Tag: adaptation

Different blokes different strokes!

Posted on by Paul Risker

Set in Dublin 2003, Eoin Macken’s Here Are the Young Men, adapted from Rob Doyle’s novel, sees Matthew (Dean-Charles Chapman) and his friends Kearney (Joe Cole), Rez (Walsh Peelo) and Jen (Anja Taylor-Joy), lose themselves in the clichés of drink, drugs, sex and thrill-seeking for one last summer.

Macken has modelled for GQ and Ralph Lauren, and he directed the 2009 documentary The Fashion of Modelling, an exploration of the aesthetic of the photograph. His narrative feature debut was the psychological thriller Christian Blake (2008), followed by Dreaming For You (2009), about a suicidal man whose troubled relationship with his girlfriend is complicated when he meets a tramp. In 2013 he directed Cold, the story of two brothers who outsiders in their community in the west of Ireland, and are drawn together by the death of their father and discovery of a dead girl on the moors.

In conversation with DMovies, Macken discussed exploring the reality of youth in a viscerally and honest way, and his personal impressions of the hyper-arousal of America for young Irish men.

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Paul Risker – ‘What we are’ versus ‘who we feel we are’ can often be out of synch. I’ve spoken with directors who say that it took a number of films before they felt they could call themselves a filmmaker. Do you feel that you can call yourself a filmmaker?

Eoin Macken – I honestly don’t know if I’d call myself a filmmaker yet. What I love about filmmaking is being a part of the process of storytelling with others. It’s a collaboration, and you get to work with people who know so much more than you do, and the buzz of creating a story and being involved in that has fascinated me.

All I did when I was a kid was read, and then suddenly you’re able to put these stories onto a screen and add music. It’s fascinating, but I don’t know if I’d call myself a filmmaker – I don’t know if I know what I’m doing. I just know what I like and what I’m trying to make, and I know I have all these other stories I want to tell.

PR – Was it your intention to penetrate the romanticisation of living out of one’s head, of dreaming, as the reality of being free from the educational institution dawns on the four characters?

EM – First and foremost I wanted to make something that hopefully felt universal. The movie is based off the book and it’s set in Ireland in a certain time period, and I wanted to be very specific about that. I dragged some stuff from a book I’d written and my own experiences into Rob’s work. I wanted the story to be universal so that it felt if you transposed these characters to Canada, America, Germany, or Brazil, they’d be variances of the same people.

The book actually has four characters in it, and I changed it to three characters, taking bits and pieces of the four to make three more specific characters. The thing about reality, and especially the reality of youth is when you’re in a night club and listening to music, nothing else matters apart from your world and your spectrum around that. You can go into a club and this one song will come on, and your mood is lifted. It doesn’t matter if you’re drinking or you’re doing drugs, whatever it is, the endorphins in that moment are suddenly elevated.

It can be the same when you walk down the street in New York for the first time. Whatever you’re listening to at the time, it could be Led Zeppelin or the Sugarbabes, that is now your reality of, “this is awesome.” This is what these kids experience, and so I wanted to get at that, but also the negative side of it in terms of when your thoughts go to a dark place, what is it that also brings you down. I wanted to try to make it as visceral as possible through the film, and explore it in whatever context it made sense to.

PR – Should an adaptation be an extension of the source material, less about being faithful to the narrative, and more about honouring the spirit of the story and its characters?

EM – Myself and Rob had a chat about this and I told him I needed him to trust me to change things. If I’d made a little adaptation of his book, I don’t think he or I would find that interesting.

A lot of the music that’s in the film I listened to when I was reading the book. I wanted to make something that was visually and cinematically interesting, and had this energy for me that grabs as much of the tone of the book.

I changed it to make it more of a linear story, and to give it more of a purpose, because there’s something about the morality of the characters I wanted to say in the movie, that comes through in the book. The main thing was getting the crux of the tone of the novel and the characters, and that world, then taking a semblance of that story and making something of a through-line.

It was the interpretation of what the book and the characters meant to me, and what they should be. It’s not a literal adaptation, there are things in the movie that never existed in Rob’s story. You want to make something that stands side-by-side, but is not the same because I’m a different artist to Rob. We write differently, he sees the world differently, he has a different lexicon and we structure sentences differently. We therefore watch and listen to movies differently, so this is my version of what this and what my art is.

PR – What was the thought process behind the visual flourish of Kearney going to America and the game show? Is it an acknowledgement of our tendency to self-project, and of our self-awareness of being players in our own life stories?

EM – I wanted to try to utilise Kearney going to America and that TV gameshow as a metaphor, and also being reflective of what was going on his head. I didn’t want it to be this thing where he was becoming totally psychotic. When he’s watching this gameshow he’s seeing his own interpretation of it. He’s projecting his own ideas and thoughts, he’s seeing and hearing what he wants to.

When you first go to America everything is different, especially when this was set, which is almost twenty years ago. From my experience America seems so much bigger, and there are so many things that are different, especially from an Irish point of view. He’s obsessed with the army and we don’t have an army in the same shape and form. You’re not allowed to own guns in Ireland, but you can in America. From that naive teenage point of view, when you’re dealing with that toxic masculinity route Kearney goes down, everything seems a lot more powerful, violent and accessible, and that’s what I wanted to ease into.

… I remember being fascinated when I went to America for that first time because I felt there was a freedom, and so I wanted to put Kearney in this different world, where it felt like he was in control of his own life and his own world. This is how he interpreted it. He’s taking all the negative parts of it because that was what he was leaning into, and that’s the part of the psyche that he allowed himself to fall into. I didn’t want it to be too much of a dreamscape, I still wanted to keep it visual in a way that was clearly a metaphor in his head, but still keep it grounded because it needed to be his fabrication of it.

PR – The story is about the anxiety of youth, with a particular attention to how our choices define us, bringing to it a moral consideration.

EM – My hope when people watch it is that they do get that feeling. Matthew becomes the character who could go any of these three or four different directions. He’s still learning who he is and it depends on the choices he makes, psychologically and emotionally, that will then start dictating. If you make a mistake when you’re younger, you don’t forget that. It stays with you, and so I wanted to get that across in the sense that while none of them understand what they’re doing, they’re all doing specific things.

Suddenly one character decides to go down this violent route, and Matthew’s pulled down it as well. I wanted to explore the idea of facing up to that moral dilemma that he’s faced with, but it’s also about how other people see his interpretations of it.

When he goes into the TV world for a moment, I wanted it to be a mirror reflection, and it’s deliberately ambiguous. Kearney has his interpretation of how Matthew sees things and what he’s doing, and Jen has her specific interpretation of what Matthew’s doing. So it’s not just Matthew making his decision, people end up having a ripple effect all the way through. I wanted to try to explore how for every decision you make, someone else is influenced by it. Then, even if you think you’re making the right decision, it might be the wrong decision because of how it affects someone else.

Here Are the Young Men is out now on VOD and DVD.

Here are the Young Men

Posted on by Paul Risker

It’s only natural for us to envy the young when they stand with the world at their feet, and yet stories often present this as being a period bereft of calm. In as much as stories, the likes of Eoin Macken’s Here Are the Young Men, adapted from Rob Doyle’s novel reminds us of our habitual vice, so to do they provoke sympathy for the anxieties and uncertainty of youth.

Dublin 2003, and Matthew (Dean-Charles Chapman) and his friends Kearney (Joe Cole), Rez (Walsh Peelo) and Jen (Anja Taylor-Joy), lose themselves in the clichés of drink, drugs, sex and thrill-seeking for one last summer. The premise of Here Are the Young Men provokes our interest for its familiarity more than its originality. We’re drawn to the story of these four school leavers, who are finally free from the educational institution and the shackles of adolescence, to see what Macken and Doyle have to say about youth.

The words of Matthew’s teacher echo throughout the film. He tells him, “I have high hopes for you. Be careful with your choices.” Later, when the pair cross paths again, he reminds him of his cautionary warning, “You’re defined by what you do Matthew. You make your choices.”

Choice is an interesting concept in the context of the story, because it feels that their futures are limited. Matthew, Kearney and Rez are characters for who it’s difficult to imagine an adulthood. They hit their peak in school, their dreams of being young anarchists, of living for the moment has no longevity. For Matthew the continuation into adulthood would be a social realist narrative, versus Kearney’s darker psychological drama.

As with The Rules of Attraction (2002), Roger Avary’s adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis’ 1987 novel, about a group of college students, the present is a last breath before the mundanity or the tragedy of adulthood begins, even if the films do not openly acknowledge as much. Macken’s efforts are to penetrate the romanticisation of reality, or living out of our heads, even if the characters are not necessarily aware of it, just as we often are not.

Unlike Kearney who plans to join his brother in America, and Jen who has thoughts of leaving her hometown, it’s never clear what Matthew and Rez’s long term plans are. We quickly sense that they’ve romanticised this moment of freedom, only for their thrill seeking to be interrupted by a traumatic accident. Each responds differently to the incident, from vulnerability and depression, to toxic masculinity and narcissism. It’s an important juncture within the story, because whether or not they are ready for adulthood, it’s suddenly thrust upon them. It’s the moment reality and romanticisation collide, a time for action, not for thought or daydreams, or living out of one’s head. No longer about what their lives can be, their choices now matter as they begin living their lives, shaping their individual and collective fates.

Kearney’s stylised self-projections bring a vibrant energy to the film, giving cause for attention and recognition beyond the immediate experience. It more aggressively confronts the way we relate to our reality by manipulating it with our imagination. It opens up the themes and ideas to the self-awareness that we’re a character in our own story. Kearney is the active and self-conscious author of his drama, while the others are passive and reactionary players to the whims of fate and circumstance.

The transgressive gesture towards religion and the Holy Communion sacrament by Macken and Doyle’s holy trinity of young men, with the teachers words about choice, intersect in a confrontational rejection of God and fate. If Kearney’s self-projections elevate the film, then the friction between morality and God gives the film a thematic and ideological bite, suggesting that morality is the concern of man, not God. Whereas religion preaches a moral simplicity, in our independence from God, we can summon up the courage to face and make the most divisive of moral choices, and then struggle with how they define us, for better or worse.

Here Are the Young Men is an effective drama, that does not try to do too much, or too little. It nestles itself within the hedonistic clichés of drink, drugs, sex and thrill-seeking, yet manages to engage with themes and ideas that resonate with preoccupations and anxieties that commonly trouble us all.

Here Are the Young Men is available now on VoD, and on DVD from May 10th.

Tell It To The Bees

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In 1952, Jean Markham (Anna Paquin) returns to the small Scottish town where she grew up to take over her father’s medical practice as the local doctor. She left in her teenage years under scandalous circumstances which, we’ll learn later, involved falling in love with another girl in an age when such things were frowned upon. When young Charlie Weekes (Gregor Selkirk) turns up at her surgery with a minor injury, recognising he may be going through something of a hard time she takes him back to her house to show him the bee hives she keeps in her garden. She tells him you can share any secret with the bees and they’ll understand.

Charlie’s mum Lydia (Holliday Grainger) isn’t having an easy time of it either. Her husband Robbie (Emun Elliot) became a changed man during the war and their relationship is over. He has to all intents and purposes moved out of the family home. Lydia holds down a factory floor position at the mill where her less than sympathetic sister in law Pam (Kate Dickie) works, but is behind on the rent and eviction is not far off on the horizon. Lydia’s fury at the new doctor taking her son to his house is mitigated when she meets Jean and discovers the latter is a woman, not a man.

Once Lydia and Charlie are evicted, Jean gives them lodging. When Lydia is laid off, Jean gives her a job as housekeeper. On news of her eviction, Lydia – a keen dancer – heads to a local pub, hits the drink and is all over the first man to join her on the dance floor. Charlie spots her through the window and feels betrayed. If you’ve seen the trailer or publicity stills which accurately pitch the film as a lesbian romance you’ve got a pretty good idea where this is going – although the narrative has a few surprises in store towards the end.

Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth’s adaptation of Fiona Shaw’s novel proves effective for the most part, capturing the feel of a small town where everybody knows everybody else and no secrets stay hidden for long. In passing, it delivers believable portraits of bailiffs working for landlords and the harsh, shop floor working conditions of (mostly female) mill workers. Doctors working within the newly founded NHS find that patients can’t quite get used to the idea that medical treatment is free and consequently are slower in seeking advice or treatment than they might be today (at least, while we still have an NHS free to all at the point of need). Finally, in an unexpectedly harrowing subplot, a backstreet abortion goes wrong threatening to kill off a minor character.

Beyond the young Charlie, the few other male characters are deftly sketched if mostly on the fringes of the narrative. Lydia’s husband Robbie is a brute given to occasional bouts of violence, unable to relate to his wife yet still tragically in love with her. He contrasts sharply with Jean’s kindly solicitor friend Jim (Stephen Robertson) who proposes to her then remains genuinely interested in her well-being even after his advances have been rejected. Elsewhere the boy with whom Charlie plays in the woods talks to him about “a dirty dyke”, the only words on offer to describe Jean’s sexual preferences.

All the performances are top notch (why doesn’t Kate Dickie get more decent roles?). A mention should also go to the decision to shoot with real bees rather than special effects: the bee wrangling and cinematography yield spectacular results.

The one place the film trips up follows a scene in which the outraged Robbie plunges his fist through one of Jean’s hives. If you kept bees and discovered someone had done this, you’d most definitely have a reaction. But, inexplicably, Jean doesn’t ever appear to notice this has happened. (It may not be a script error – it’s possible this material was there and either not shot or cut out after shooting to bring down the running length.) It’s an irritating plot hole that knocks the film down at least a star on our rating. Which is a shame because, that sole misstep aside, the whole thing works as a serviceable, small town, post-war, lesbian, romantic drama. With a young boy’s perspective thrown in alongside those of the two women for good measure.

Tell It To The Bees is out in the UK on Friday, July 19th. On VoD on Monday, November 11th.