Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran on making one of Ireland's most loved-films

Groundbreaking and much-loved Adam and Paul reaches the grand old age of 20, writes Esther McCarthy

Thu, 13 Jun, 2024 - 21:02

Twenty years ago, an up-and-coming filmmaker and screenwriter tentatively introduced their first movie to Irish audiences.

Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran couldn’t have known it then, but their tale of a day in the life of two old friends struggling with addiction was about to become a gamechanger.

Adam & Paul, which turns 20 this summer, has gone on to become one of Ireland’s most-loved films. It is a groundbreaking blend of comedy, slapstick, pathos and empathy which is frequently listed among the greatest Irish films.

When Abrahamson and his cast showed Adam & Paul at the Galway Film Fleadh for the first time in 2004, the audience reaction was beyond their wildest hopes.

“It was in the town hall, and it was the first public screening of the film,” recalls Abrahamson now.

“It was fabulous. I just remember the audience so embracing the film and afterwards, Mark and I looking at each other as people came up, the enthusiasm about the film and the desire to talk about it.

“Mark and the actors felt it was really good what we were doing. I remember the feeling of excitement. But between that and thinking it’s going to be popular, that’s the one you can never know.”

This weekend, a special 20th- anniversary screening of the film will be held at the Irish Film Institute as part of the Bloomsday Film Festival. O’Halloran will introduce the film and explore its Joycean connections. An Encounter, a short directed by Kelly Campbell and adapted by O’Halloran from Joyce’s story, will also be screened.

Abrahamson, an Oscar nominee for Room and with other hits including Frank, Garage and Normal People, was back then a first-time feature director looking for a story to tell. “It’s probably the happiest project in that sense because nobody was looking over our shoulders,” he says. “Nobody had expectations about it. We kind of knew we were doing something at least original whether it was going to work or not. But it felt like it knew what it was itself tonally.”

As well as writing the film’s screenplay, O’Halloran starred as Paul in the film, working opposite his late friend and colleague Tom Murphy, a hugely talented actor who died three years after the film was released.

“It was so interesting seeing Tom arrive on set,” says O’Halloran. “He looked such a mess in his costume and he upped everybody’s game in lots of ways. He really was spectacularly good. I thought that Tom was so brilliantly caught in this moment of greatness.”

Mark O'Halloran and Tom Murphy in Adam and Paul

O’Halloran first began to develop the characters during some downtime in his own theatre acting career. He’d started to write short plays and had met Abrahamson, who had made the well-received short, 3 Joes.

“He asked me did I have any material for a feature, so I gave this one pager and some scenes which literally nobody else would have paid any attention to, only Lenny got them. He thought there was a vibe in there that was good.

“I literally had no idea how to write a screenplay. I remember opening the documents going, how do you start a film? I just had him stuck to a mattress, that was the first thing I came up with. And then it kind of got written in cycles. I would deliver pages to Lenny and we’d read them and we’d laugh about them. Some of them were overwritten and some of them are underwritten and then we’d put them in sequence.”

Both men feel that because they hadn’t gone through the filmmaking process before, they were able to make something that felt fresher.

“We weren’t burdened by an over-restrictive idea of how screen storytelling should work and I think both felt irritated, probably, by the idea that there have to be three acts and they have to run a certain way,” says Abrahamson. “And so in the end, you’ve just got this very strange but hopefully good mix of tones that were unusual but work together. I remember a lot of me was just encouraging Mark to go with his instinct. I remember at one point there was a more plotty version and we just decided: forget that.”

As well as the film’s wonderful gags about a character named Clank, jokes about Bulgaria and the hapless duo’s frequent accidents and run-ins, what’s special about Adam & Paul is the great empathy it has towards its characters. This was Dublin in 2004, a city still reeling from the impacts of heroin addiction.

“I think that’s probably why myself and Mark work well together, is we both have a very similar, very natural instinct towards orientating yourself with empathy towards characters, no matter who they are,” says Abrahamson.

“I don’t think we wanted to do that ‘laughing at’ comedy. We just wanted to evoke these two people with all of their flaws. You can see the children in them.”

“There’s a key line that Matthew’s mother says: ‘Youse are good boys, youse were always good boys’,” adds O’Halloran.

Audiences are still finding the film and he still gets recognised from it. “[People say] ‘alright Clank! I’m not wiping myself with a Tayto bag!’

“I was waiting on the street for a friend to arrive the other day. This young fella passed by and he was going: ‘I know you. Do I know you? Adam & Paul!’ He was calling young fellas to come over and take photographs.”

On the morning the film was released in cinemas, Abrahamson dropped into a Dublin cinema to see how the film was being received.

“I remember there being about 20 people, which felt like quite a lot. I was just listening to people laughing. It’s such a huge thing I think, the first time anybody is interested in something who isn’t [from] your family.

“You don’t know until you make one whether you can make one. I’d done a short and other commercials and stuff but it’s still a very big leap. And all of the actors were mostly at the beginning of their careers.”

The release of Adam & Paul felt like a punctuation point in Irish film, coming at a time when we started to feel confident in telling our own stories. “There were other people doing it around the same time or even a little bit earlier. But it did feel like it was part of that big transition,” says Abrahamson.

“What’s kind of interesting is that Mark and I had very explicit conversations about not getting hung up on what constitutes an Irish film. Everybody was constantly going on about what’s Irish cinema? What should Irish cinema be? And that ended up meaning themes were reduced almost to a set of acceptable topics. We set out to make a film that felt like it was artistically exciting to us.”