When we meet, Glen Hansard is looking a little battleworn. His hands alternate between rubbing his eyes open and, almost nervously, fiddling with a grey pick, which he twirls through his calloused fingers with acrobatic ease, and occasionally taps against the bench. “To be honest, I’m almost missing all this success, because I am so busy,” he sighs, looking suddenly even more exhausted. “This is not a complaint, but I need to take a break just to get some perspective. Perspective is important, both with great success and great failure. Also, they say that if you don’t take time to celebrate when your ship comes in, it’s just another day at the office.”
Hansard certainly does have cause to celebrate recently. After seventeen years of leading Irish independent band, The Frames, he’s receiving a new kind of media attention. As the lead actor in Once, a touching romance/drama about a Dublin busker who falls in love with a Czech migrant, both his musical and personal profile have received a welcome bolster. This comes just in time for a current tour with Bob Dylan, and the release of his band’s new album, The Cost, a beautifully emotion recording which includes several songs featured in the film.
“The movie was just a three week bit of fun with some friends, and it never had any significance at all to my career, except now it does,” he reflects, sounding almost a little shocked by his own success. “Now, this film has brought us a huge amount of new audience. In an ideal world, you’d hope that you could write a song and people would respond to it in a certain way, but the world isn’t that simple and the media really doesn’t hasn’t had much to say about us in a while. There is no ‘myth,’ if you like… And now, we haven’t done anything different to how we’ve always done it, but there’s this film, and sometimes people just need something like that to latch onto. And this has just brought a whole new wave of energy around the band. It’s definitely reenergised the audience, which has in turn reenergised the band.”
Initially, Hansard’s role in Once was not as high-profile. Working with director and ex-band member John Carney, he was to produce a set of songs in concurrence with the script. For Hansard, working under Carney’s direction was an unusual power reversal. “I was working on his project, whereas before [in The Frames] he’d always been working on mine,” he explains, “It was such a perspective shift, having to ultimately adhere to John’s vision, and also such a good thing. When you spend a long time being the one who makes the art, you tend to get that ‘I’m right’ attitude happening a lot, so it is good to work on someone else’s art and, even if you don’t agree, they will say ‘well, this is me vision,’ and that’s that.”
Hansard’s role shifted dramatically, though, when Cillian Murphy (arguably a dubious casting choice) pulled out of his role as the lead actor. Given Hansard’s strong connection to the main character, it was suggested that he fill those shoes. “I honestly didn’t feel that comfortable about it,” Hansard confesses, looking slightly awkward, “But John just said, ‘Trust me, I will get a good performance out of you.’ And all I asked was that he promise to fire me if he had to, because I don’t want to be in a shit film. All he said was, ‘I won’t let you be.’ So that was the deal we all struck with each other. In the end, I wasn’t acting very much… John just kept on saying, ‘stop acting, and pull back a bit more.’ Sometimes I would really stop acting altogether and just read the lines and he would say, ‘Now that’s perfect.’ He just wanted us to be ourselves.”
As Murphy departed though, so did the producer and the film’s financing. “We had no lead and no money,” Hansard remembers, “We had to convince all the crew to work for free, meself and Mar [Irglova, the lead actress] worked for free, and we made the film in seventeen days as that was all the crew could give us.” Overnight, Once had become a project financed entirely by love, a factor which definitely shines through the final product. Suddenly, several sharp cost cuts were made; the Dublin scenes were filmed on long lenses without official permits, the musical recordings were done in Hansard’s bedroom rather than in a studio, and the entire film was shot on HD instead of on the intended 16mm film stock.
“It felt really good, though,” Hansard emphasises, “If you’re doing something like this where everyone is working for free – and I’ve been in this situation with my band many times before – you have to get as much out of these people as possible, so there’s a high energy. We were knocking out about four or five scenes a day.”
Perhaps this is the reason why the film feels so natural and organic; although that may also be attributed to the fact that so much of the film was improvised. Hansard clarifies, “What I love most about music is doing it live, when it’s all in the moment, and everything is real and happening right there, so that, when you fuck up, it’s almost part of the beauty of the performance. That’s what a performance is – imperfect…. And I think John understood that really well, that it had to be improvised in order for it to be enjoyable. A lot of directors are really precious about their dialogue, but John said, ‘If you can find a better way to get to that same point, you should do it.’” Naturally, the fact that Hansard is essentially playing himself, and that he is now actually romantically involved Irglova (this is the one point in the conversation during which he looks significantly more awake), helped infuse that improvisation with a poignant sense of reality.
For Hansard though, it seems that Once is about more than the love between two people. “John described the movie as a ‘love song for Ireland’ – but it kind of depicts a Dublin of about fifteen years ago. I mean, it’s all shot on the streets of Dublin now and with no extras, but Dublin now, like Australia, is full of wine bars and cappuccino cafes now, and we’ve got all the high-end designer clothes shops and people are driving around in Range Rovers flaunting their wealth. What we wanted to do was make a film about Ireland before that happened. Also, the Irish were once famous for their friendly welcome… but when we had to deal with immigration we became quite cruel and quite the opposite. My character in the film actually just represents older Ireland, the guy who just accepts the girl, and likes her for who she is, while there’s no real talk about her past and her Czech history or her poverty.”
Significantly, Once did not receive a raving response upon its release in Ireland. (“Irish people don’t see Irish films,” Hansard explains.) Perhaps this is the reason why Hansard, believing the film would never be successful enough to actually warrant a soundtrack, decided to go ahead and record the film’s songs on a separate album, together with Irglova. “We ended up making this record called The Swell Season, which was just a basically an album of the songs from Once,” he reflects, and then laughs, once more recalling that now familiar tone of disbelief, with which he adds, “We figured Once would never be seen by anybody.”
No comments:
Post a Comment