Dublin mobster Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson) is not a good man to owe money to, as Michael (Cillian Murphy) knows only too well.
With no means to pay his debt, Michael goes on the run with best friend Brenda (Jodie Whittaker) and dad Jim (Jim Broadbent) in tow.
But Irish gangsters don’t give up that easily in Mark O’Rowe’s dark comedy, Perrier’s Bounty.
My Movie Mundo met up with actor CILLIAN MURPHY and producers ALAN MOLONEY and ELIZABETH KARLSEN to talk Irish westerns, cartoon naturalism, and career strategies.
MMM: How did the project start? Did the film’s writer Mark O’Rowe (Intermission, Boy A) come to you with a script or did you commission a script from him?
Moloney: When we were making Intermission around 2003 we were enjoying it so much, that we started chatting about doing something else together. At that time Mark had this thought that he’d like to write a western. After that he went off, and six months later I got a phone call from him saying ‘I have something that might be kind of interesting’; and that became Perrier’s Bounty. The western element is that guys go on the run and they’re chased by a posse!
Brendan Gleeson stars as gangster Darren Perrier
Mark wrote a play, which kind of kicked him off, called Howie the Rookie, and that’s how we first came across him. Intermission came out of that, and Perrier’s Bounty, I think, is a direct line to Howie the Rookie. It’s very much his writing, his idiom… the language is a Mark O’Rowe patois.
Karlsen: Stephen [Woolley, Karlsen's producing partner at Number 9 Films] had done Intermission with Alan [Moloney] and Cillian [Murphy], so naturally we teamed up again. Alan and I worked pretty closely on the production and post-production.
I love the film – it’s the poetry of Mark’s language combined with the extreme violence and humour. He seems to pull off that very disparate combination with such finesse. And obviously Cillian handles it superbly. It’s a rollercoaster ride of a movie for me. It’s such fun and it seems to throw you places you don’t expect to go with a jolt.
MMM: Cillian, you were part of Intermission, so you know the writing and the playwright too. Have you been on board a long time with the idea?
Murphy: I remember Mark mentioning it when we were making Intermission, and it was very intriguing even at that stage as he described it as ‘kind of a western, kind of a road movie, with a metaphysical element to it.’
I’ve been a fan of his work since I was a rookie in Ireland. He’s up there with Martin McDonagh; he’s in that great new generation of Irish writers. And it was tremendous fun making Intermission and the idea of that team getting back together again was very appealing too.
MMM: Is this Ian Fitzgibbon’s first feature in the director’s chair?
Moloney: We did a small film [A Film With Me In It] together about 2 years ago with Dylan Moran, which hasn’t actually come out here yet. I think it will this year. It’s playing in New York at the moment. It’s a tiny little film and got rave reviews in the New York papers.
It was a million pound film done as a stepping stone to demonstrate to people that Ian could handle a feature film because he’d done quite a lot of television before that. He’s clearly a talent to keep watching.
Father and son on the run... Jim Broadbent and Cillian Murphy
MMM: The film’s writer, Mark O’Rowe, has described the film’s style as ‘cartoon naturalism’. How did you decide how far to go with the violence? And how did you manage to get the balance right between the violence and the comedy?
Karlsen: I think that what you see is pretty true to the original script, though I remember one of the original financiers, who’s not involved now, was very keen to take out the gay gangster theme. I remember with The Crying Game someone had said that we should know straight away that the Jaye Davidson character is a man in the first scene! So I think it might have been one of those notes that everyone saw fit to ignore.
I think the level of violence was always there. It’s one of those scripts where the writing really jumps off the page, and you feel ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ There were some things that Mark had in there, like training scenes with the whole Canine Vernacular Society. It was impossible to shoot those really, so that was the main area that was finessed in the script.
MMM: As an actor involved in a film like this, it’s all about the tone, isn’t it, because those words could be played in all sorts of ways. Is what your approach to the script should be part of the discussion with the director as well?
Murphy: Absolutely, we talked about it a lot. I think it’s key that you keep going back to is that you play it for the truth of it, you play it for the honesty of it, and if you follow that through all the way, it seems to work. Also Mark’s language is very precise. You can’t really deviate from it or extemporise on it. It is a heightened version of Dublin, but if you inhabit that completely it should pay off.
MMM: You mentioned a whole generation of writers earlier, and it seems there’s almost a genre of Irish gangster movies now.
Moloney: I think it is interesting that all those writers are all around the same age and each had their initial success in theatre, and I suppose there is a tradition of that in Ireland. It’s the first generation of writers that have grown up with film and television in Ireland, so I think it’s a different style of writing that’s emerged. The fact that it found its way through theatre is because it’s easier to get plays put on than films made. Questionably it has become an interesting sub-genre or a writing force of its own.
Perrier's Bounty stars, Murphy, Jodie Whittaker, and Broadbent
MMM: Cillian, Jim Broadbent plays your father in the film. What was it like working with him?
Murphy: I’ve been a huge fan of Jim Broadbent for many years, and it was a great honour to get to work with him. He has this enviable quality where he comes on screen and you just fall in love with him as a character. And his funny bones are so impressive. I’m a terrible corpse anyway, so it was quite hard keeping a straight face during scenes. He was a delight.
MMM: Does working with people like Ian Fitzgibbon, Ken Loach, and Neil Jordan allow you to take one something like a Christopher Nolan film? And having done Batman, does that give you extra freedom to do stuff like this?
Murphy: I suppose that would be the text book way, but it doesn’t ever work like that. You just do what you think are the more interesting roles. You do stuff you think will challenge you. You can’t start to strategise about how a career’s going to work out.
I’ve been lucky to make big films and smaller films. I just look at them in terms of story and character. I know a lot of actors say that, but you can’t say: ‘right, I’ll do one for them and then one for me’. It doesn’t really work like that. You work and then you don’t work and then you work again, that’s kinda the way it goes.
By film journalist Jan Gilbert