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Photo main left: Colin Farrell and Alicja Bachleda; and inset top, DP Christopher Doyle and Neil Jordan; above: scenes from Ondine and Neil Jordan behind camera
FUJIFILM MOTION PICTURE • THE MAGAZINE • EXPOSURE • 11
“AT THE OUTSET NEIL ASKED ME WHY ALL MY FILMS
LOOK SO DIFFERENT, AND I HAVE TO SAY THAT THIS IS BECAUSE OF WHERE, MORE THAN HOW, THEY ARE SHOT.”
ASONGOFTHESEA
IRISH FILMMAKER NEIL JORDAN RETURNS TO HIS ROOTS FOR ONDINE
The magical elements of fairy Atales have frequently found
their way into writer-director Neil Jordan’s work, which often hinge on the moment
innocence meets malign reality.
His second feature The Company
of Wolves touched upon this quite expressly, and his latest movie, Ondine, returns to the theme as an Irish fisherman raises his trawler nets out of the water only to find they contain a mysterious woman.
One explanation is that his unexpected catch, the Ondine of the title (played by Alicja Bachleda) is a mermaid. Fisherman Syracuse (Colin Farrell) and his young daughter Annie (Alison Barry) are beguiled by this prospect, even though other more prosaic possibilities still lurk in the background.
In bringing a film to the screen that speaks so strongly to the director’s past work, producer James Flynn of Octagon Films acknowledges this original story penned by the director is ‘classic Neil Jordan’.
For his own part, Jordan was keen to strip back his filmmaking without the distraction of big budget production he had made in the past including Interview With The Vampire and Michael Collins.
“Sometimes circumstances force you to strip down your aesthetic to thebonesandreinventyourself,”he explains. “Large can be great but sometimes small is even better. I think the worst thing you can do is repeat yourself.” To achieve this aim on Ondine – nominated for no fewer than eight Irish Film & Television
Academy awards this year and winning four of its categories, Jordan began a fruitful collaboration with a DP who has a similar aesthetic, Christopher Doyle HKSC, whose work spans some of the best of today’s East and West Cinema.
“At the outset Neil asked me why all my films look so different,” Doyle reports, “and I have to say that this is because of where, more than how, they are shot.”
With some Irish blood coursing through his own veins Doyle confesses he was keen to find his own connection with Ireland, in particular the area around Jordan’s Castletownbere home in the south west of the country.
“I wanted this film to be about landscape,” the director explains, “and of course it could have been filmedwhereIcomefromin Connemara, or Sligo. But Castletownbere is a real working fishing town and quite a bit away from the tourist trail. It has its own identity, its own industry, and its own internal life.”
The film was shot during the not particularly warm or pleasant summer of 2008, which posed a particular challenge for all concerned given that almost half of the story would be taking place on or near the sea.
“We had constantly changing tides and bad weather,” recalls stunt co-ordinator Mark Mottram, “with wind and rain most of the time. But what was achieved here in a few months was amazing. We only lost one full day of shooting to the weather conditions.”
Shooting on the water is a technically challenging exercise at the best of times, and in these conditions Doyle’s talents were tested to the limit. Typically, he took to the task gamely. Shooting, sometimes hand held, on a fishing boat just six metres long, was just the beginning of, as he wryly puts it, “being covered in fish for most of the time.
“The easiest and most elegant way to move around the boat meant it had be hand-held,” he adds. “Then it was a question of finding shots that celebrated the sea and man’s place in it.
“Of course,” adds Doyle, “there are also shots of the coast, we were looking for angles that would articulate the story and celebrate the emotional journey of our lead characters.” ANWARBRETT
Ondine, now on release in the UK, was originated on 35mm Fujicolor ETERNA 400T, 8583