Calvary is one of those indie gems you feel special as a movie fan discovering before everyone else gets the opportunity to jump on its bandwagon. Writer/director John Michael McDonagh set the bar high with his feature film debut and, fortunately, his second effort lives up to the standard he set for himself with 2011’s The Guard. Calvary reunites McDonagh with his The Guard star Brendan Gleeson for yet another award-worthy collaboration, taking on a difficult subject matter with finesse and a touch of dark humor.
The Plot: Calvary‘s Father James (Gleeson) is a good priest who is faced with sinister and troubling circumstances brought about by a mysterious member of his parish. Although he continues to comfort his own fragile daughter (Kelly Reilly) and reach out to help members of his church with their various scurrilous moral – and often comic – problems, he feels sinister and troubling forces closing in, and begins to wonder if he will have the courage to face his own personal Calvary.
John Michael McDonagh Calvary Interview
I realize it’s the same time of year as The Guard was released in America, but I’m afraid that no one is going to remember Brendan Gleeson’s performance by the end of the year and he deserves recognition.
John Michael McDonagh: “Yeah, I know. That is a worry. I was a bit irritated that he didn’t get enough recognition as he should of for The Guard.”
Exactly.
John Michael McDonagh: “Yeah, it’s possible the same thing might happen now. What I’ve found though, a lot of the reviews, even people who don’t necessarily like the movie – we haven’t had that many bad reviews – but usually they still love Brendan’s performance. Usually they might criticize me, but he’s had a universal applause, basically.
I guess The Guard was successful in its run and I guess Fox Seachlight is doing the same kind of thing with Calvary‘s release. That is the risk you take is that the timing of it, it might get lost in the shuffle when it comes to the end of the year.”
Your whole entire ensemble cast is incredible. We can only hope people remember this movie at the end of the year.
John Michael McDonagh: “I think Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen, Chris O’Dowd, all those are awards worthy performances, I think.”
Is there one of them you would have liked to have spent a little more time with in the film?
John Michael McDonagh: “I think looking back at the movie, probably Chris O’Dowd’s character, the butcher Jack, probably needed maybe a couple more scenes to round him out a little bit more. I just feel we miss him at a certain section in the movie. I think the others though all have pretty juicy scenes. Chris’s character has pretty juicy scenes, but they’re sparingly placed within the film so maybe he needed one or two earlier on. Apart from that, I’m happy. They all make an impression. They all have something confrontational to say, let’s put it that way.”
Is the lack of Chris O’Dowd your personal opinion or what you’ve heard from people who have watched the film?
John Michael McDonagh: “No. I just noticed it in the first 40 minutes. It’s like, ‘Oh, we haven’t seen Chris in a while.’ Then he comes back in the pub and he has a really big scene with Brendan in the pub, so it’s just like there was just one section…Let’s say maybe only one little hole maybe in the first 40 minutes where I could’ve come up with something else for him.”
The pacing is spot on and you didn’t rush anything. You played it out gently across that whole week period in which the film takes place. Did you know audiences would be with it that entire time and that you wouldn’t be losing people by the time you hit Wednesday or Thursday?
John Michael McDonagh: “I worried about it because it is quite specifically paced. I worried about the idea of breaking it up into days because it’s the thing, if you don’t like the movie, you’re going to go, ‘Oh god, it’s only Wednesday,’ you know? That kind of thing. When you’re watching Dogville, I like that movie but I think it was in 10 chapters and by the 5th chapter, we were about an hour and half in, and you’re going, ‘God, it’s going to go over three hours or something.’ I was worried a bit about that, but I tried to make the film I wanted to make and just hope that an audience will go with me.
What I found from early screenings, especially at Sundance is I was surprised at how long the humor lasted into the movie because at a certain point about halfway through, I’d say specifically when Brendan’s character goes to visit Freddie the serial killer, played by Domhnall Gleeson, that’s a really dark and brilliant scene. I felt after that we’re not going to get any laughs, but we did. I realized looking back that when there’s really dark and brilliant scenes, after that an audience wants a bit of relief. They’re willing to accept the darkness as long as there are comic moments dotted throughout. I was quite pleased. In all the screenings I’ve seen, the laughter lasts almost up to the final confrontation.”
Without giving away any spoilers, was the final scene exactly as you originally pictured it when you first came up with the idea of tackling this particular subject matter or did it change much?
John Michael McDonagh: “At the end of the film, one of the main characters reaches for the phone to try to communicate with another character. In the original draft, he doesn’t reach for the phone and I thought, ‘That’s too bleak.’ Him reaching for the phone is, at least he’s trying to communicate. I wanted a much more hopeful ending, so that was the only minor change. It’s not even a minor change really, it’s a big hopeful change.”
Does it surprise you that this particular subject matter is not tackled more often in feature films?
John Michael McDonagh: “No, because I think people, generally speaking, want to go to the movies because they want to escape from thinking about dark subject matters or philosophical or spiritual ideas, and you understand that. Most people’s lives are pretty tough. They’re working pretty hard now because of everything that’s happened with financial scandals and everything. It’s a tough world out there and I guess when you go to a movie, you want to switch off. I particularly don’t. I’m getting bored with all the popcorn movies. I barely go to see them anymore because I find them quite tiresome now just because they’re repetitive. They’re telling the same story over and over again. The filmmaking is improving, but the storytelling isn’t. I can understand it, but the responses I’ve got is that people are enjoying it because it’s something they haven’t seen in a long, long time. I think you have to go back, I guess, to the ’60s and ’70s and people like Bergman who was dealing with all those issues. I think it’s something new and original to them and people enjoy coming across something that’s original.”
It was one of the few films that I walked out of and actually talked about afterwards.
John Michael McDonagh: “The thing about the film is whether you loved it or a few people don’t like it, I think even the people who don’t like it, they can’t really dismiss it. It’s not a film you walk out of and go, ‘Okay, well, I didn’t like that one, I’ll go and get a hot dog.’ You have to deal with why you didn’t like it or explain to the person with you what was it about it that annoyed you or whatever. It’s not a film that can be dismissed.”
I also believe it’s a movie you can go back and see again and catch things you may not have picked up on the first time.
John Michael McDonagh: “Definitely. The whole murder mystery hook; once you’ve seen the film the first time, you know who the killer is. When you watch it again, there’s lots of other levels to his interactions with the priest all the way through the movie.”
Given the subject matter, did you have a difficult time finding financing?
John Michael McDonagh: “Actually, what happened was Brendan was involved from the start, so it’s good to have a big actor who’s specifically known in the UK right from the start. When Chris O’Dowd came on board, we basically secured financing although we didn’t get as much money as we did for The Guard. I think The Guard was $6.8 million and this was about $6 million. I was happy with that. I guess a lot of filmmakers would say, ‘Well, The Guard was a hit, so why can’t you give me more money?’ My feeling was the subject matter of this is much tougher than The Guard, even though it had lots of melancholy moments in it, it was a much broader buddy comedy, I guess. I can understand that finances were tougher and I was happy enough to get the six million, to be honest. There’s lots of filmmakers that are struggling out there trying to get anything made.”
With that budget were you able to do everything you wanted to do?
John Michael McDonagh: “We got everything we needed, but it was a very short schedule. It started off with 27 days and in the first week, we did a six day week, but in that first week, we shot the conclusion of the movie, the whole confrontation on the beach. At that point, the financier said, ‘Okay, we got the end in. We’ll give the guy another two days.’ We had 29 days in the end. It’s tough. It was tough on Brendan more than me in a way because he’s on the set every day. He’s in every scene basically and he’s being emotionally hammered by all these characters.
I found for me, I storyboard everything. I found it really concentrated my mind because I knew that I had to be specific about everything. I had to move on when I needed to move on. I couldn’t just hang around doing take after take. What I would say is if you talk specifically, let’s say, about the beach scene, we got really lucky with the weather. This was shooting in Ireland in October. If we hadn’t got lucky with the weather, the shoot could have been a complete disaster. I got away with it in that sense. I wouldn’t like to do it on that schedule again. 35 to 40 days, I think, is a much easier schedule to get everything you want done.”
Did it help that you and Brendan had developed a short hand by that point having already worked on The Guard?
John Michael McDonagh: “Yes. I think we would have talked the film through beforehand, so there didn’t need to be a lot of discussions on set. I think we did about four or five days rehearsal with Brendan and the rest of the actors, so when everyone came on the set, they all, broadly speaking, knew what they were going to do. There was no long discussions or anything. We worked quite swiftly and Larry Smith, the cinematographer, lights really quickly once he sees how it’s all blocked. I gave him the storyboard, so he knows what the frame is. There’s not a lot of sitting around in trailers. [Laughing] Not that we had trailers. We had these tiny little caravans that you don’t really want to spend much time in because they’re all smelly. We worked quick.”
What are you working on next?
John Michael McDonagh: “Well, I’m hopefully next year going to shoot my first American movie called War on Everyone with Michael Pena and Garrett Hedlund, and we’re in the process of writing the finances for that. It’s meant to be about two corrupt cops in Texas, so it’s kind of a black comedy. Now we’re getting into discussions about, ‘Well, there’s better tax credits in Louisiana. Can you go to Louisiana?’ You know, there’s all those sorts of discussions.
It will be in about the $8 to 10 million budget. It was my kind of budget range, really. It will be harking back to black comedy of The Guard, but it goes into a darker ending in the last 30 minutes.”
-By Rebecca Murray
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