Paul Quinn looks up at the not-so-hot tin roof and mutters: "It's the only studio where you have to stop for rain or airplanes." He lives in Los Angeles and has clearly seen smarter, better-soundproofed studios in his day. Although he has acted in a number of films (Bob Roberts, Avalon, Grosse Pointe Blank) and is a founding member of New Crime Productions, the LA/Chicago film and theatre company headed by the fine American character-actor John Cusack, this is his first outing as writer/director.
He gnaws on a dry, brown scone. He complains, meekly, about rewrites forced by budget constraints. "We can't go to Sligo to use the beaches . . . we have to go to some beach up the road," he laughs, nervously. There are only four more days of shooting. The studio is indeed a modified hay barn on the road between Manor Kilbride and the Sally Gap. Inside the cramped set Declan Quinn, the cinematographer, who counts Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas and Louis Malle's last picture, Vanya On 42nd Street among his credits, is clearly exhausted, having spent the best of the past seven weeks on his feet. But the atmosphere is buoyant, professional, with about 10 technicians squeezed into the tiny space as Gina Moxley and John Kavanagh deliver a cruel, harrowing scene.
Declan hovers over the camera, checking the angles, courteous and focused. Meanwhile, Paul calls for Moya Farrelly, a young Dublin actress who plays the lead, to rehearse with Eamon Morrissey. The young PAs tell everyone to be quiet over and over again. No one appears to have heard that cigarettes can damage your health.
Marian Quinn, an actress based in Brooklyn, comes in later to complete her scenes, dressed in a long, brown frock. She gives Paul a supportive embrace. She's married to Dubliner Tommy Weir, a founder of the City Arts Centre now based in New York, and they return regularly to spend time in a family cottage in Dromahair, Sligo with their two children. Another Quinn brother works as a landscaper back in the States. So. That's three brothers and a sister. Where's Aidan Quinn? For Aidan Quinn, it's a rare day off, but he arrives on the set anyway, for a photoshoot, an interview and to scout the following day's location. He's easy to meet, charming, accommodating, unharried. There is no limo, no fawning. But dammit, those eyes.
His haircut could be described as 1930s brutal, as his role demands in this is a very bleak tale of inadmissible love, church repression, betrayal, social cruelty and isolation. Quinn's character is described in the synopsis as "a simple farmer, a poorhouse bastard". Gina Moxley, who plays "a rich widow", is wandering around with the most atrocious "wounds" to her knee. John Kavanagh looks like a convict.
"Paul's doing incredible," Aidan says in a quite wonderfully droll, laconic voice they all share. "He's really doing fantastic - I mean, to have two older brothers hovering over him - you know - and dealing with that. I rarely say this but I think it's going to be a really good movie."
And so it should be with a cast including James Caan, Stephen Rea, John Cusack, Colm Meaney, Brendan Gleeson, Donal Donnelly, Brendan Conroy . . . There are some 42 actors in all and about 85 crew. The independent film has been put together with vast resources of will and determination. "Between Declan, myself and Marian there is a huge attachment to Ireland and we're always coming back, back and back," says Aidan, walking toward a rickety double-decker bus fitted with tables. "But I didn't realise how much Paul was also attached. He spent the least amount of time here of any of us so it was interesting to read the script and to see how much of it is buried in him, too. He is very clear-cut - he calls himself American - whereas with Declan and Marian and myself it's always back and forth, Irish-American, American-Irish. A see-saw." The Quinns were born in Chicago in the late 1950s and 1960s of emigrant parents - both from Co Offaly - who returned to Ireland for several long stretches. This unsettled migration, more than anything, seems to have brought them close, developed their ability to work so intensely together (although genetics must be credited for their creative talents). "We got used to living in two different cultures and being able to go back and forth . . . We've always been very close, we care about each other. We get along well, most of the time, and have similar interests." Balm to the ears of any parents raising warring siblings.
He also concedes: "We grew up fast. I look at my nieces now [Declan's daughters] and I think about what I was doing at their age. They're so much better behaved than I ever was. Oh my God! Oh yeah! Oh they are."
Between living first in Chicago, then moving to the conservative mid-western town of Rockford, Illinois ("the last place God made"), then moving back to Birr and then to Dublin, they reinvented themselves a number of times in order to make the most of being the new kids in town. "My life really started at 13 when we came back to Birr," Quinn says. "There was a vast explosion, all of a sudden, of being accepted. When we moved from Chicago to Rockford, a tight and puritan mid-western community, we were often referred to as foreigners - purely because our parents had Irish accents. So it was kind of shocking to land in Birr and to suddenly have friends and get all this attention. Declan had already been there for a year and set it up. Everyone knew him. It was an explosion. Girls were, like, interested in us?"
No kidding. "All those girls, all that courting." Birr, Co Offaly, was clearly the place to be.
"I remember, at 13, coming back and opening my granny's door, and looking in and getting the smell . . . and looking at the grandfather clock, and the stairs, and everything was familiar because it all came back from when I was last there at the age of four or five, just a tyke. Hard to describe how the smells - the peat, even the fries - seemed so comfortable and familiar and good . . . it was a great year for me. "It is also always extraordinary coming back to a place where you find so many people whose traits you recognise, who look like your family. That sudden realisation: `This is my tribe'." The Quinns' mother came from Cloghan, 12 miles from Birr, "smack dab in the middle of the Bog of Allen". She was the wild one, the dancer, the one who went to parties. It was from his mother's people - they still run a B&B in Birr - that the bones of this filmscript were gathered.
"The stories she told of the old place where she grew up were always very compelling," says Quinn.
After mingling in Birr, Aidan left the country town to go to school in Dublin - St Joseph's College - for a year, then back to Rockford, Illinois then back to Dublin. "I moved here for a year and tried to live out the romantic dream of being a writer and all that and that's when I got the bug to be an actor. But I couldn't get any work and that's when I went back to Chicago and New York."
Their father was a literature professor - "There were always stories . . . Irish writers, particularly, were important to him. He encouraged us to read, not to watch television - forced us not to watch television . . . Just how autobiographical is This Is My Father? The story begins, after all, with a school teacher. Its time would be their mother's time. An answer came there, sort of. "There was a story that we heard in Offaly, from the home-place, and this provided the skeleton. But it has been totally fictionalised. No one knew any of these people . . .
"I'm not sure how much Paul wants to reveal, especially at this stage, but there is a story where some of the external things that happened are similar to what happened in the 1930s in and around my mother's place, and Paul just built on it."
The period was, of course, full of desperate, cruel stories. In this one, a 57-year-old, burnt-out American high school teacher (James Caan) discovers the identity of his real father - he had been led to believe his father was a merchant seaman who had drowned. He returns to Ireland with a young student and the action retraces events of 1939 and where they have led people, up until the 1990s. LUNCH is called: it's 4 p.m. and absolutely everyone downs tools. "I live on fish, I have it every day," says Aidan. We move into the Quinns' trailer - one for all of them - where there is a bed, kitchen and several television screens for watching rushes. Paul's wife, actress Patrice Pitman Quinn, is tapping away on her laptop in the corner, working on the latest rewrite. This is subject to considerable debate and some cajoling. The script calls for the young lovers to sneak off to Galway for a day, where they fall in love. Alas, not possible. The shoot cannot afford to go to Galway, so the scene is rewritten to happen on the way to Galway (i.e. their car breaks down up the road). "I feel a major rewrite coming on," says Paul. He has worked on the script over five years with Patrice, in between teaching, coaching, and acting. He hopes now to devote all his time to writing.
Declan, the eldest brother, comes in. "So, John Kavanagh did good with the last scene, huh?" Aidan asks. "Yeah, in the second-last scene he was building up to becoming an axe-murderer. I was afraid we might have to get out of town," Declan says. Eamon Morrissey, terrifyingly severe in a dog-collar ("It's extraordinary how people move away from you when you are wearing these things," he says) had delivered a chilling sermon from the pulpit during an earlier shoot.
"I had to hold on to my face to avoid cracking up," says Aidan. "He's so good. And Colm Meaney's mammy's boy - he's hysterical." We talk about Leaving Las Vegas, with Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shrue, which Declan helped design as much as photograph. The ravages of alcoholism have certainly been a dominant theme in book, films and plays in the past two years. Aidan's favourite films to date? "Three or four were important to me: Avalon, Early Frost a production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons we did for television. At Play In The Fields Of The Lord was hard, but I really cared about what it was about."
The rest he describes as "sweet". "Desperately Seeking Susan was sweet, Playboys, Benny And Joon . . ." Quinn has clearly decided not to follow the heart-throb route.
Would he like to follow Ralph Fiennes's example, say, and return to the stage occasionally? "I haven't been in a play for eight years. I would love to. It's just a problem of time. And if you're going to be away from home . . . if you get offered a really good role in a film at the same time as a really good role in a play, the film is going to pay for mortgages and projects." That's the dilemma for theatre directors these days. Lunch is almost over. We're talking about the popularity of all things Irish around the world. Does he think Irish-chic will last? "I think we have to realise it's not going to last. It's wonderful, there's huge interest and that's good for all sorts of reasons. But it also has its kitschy side . . . the whole Irish American thing can get embarrassing. And I don't have any time for republican romanticism."
Throughout the interview, the Quinns are being videod. Fergus Tidhe, of Power Pictures in Galway, is making both the EPK (electronic press kit) and a documentary about the making of the film and the Quinn clan. He worked on Declan's first film with him - The Clash Of The Ash in 1987 - and has known him since 1982. They are all clearly comfortable as Tidhe shadows them with a hand-held camera, filming practically everything they do.
In an old converted bus Lisa Mulcahy, the first assistant director, is in animated consultation with the production manager, Maggie Mooney, and the location manager, Daragh McClatchey, discussing the logistics and fine-details of the next day's shoot, which will involve John Cusack landing in a 1930s airplane on a private beach near Brittas. The beach was discovered on Tuesday; the scene will be shot on Thursday.
Within minutes, they establish the following: they need a safety boat, additional ground-to-air radios, extra batteries, a smudge pot to create smoke on the beach.
The organisation involved in this one scene is mind-boggling: can they get permission to use the beach? Access for the plane? Do they need a dolly? ("Declan is known as tripod legs: he can probably do the scene with a hand-held camera.") Planks to hide under the sand? "Rakes! We'll need lots and lots of rakes!" "Can we get some trainees to keep the public at bay? We'll need waders. We'll need steam effects and bonfires for two nights. They'll need to build a tower for overview shots."
Various orders are sent down the line.
There are the logistics of getting through woods from the road to the beach. Calls are made to check on the tides and the weather forecast. The weather has been challenging for anyone making films this summer.
Contemporary music is required for a dance scene and coproducer Philip King volunteers Red Sails In The Sunset as having been an Irish-American "hit" in 1939. He promises to do some research.
"We have a heavy two days ahead."
"There are only four days left," someone offers cheerfully.
"That light has not yet appeared," says Lisa who, her colleagues explain meaningfully, is the granddaughter of a general.
Bob Altman - no, not that one - is the line-producer and he keeps everyone . . . well - in line. He's the one who makes sure they don't run over time or out of money. The atmosphere is amazingly buzzy and positive as they reach the end of the film, despite the rain. "Usually when you come back to a set after being away for a few weeks, the tension is edible," says Eamon Morrissey. "So I'm quite surprised to come back here and find this kind of atmosphere." We hear the next day that the scene with John Cusack and the plane has gone swimmingly. Who needs Sligo, after all, when Brittas Bay is only up the road?
By now, Aidan Quinn is back in the US - he left Ireland earlier this week - working on Neil Jordan's new film on location in Massachusetts for 14 or 15 weeks until January. "It will be close to home, which is great, which is fantastic. My spiritual home is in upstate New York. High Falls. I love it. We have a stone cottage built in 1782." He, his wife, actress Elizabeth Bracco and their eight-year-old daughter Ava Eileen, also live in New York city. "I don't particularly like cities anymore, I want to be away from crowds and noise and pollution. I want more children. But that's up to my wife.
"I try to work six months on, six months off - when I'm home I'm always working anyway - documentaries, narration work, charity - but this time I'm working straight through." Does his wife like it over here? "She does, she likes it, but I think she'd be wary about getting a house here - we already have a country house and a normal house and she'd worry that I'd want to come over here all the time. But she enjoys Ireland.
"Every time I'm not home I'm aching, you know, I miss my daughter. I missed her birthday. I don't like that. On the other hand, I love to travel. Like everything else I do, riding on a see-saw. Back and forth, back and forth."