That low whirring noise you can hear in the background is the sound of the publicity machine cranking up for Conversations with Friends, the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney's debut novel from the same creative team who gave us the hit version of her second book, Normal People. The current issue of Vanity Fair magazine has a behind-the-scenes peek at the production, along with interviews with the cast (most of whom are more well-established than were Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones before Normal People's success).
When the first teaser trailer dropped online a couple of days later, some people who hadn't been paying attention while the show was shooting last year expressed surprise at another (sort of) casting decision. Conversations with Friends is set in Dublin but filmed in Belfast. This continues a recent trend of the Northern metropolis standing in for its Southern neighbour in, for example, The Dublin Murders, as part of the boom in production north of the Border. Dublin isn't the only place being recreated by the Lagan. For a decade now, Belfast has also been impersonating an unnamed city in the English midlands for Line of Duty.
Much of this is down to the successful strategy pursued by the Northern Ireland authorities to attract major international productions with a mix of tax credits, subsidies and improved facilities. These are the essential building blocks for establishing an international reputation as an attractive location for film companies, and the provisions of the Northern Ireland Protocol, along with the continuing boom in global demand, may well offer new opportunities in that regard.
The one place Belfast doesn’t much get to represent, it seems, is Belfast. Blackburn was used for the scarifying scenes of violence and disorder in Yann Demange’s excellent Troubles-era thriller, ’71. And Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-nominated love letter to the city of his childhood was mostly shot on sets constructed on an unused airfield outside London.
The Hollywood Reporter explained that “because of Covid-19 restrictions, shooting on location wasn’t going to be an option”, for Belfast the movie but also noted that even if it had been possible, Belfast the city had changed dramatically since the 1960s. Branagh himself explained that half of the street he grew up on “wasn’t there any more”.
Thanks to successive waves of bombing, sectarian conflict, slum clearance and urban regeneration, the Belfast of 2022, as seen through a cinematographer’s viewfinder, now offers a pleasingly neutral slate, an urban anywhere that can stand in for any mid-sized city on these islands. In that respect, it’s akin, on a somewhat smaller scale, to the role played by Toronto and Vancouver in the north American film industry. Those cities have stood in thousands of times for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and all points between in productions attracted by cheaper crews and financial incentives.
There’s something else worth considering about how locations are chosen for contemporary TV dramas like Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Rooney’s fictions are set in a recognisable Ireland, but it’s not clear that their “Irishness” (whatever that might be) is inherent to their success as works of art or their popularity with international audiences. Their explorations of class, gender and the quest for meaning among university-educated millennials could easily be played out in Oslo or Edinburgh, or in a hundred other places (a Korean version would be interesting).
There’s always been a tension in cinema between the authenticity which the photographic image purports to offer and the high artifice which goes into manufacturing the world we see on screen. That tension extends, sometimes powerfully, to our sense of place. If you’ve never seen your own world represented on screen, it can feel like a sort of validation when it finally happens. In his memoir Walking with Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne describes the audience bursting into applause in a Dublin cinema in the 1950s when images of the city appeared in a newsreel. The downside of that emotion can be a crushingly parochial literalness, as when Roddy Doyle and Michael Winterbottom’s groundbreaking 1990s TV drama, Family, was attacked for its “depiction of Ballymun”. Family was not set in Ballymun, but it was shot there, a distinction which eluded many Dubliners.
Do such extreme emotional reactions still happen in a world saturated with moving images, where geographical distance has been collapsed by the internet and cultural differences have been flattened by globalisation? Probably not, or at least not in the circles in which Rooney’s characters move. If the discontents of bourgeois Dublin twentysomethings have some sort of specifically local character, it’s not immediately visible to the viewer, which may help explain in part why the new series is so eagerly anticipated.
