I WAS IN a community hall in Leitrim last week with a film crew. There was a boxing ring in the hall, and young boys were skipping away and sometimes gawking at the actors like they might not be real.
The film wasn’t about the child boxers. It was merely coincidence that the boxing club and the film crew were using the hall on the same night. The film crew didn’t seem quite real to the children, and the children didn’t seem real to me, since I too was there because I was in the film.
In one scene I had to smuggle diesel by driving a truck across the Border. Of course I only drove the truck 5m, and a real driver did the rest, wearing the same clothes as me. While the film crew set up cameras, me and the real driver waited in the cab of the truck and talked about the weather, fracking and the quality of chips in Dromahair.
The next scene was in Dromahair in the back room of a bar, where my character was involved in a fight.
But in the real bar, where I waited for the shooting to commence, two old men sat at either ends of the counter, reading separate copies of The Leitrim Observerin silence.
Then a third man entered, old and scrawny in a shiny black suit, sat beside me and said, “Is this where they’re filming?” “They’re in the back room,” the barman whispered.
“I should be in it,” he declared. “I’ve had an interesting life.” And pinning me to the high stool with a stare, he continued: “I often danced half the night and drank a bottle of whiskey, and still made love so fiercely that they called me the Hammer. Oh indeed,” he concluded, “I turned every page in the book.” “No one ever called me a hammer,” I said.
“And who are you?” he asked, with the authority of someone who never dug a crooked ridge in his life.
“I live near Lough Allen,” I said, trying to avoid discussing the film.
“Well,” he said, “my grandfather was from Lough Allen. And he emigrated to America with a brother. And the brother was flung from the upper deck of an open top bus one day and split his head open. So my grandfather came home and I was born here, and if that grand uncle hadn’t died prematurely I wouldn’t be talking to you now. I might have grown up as an American and become – a movie star.” He seemed pleased with that phrase.
“Anyway,” he asked, “what are you doing in Dromahair?” “I’m in – the movie,” I admitted.
Just then I was called into the back room because it was time to act. There’s an air of unreality about films. It gets to be so real that real life seems like the illusion.
Even Dublin seemed unreal later in the week, when I attended the film festival. From the window of my hotel one night, I witnessed a savage brawl on the street below, between two youths.
The following morning I passed the spot and could smell disinfectant where the blood had been cleared up, but it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I had a pancake with maple syrup, at a street cafe not far from Grogan’s pub, where I once met the poet John Jordan in 1979.
I don’t know if Jordan had any opinion about films because I never asked him. But I did ask him if he believed in God because people told me he was a great Catholic.
“I believe in affliction,” he said, twisting every sinew of his arthritic body around the words, like ivy choking a tree. “Affliction is the only reality.” After the pancake I slipped into Grogan’s, just to see who was there. Morning light slanted across the carpet and a barman was boiling a kettle. The place seemed weird without smoke, and empty without John Jordan.
Outside Drury Street car park a homeless man sat with his blanket, woolly hat and plastic cup. He smiled and blessed me, and I tried to avoid his eyes by assuming a kind of unfocused indignation; but he was having none of it.
“Please,” he begged, stretching his arm towards me. “Small change.”
His eyes caught mine and I realised that he was beautiful, and that he looked very like Daniel Day Lewis, and for all I knew there might have been cameras around the corner, because the moment was very real indeed.