‘I saw Brenda on TV, I had to have her in my film’

Tadhg O’Sullivan is an Irish documentarian known for blending observational essay style with experimental techniques.

His works like To The Moon are meditative, offering audiences space and time to reflect.

His latest film, The Swallow, is his first narrative feature, telling the story of an older woman living in a cottage by the sea as she reflects on her life while writing a letter.

O’Sullivan, who will take part in a Q&A session after the screening of the film in Triskel Cinema on October 19, says he originally intended to make a documentary about the legacy of art.

“I was interested in doing something about the politics of preservation of art and what gets put in museums. Why do we care about preserving certain artworks and not others? What does it mean to try to preserve anything when the future is a very uncertain thing these days? I thought that it could make an interesting subject for a documentary, but the more I thought of it, the more I thought it was a bit of a dry subject.”

He realised the key to examining the subject was to give it a human perspective.

“If you put those questions about that subject into the mind of somebody for whom these are acute questions, an artist who cared about what happened to their work after they were gone. If you put that person in the winter of their life, the question about what happens after they are gone becomes a different one. Suddenly, all of these very interesting but somewhat dry questions become part of a human engagement with the world.”

The film has just one character: the artist at the centre of the story. O’Sullivan knew he needed someone who could hold the audience’s attention and convey plenty of emotion without interacting with another actor. He was watching television when the right actor came to his attention.

“I had a list of people to approach. I think the whole country saw that interview that Brenda Fricker did with Tommy Tiernan a couple of years ago. I watched the interview, and my partner, Sarah, poked me on the arm and said, ‘You need her’.”

Brenda was so good at articulating the experience I was trying to get and understand, which was solitude - what she later called the loneliness without pity, or loneliness that refuses pity. “

O’Sullivan says in that interview, Fricker could articulate more than he ever could. and agreed straight away that she was the perfect actor.

“I knew I needed an actor who could bring a certain level of understanding of the character to me that I wouldn’t necessarily know myself. We had a phone call, and she was interested in the fact that it was a film with one character.

“This is a very unusual proposition for any actor; for an older woman, it was unusual to have a character who wasn’t defined by her role as a mother, a grandmother, or a wife. It was just her on her own terms. She really took the character and built it with me, put flesh on the bones and turned it into a living, breathing human being.”

As this was O’Sullivan’s first time making a narrative feature, he had to learn a new side of filmmaking and work with sets and props for the first time.

“When you’re making a documentary, you just walk into a room, and you might intervene to an extent by turning on or off a light or moving a chair, but ultimately, you work with what’s in front of you; when you’re working in drama, you start with a house that has been stripped bare. You have to build this from scratch, which is at once exciting and incredibly daunting, because it has to feel real.

“Anybody can look at a set and see that it is not believable, but this needed to be a house that looked lived in.”

O’Sullivan says he was fortunate to work with Patricia Hurl from the artist collective Na Cailleacha, who allowed the film crew to borrow contents of her studio to create the studio for Fricker’s character.

Music plays a big part in the film, and O’Sullivan worked with a Norwegian musician, Benedicte Maurseth, an artist who understands Ireland’s West Coast.

“She is from the western coast of Norway, which is the equivalent of the western coast of Ireland. It has the same sea birds, the same harsh weather, and the same ways. If I’d used an Irish fiddler, it would have been too twee, but using a Norwegian fiddler gave it this otherworldly sense.”

O’Sullivan, a former artist-in-residence at UCC who worked with the great West Cork filmmaker Pat Collins several times, says he has an affinity for the Rebel County.

“I have always brought films to Cork, and Cork has always been very responsive to my work and to the kind of work I love. The Triskel is a very meditative place.

“Sometimes, as a filmmaker, you daydream that you will never finish your work, and you imagine what it would be like when it’s finished. You daydream about what it would be like playing somewhere like the Triskel, where people are quiet and really enjoying the film.

“You need goals in life, so for me, bringing the film to Triskel is a delivery on that. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”

O’Sullivan will take part in a post-screening Q&A on Sunday, October 19 at Triskel Cinema where the film screens until October 22. See triskelartscentre.ie