to let off steam.

“My films are all about people for whom the instruments that they have become part of their daily narrative and how they communicate and how they talk. I never really saw music as a thing to get to ‘here’. It was part of the banality of life and the daily grind of your life and I felt if I could integrate music into those stories, that would be a very pleasing concoction.”

For two decades now, Carney has been part of an industry that has been built indigenously but continues to make waves around the world. This year’s Oscars, in which Irish talent drove a ‘green wave’ with 14 nominations, delighted but didn’t entirely surprise him.

“You know what? In a way, it doesn’t. If you think about it, Irish people always loved going to the pictures. Famously, we loved it and that is in the blood. The storytelling thing we’re famous for, but the fact that it’s developed now and cross pollinated into successful filmmakers and writers and actors, actually, doesn’t surprise me because we have the heritage of the natural storyteller.

“But we also go to movies. John C. Reilly, who’s a friend of mine, who comes over to Ireland, he’s recognised more and lauded and stopped in the street more in Dublin than he is in Los Angeles, because we love him and we love stories and cinema. So in a way it doesn’t surprise me actually that we’ve done exponentially better than we necessarily should have, or could have.”

• Flora and Son is in cinemas and on Apple TV.