With his new film, Lenny Abrahamson is once again shining a light on the dark side of Ireland's capital. What Richard Did has less grime than Adam and Paul, but is just as unflinchingly honest, the director tells DONALD CLARKE
LENNY ABRAHAMSON may be 40-cough-ahem years old, but in the late-starting world of movies, he still probably counts as our most distinguished young film-maker. In 2004, then a little hairier than he is now, he delivered the signature domestic film of the decade with Adam and Paul. Part Beckettian nightmare, part Laurel-and-Hardy romp, the film – brilliantly scripted by Mark O’Halloran – followed two distracted heroin addicts as they pottered about an uninterested Dublin. It served to remind viewers that, even in those boom times, the city still swelled with the dispossessed.
Now, Lenny returns with a film that feels like a neat complement to that earlier work. What Richard Did concerns an achingly middle-class, rugby-playing youth whose suave life is disrupted following a violent altercation outside a South Dublin party. Lenny almost seems to be saying . . .
“Yes, yes . . .” he interrupts.
He’s heard this before. The film looks to be saying that, even in times of hardship, Dublin still harbours vast tracts of privilege.
“Do you know what? There is an awful lot of inertia in society,” Abrahamson says.
“Privilege existed before the Celtic Tiger. Maybe that made it worse. But in essence it didn’t change and it hasn’t changed since. Similarly, in boom times, poverty wasn’t really shifted. I wasn’t making any conscious effort to ‘do’ the middle classes. I tend to gravitate towards characters who do something that shifts their parameters. That’s what happens to Richard?”
Yes, indeed. Adapted by Malcolm Campbell from Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock, What Richard Did carries many allusions to the killing of Brian Murphy, a secondary-school student, outside Annabel’s nightclub in 2000. The film seems to deviate much more dramatically from the case than did Power’s book. The incident is more of a shadow in the film’s nether regions.
“That is exactly right. The book is fictionalised, but there are clear resonances with the Annabel’s case,” he says. “Some people say: ‘I take artistic license when dealing with a real case.’ I wanted complete license. Also I didn’t want to put people through more discussion of that case – though there is no way of avoiding the conversation we are having now. And that’s fair enough.”
Did he or his colleagues approach Brian Murphy’s family?
“No. We did debate whether we should approach people and tell them: ‘We are doing something very different.’ But we thought we didn’t have the right to do that. If we were actually going to make a film about Annabel’s, then we would have made sure to make contact.”
To do so would have been to imply more of a connection than he intended?
“Yes, exactly. Informally, by people who know people, I have been able to say: ‘This is not the Annabel’s film’.”
As Abrahamson explains, Irish film-makers – and their British counterpoints for that matter – have never been very comfortable dealing with the middle-classes. The spectre of Ross O’Carroll Kelly hangs over so much commentary on that sector of domestic society. A deeply serious film, shot in sombre shades, What Richard Did manages to avoid all those comic clichés. Played with disconcerting warmth by newcomer Jack Reynor, the eponymous protagonist comes across as confident, pampered and cosseted. But he is no sort of monster. Were it not for one moment of violent insanity, he could easily have ended up as a decent, responsible member of society.
“I like the clichés when they are funny,” he says. “I love Ross O’Carroll Kelly. But I didn’t feel that pressure. I had great faith that, if you work truthfully and with integrity, you can trust in what will emerge. If there’s an implied author in my stuff, he is quite academic and chin-stroking. I arrive in the world of the film and try to get a handle on it. We don’t have somebody called Tarquin telling us that the family are all off to Paris.”
Abrahamson admits to having some intellectual purchase on that world. The son of a lawyer, he was educated at The High School in Rathgar, Trinity College Dublin and at Stanford University. He must have pondered how life has changed for the metropolitan middle class. Are they really taking the handcart to Hades?
“That is certainly a question I asked myself a lot while I was doing it,” he says. “Maybe the young people I met seem more sophisticated, but essentially it hasn’t changed much. Every generation thinks the one coming up has more licence than they did. And it’s never true. We all drank our heads off. We had sex quite young. None of those things was shocking to me. We all did that ‘deep conversion’ thing we thought so profound. Maybe there is a greater expectation for the material things in life now. That would be the main difference.”
Abrahamson was, as a younger fellow, surely a little too assiduous to ever get sucked into decadence and dissolution. When in Trinity, he helped establish the college’s first video society and, armed with cameras the size of fridge freezers, set about testing the bounds of the new technology. He also managed to secure a scholarship in philosophy and ultimately a place at Stamford to pursue a PhD in the subject.
In 1991, when even short films were thin on the ground, he had a festival hit with a nifty little comedy (featuring an unknown Dominic West) entitled The 3 Joes. But the life of the mind intervened and Leonard headed for the Ivy League.
He eventually returned without completing his PhD and, by his own reckoning, endured a few “wilderness years” pondering great cinematic projects that were never likely to reach fruition. Drifting into TV commercials, he gradually gained confidence in his skills and – more than a decade after that acclaimed debut short – got around to conjuring up Adam and Paul. The worrying, darkly funny Garage, also written in O’Halloran, followed in 2007.
“Despite my arrogance as a bedsit wannabe, I was as deeply insecure as we all are at that age,” he says. “It was only through making commercials that I had that arrogance knocked out of me. That allowed me to make Adam and Paul.”
And he’s still here.
Now a respected commercials director, he has often worked overseas, but he remains domiciled in the old country and all three of his features have been shot here. In between Garage and What Richard Did, he and O’Halloran delivered the state-of-the nation TV series Prosperity for RTÉ. All admirable stuff, but one imagines that, had he wished, Abrahamson could be making a fortune shooting episodes of the latest HBO epic.
“I am very wedded to life here,” he says. “I am not a flag-waving type at all. I don’t even know what it is to support a football team. ‘Our lads hammered your lads.’ I don’t understand that at all. But I am a homebird. I just like it here.”
Maybe he might have thought differently if Adam and Paul had happened when he was younger.
“I knew something was working with that film. But I didn’t expect it to strike the chords it did,” he says. “So many people can quote lines. It has that funny cult quality to it. What gratified me was that people really got that mixture of Beckett and Vaudeville. It was gratifying. But that response perhaps explains why there was a gap before Garage.”
He puts on a sensible face.
“I was prepared to do everything a bit later in life. If I had gone abroad earlier, I might have come a cropper.”
As things worked out, Abrahamson finds himself as an accidental inspiration to younger film-makers. He has established a reputation without leaving the country. We all want to know how it’s done. We want him to tell us what’s wrong (and what’s right) with the Irish film industry.
He pauses as if wondering whether to say what’s on his mind.
“This is probably impolitic of me. The big problem? The lack of engagement of RTÉ in drama film-making,” he says. “We have a majorly dysfunctional broadcasting sector. We only have one big player, which is a bizarre operation. There are great people in there. There are people trying to do great things. But it’s not a healthy organisation. I can’t believe I am saying this, but I don’t care. A friend of mine suggests that it must have been built on an Indian burial ground because of the general air of mordant, soporific awfulness.”
Yikes! And how does this malaise manifest itself?
“They are not very good at giving Irish directors a shot on homegrown drama. They would rather use second-rate foreign directors than first-rate Irish directors,” he says, before going on to acknowledge that the state broadcaster is short of money.
“Secondly, they don’t see it as part of their brief to engage with feature film-making. In every other country that has a film industry, the national broadcasters are involved.”
(RTÉ declined to comment on Abrahamson’s observations.)
Let’s move away delicately before we cause an implosion in Donnybrook.
What Richard Did looks to have cemented Lenny’s place in the cinematic firmament? The film recently played at the Toronto Film Festival to some acclaim, and Abrahamson – finally accelerating his feature output – is set to start working with Michael Fassbender and Domhnall Gleeson on a drama entitled Frank.
One wonders what the rest of the world made of What Richard Did. It offers a very different perspective on Irish life to that in the typical IRA thriller or Roddy Doyle adaptation.
“It was interesting. They suddenly go: ‘Oh my God, these people are just like American teenagers.’ Funnily enough, you then realise our teens are very porous – more so than British teenagers. Foreigners may not know what ‘gaff’ means, but they know who these kids are. They also notice that Dublin is quite beautiful. I suppose I am part of the reason that Dublin is often seen as grimy.”
