Home is where the art is
SET amidst the rugged beauty of West Cork’s famous peninsulas, new Irish film The Pier offers an unflinching yet compassionate look at the fraught relations between a grizzled elderly father and his returned emigrant son. Written and directed by Skibbereen native Gerard Hurley, it won plaudits at both the Galway Film Fleadh and Cork Film Festival in 2011, and it has also travelled well on the international festival circuit. It goes on national release this weekend, with a host of screenings taking place in the broader Cork area.
The narrative opens with Jack McCarthy (played by Hurley) returning home from New York, following news his father is on his death-bed. He is not best pleased to find the contrary auld fella up and about when he gets home, but without a penny to pay for a flight back to the States he is coaxed into sticking around to help his father recoup a few bad debts. From there a terse but moving rapprochement between the men unfolds.
The men’s strained relationship is notable for its unbending grit. While sentimental at times, the film is never mawkish and benefits from some moments of black comedy.
“Like with everything in life, you’ve just got to be honest and tell it how it is,” says Hurley. “I didn’t want to get sentimental with the film, even though I would regard it as being highly romantic. The third character in the movie is the landscape of West Cork, and if a degree of sentiment comes in anywhere then it would be through the landscape.”
Certainly, the film’s shots of the landscape are stunning. Having spent the last 20 years in New York, Hurley says he remains deeply affected by the rugged beauty of his home-place.
“I am so proud of being from West Cork,” he says. “I’ve travelled to many places and I think that West Cork is the most beautiful place there is. But it’s a very complicated relationship, too. There is something about the landscape and the seascape that just kills me.”
Significantly, The Pier never exoticises the landscape the way so many Hollywood versions of Ireland have done over the years. The presence of a native eye behind the camera is keenly felt.
“It was important to create a sense of isolation — and desperation too — with the landscape,” says Hurley. “Because, as beautiful as it is, it’s also very unforgiving and very tragic. You stand out in the fields in West Cork, or stand out next to the sea, and you’ll find out how cold and brutal it can be. And so I definitely didn’t want to give this film any sense of Hollywood at all. All I wanted to do was honour where I come from.”
That involves honouring the hardness that’s native to that land as well as its more positive virtues of community and kinship. The hardness we find in the father character is as much a hardness borne of his physical environment as it is anything else.
Hurley agrees. “I thoroughly believe that our environment shapes us regardless of where we come from in the world,” he says. “Getting down specifically to the West Cork temperament, people can be sort of flinty and dark but they also can be very warm and inviting.”
Hurley left Ireland in the 1980s, initially heading for Switzerland to work with horses before winding up in the US. Following a variety of jobs, among them a stint working on oil wells in Oklahoma, he found himself building sets for a film production company in New York. From there his interest in filmmaking escalated and he turned to scriptwriting. Though he’d always been interested in art and drama as a youngster, it wasn’t a road he ever expected to find himself on.
“I was a horrendous student,” he confesses. “I got kicked out of three different secondary schools. So I never much imagined myself as a writer. But I started when I was 21, just out of frustration. I was trying to vent my demons, I suppose. But I just took to it.”
With 20 years of scripts behind him — and a number of those optioned in Hollywood — Hurley jumped in at the deep end in 2008 when he wrote and directed his well-received first feature, The Pride. A film about domestic abuse in the Irish traveller culture in America, it was produced on a shoestring budget. The Pier, too, was produced on a small budget (€100,000), yet its low cost belies its hugely professional production values, and the film weds accomplished filmmaking to a well told story.
Though Hurley puts in an impressive turn, the film belongs in many respects to Karl Johnson, a great stalwart of British theatre, film, and television, who shines as a ragged and hard-boiled old loner.
The Welsh actor was recommended to Hurley by a friend in London after he had failed to find the right actor in Ireland. “Karl is an amazing human being and an incredible man to work with,” he says. “If you look at his resumé, it’s mind-blowing, and I was so honoured to be able to bring him over.”
The film also features American actress Lili Taylor in a small but significant part. Both Johnson and Taylor worked for “a pittance,” says Hurley.
“Lili and I have known each other for a number of years,” he says. “I know a bunch of actors back in the States from my years of writing and just being around the block over there. We knew at some point that we would work together on something and it just so happened that I wrote this character and I thought of her for it. Her character is very important and I needed someone who could pull that off without intruding on the screen.”
Hurley stresses that her participation was not a market-driven concern.
“What’s important to me is to make a movie that’s got honesty and integrity first of all,” he says. “My first and foremost objective is the art of making a film itself. My second objective is if I can sell it, because I’ve got to make money some time. I haven’t made anything in two years. But it’s not about putting someone in there so I can get this sort of distribution and whatever. I completely despise that whole game.”
Hurley’s sense of integrity and his do-it-yourself attitude are admirable traits. In the past week it has seen him putting up posters around West Cork ahead of the film’s screenings in the area. “Filmmaking and storytelling is my passion,” he says. “Anything that I can do to bring my film into the world, I’ll do it.”
* The Pier is in selected cinemas from Jan 31. www.thepierfilm.com.
