WORDS Deirdre Molumby
Dublin-born and Trinity-educated, interviewing Lenny Abrahamson feels like familiar territory. Yet the director has had some extraordinary achievements. Following the success of his multi-award winning short film 3 Joes (1991), Lenny Abrahamson made TV commercials and then went into feature filmmaking. His first feature-length movie was Adam & Paul (2004), which revolves around two Dublin heroin addicts. It not only won the Best First Feature award at the 2004 Galway Film Fleadh and earned Abrahamson the Best Director award at the IFTA Awards, it was also shown at the Telluride Film Festival, Colorado, and the 2005 Berlin Film Festival. Abrahamson’s next feature was Garage (2007), another film to win awards both in Ireland and abroad. Garage tells the story of Josie, an over-diligent garage employee, as he searches for companionship in County Tipperary. It is Abrahamson’s third feature, What Richard Did, that we are talking about today.
Lenny explains: “it’s a film about a boy who is the one everybody loves in school – teachers, students, and parents love him. He’s a sort of decent guy. He’s also successful academically, good at sport, and cares about his peers, or seems to, so he’s a sort of golden boy. The film follows a series of pretty small, ordinary sort of things that happen in lots of people’s lives when they’re that age, like being in love with a girl, not being sure if she likes you, or having uneasy relationships with some other guys. Richard ends up doing something really terrible and really uncharacteristic, and then the film details how he comes to terms with, or doesn’t come to terms with, what he’s done.”
I ask Jack Reynor, who plays the title role, to tell us more about his character: “there is something kind of sad about him, maybe a little bit dark, even from the start that we feel as an audience. As it goes on, the ideas that he has about himself and his own morality which is very important to him kind of starts to break down. Everything that he believes about himself is shed, and we’re left with just the bare bones of this kid who’s made the most horrific mistake, and has to deal with it in a very quiet, internal way.”
What Richard Did is also the first film Lenny has produced which involves a mostly young cast. “The cast had incredible energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to the film. They were all really talented, all up for any sort of work I wanted them to do. Therefore it was a really free and pleasurable experience to work with them, right through the workshopping we did and then into the shoot. The set was just a very good place to be. Even when we were shooting very difficult stuff, very intense, dramatic stuff, it was still a really warm environment for us.”
The acting of the cast in this film is quite extraordinary. The conversations and chemistry between the characters is so familiar and natural that they feel completely real. Jack explains how this effect was achieved: “We spent eight months workshopping the film before we went in for the principal shoot. We did it in a very informal way, whereby we sat down as an ensemble with Lenny and Malcolm [Malcolm Campbell, writer — ed.] quite frequently over those eight months, and just talked really candidly about our own lives… We got very close, it was very raw. But we’d also just hang out and go over to each other’s houses for barbeques to have drinks and stuff. Lenny and Malcolm would always be around and that was great. So we became very close as a group of people, very tightly knit, which meant that when it came to it, it kind of in a sense was just a bunch of young Dublin guys hanging out, talking and just being friends, because we were.”
The film makes people reflect on themselves, their relationships and their lives.
In spite of suggestions that What Richard Did is based on the Anabel’s case of 2000 (involving the violent death of a young man outside a Dublin nightclub), Lenny is adamant that his film is “completely fictional”. He says “there are resonances, but what I wanted for people to do was to make something really truthful and real which showed the complexity of the lives of those kids and the kinds of pressures they’re under. I think if you watch the film, and you really watch it, it affects you. I think it will make you think. If you’re a parent, it will make you think about your relationship with your kids, and if you’re a teenager make you think about your own life and the way you operate in a circle, and make you really think about what you would do in a situation like that.” Jack agrees: “That’s the main thing about the film. It makes people reflect on themselves, their relationships and their lives.”
This is Jack Reynor’s first major role in a feature-length film. When I ask him about portraying such a complicated character on-screen, Jack reveals his biggest challenge was to depict the lead “in such a way that the audience was always going to empathise with Richard. That no matter what he did, we’d still be able to go ‘That’s not right but, Jesus, it could’ve happened to me and I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes’. That was the most important thing that I felt about it — that you’ll still be able to look at him at the end of the film and no matter what happens, you can go, ‘Yeah, I do feel sympathy for him’. So that was the big challenge, but we spent so long working on it, and the relationship that Lenny and I had just made it something that we could achieve.”
One of the biggest pleasures in interviewing Lenny and Jack was seeing the two relate to each other. They are so at ease and chatty with one another, and not afraid to tease each other either. When asking Jack about what he found most difficult in portraying Richard, Lenny answered “Making him look like he can throw a rugby ball,” laughing. Jack started answering the question, only to turn a moment later to tell Lenny “You know, that’s really harsh, man” and both had a laugh about it. Lenny described how the two worked closely together during filming as well as in pre-production. “People, when they work together on a film, do get very close. You know, people tell you the same thing — ‘Oh my God I can’t believe we’re so close’ and ‘What are we going to do when the film is over?’ and then you just go back to your lives. But actually we did stay close and we did become friends, even despite our age difference.” It’s a genuine relationship, and one that has produced a great picture.
