Lenny Abrahamson's impressive début feature, Adam & Paul, a dark comedy about a pair of Dublin junkies, injects much-needed life into the indigenous film industry. A relieved Donald Clarke talks to the film's makers
On the rare occasions such a thing is possible, it is quite a relief to be able to function without the chip in the brain that enables - or urges - us to make excuses for the latest not-so-dreadful Irish film. A few minutes into Lenny Abrahamson's triumphant début feature Adam & Paul, I was delighted to hear a dull click at the base of my skull as the Excuse Generator turned itself off. Adam & Paul may not quite be The Irish Film We Have All Been Waiting For, but it is remarkable enough to suggest that such a thing may be closer to hand than many of us had come to fear.
The film, brilliantly written by the Ennis-born actor Mark O'Halloran, follows the adventures of two strung-out Dublin heroin addicts, played with squashed desperation by O'Halloran and Tom Murphy, as they stroll the city in search of a fix. They get thrown out of a shop for squeezing the bread. They have an argument with an angry Bulgarian. They punch car windows. All this shot, despite the drab locations, in beautiful, watery shades by the respected cinematographer, James Mather.
What really singles Adam & Paul out, however, is its extraordinary sense of tone. If, at any moment, the film were to edge a millimetre this way or that, it could find itself in the territory of grim social realism but, though truly awful things happen throughout, it never quite stops being a comedy.
"If you went for a naturalistic approach to this material it would seem so dead," Abrahamson explains. "That really is of no interest to me any more. The first time people saw that sort of naturalistic approach it must have seemed fresh and interesting. But now it almost seems the reverse." The point is well made. But, in comparison to almost anything else currently playing in our cinemas, Adam & Paul is a work of naturalism. Where it differs from the films of, say, Ken Loach is not in its approach to verisimilitude, but in its capacity to extract humour from the grimmest incidents in the lives of the socially excluded.
There is a problem here, of course. One might argue that a bunch of poshy film-makers have no business setting up members of such a vulnerable section of society as figures of fun. Should we really be laughing at junkies? "I think it is tender towards the characters," Abrahamson says. "It is harsh when it needs to be, but it always treats the characters with dignity. It, in fact, humanises a particularly despised section of society."
I am pleased that he doesn't trot out the cliché about us laughing with rather than at his characters. There is no question but that Adam and Paul are, from time to time, being set up for ridicule.
"Well, I will tell you why I think that's okay," Abrahamson says. "It's a Laurel and Hardy film. It is slower than that, it is more pared down than that, but that is how it sees itself. Why are there two of them? Because that is the Laurel and Hardy style. And another one of the rules of that style is you treat the characters like gormless kids who just can't cope with the world." Mark O'Halloran goes on to talk interestingly about the way in which the urban junkie has taken on some of the characteristics of the tramps that inspired Chaplin and Beckett. After all, both The Gold Rush and Waiting For Godot are, in some sense, comedies about homelessness.
Nonetheless, Adam & Paul's producer Jonny Speers acknowledges the difficulties of tackling such sensitive material. With this in mind, he organised a reading of the script with a group of drug users and ex-users.
"We did it just to make sure there were no clangers," Speers explains. "So there would be nothing in there that junkies just wouldn't do, and also for the actors to be around people who had been users. We were very aware of the accusation of being middle-class boys who potentially didn't know what we were talking about. It was a really moving evening. They all took roles and they were constantly laughing or shaking their heads in recognition."
So what were the film-makers forced to take out of the script? "Oh there was this one scene early on," O'Halloran laughs. "These kids go past Adam and Paul with a shopping trolley with a microwave in it and they burst their shites laughing. And one of the guys at the reading said: 'No way man. I'd have had the microwave off them, like that.'"
"And he kept coming back to it," Abrahamson says. "'I don't want to keep harping on about it,' he'd say, 'but if they'd taken the microwave none of this other stuff would have had to happen.'" It was like he'd solved the problem of having to make the film at all. We can just make a short now."
Other conversations with ex-junkies were more harrowing. During the film Adam and Paul - we do not learn which is which until the closing credits identify them as, respectively, O'Halloran and Murphy - call into an old friend, Janine (Louise Lewis), who is beginning a life without smack.
"We were talking to a woman and she said that when Janine says 'I'm just so bored', that was exactly how it was, getting off heroin," O'Halloran says. "You would be sitting there in your flat and it would be perfectly tidied and you would just have nothing to do. You would be utterly bored. And then you would have to face up to all the things you had done - you've robbed from your Ma, you've neglected your kids. And then you would just go straight out and score."
The film's publicity identifies Lenny as a "newcomer", a description he regards as rather hilarious. "I must have fallen off the planet for a few decades," he laughs. A graduate of Trinity College where, in the mid-1980s, he began experimenting with the era's coffin-sized video cameras, Abrahamson first came to prominence as the director of the hugely acclaimed 1991 short, 3 Joes. Shortly after taking up a postgraduate scholarship to study philosophy at Stanford University, he learned that the film had won Best European Short at the Cork Film Festival.
"I thought, 'I am not staying here, I am coming back to Ireland to make films'. This unfortunately coincided with a personal crash - a sort of delayed teenage thing. What I did was sit in my flat and write quite a good script. But I got very, very self-critical. I was so afraid of making something bad that I never did anything. There were three or four pretty bad years there."
Eventually he persuaded the supernaturally affable Speers, one of the country's top commercials producers, to give him a job, and the two have gone on to develop a very fruitful partnership. They were responsible for, among many successful campaigns, that Carlsberg advertisement with the magical apartment full of sports-mad supermodels. Abrahamson regards working on commercials as very good training.
"You have to become very technically adept," he says. "You get to understand the camera in a way a lot of drama directors don't. They can be too concerned with what's in front of it."
Just as he was beginning to get anxious about the fact that so many of his contemporaries were breaking into features, a few rough scenes of what was to become Adam & Paul fell onto his desk. O'Halloran, a versatile actor who has worked at The Gate and with the Corn Exchange company, had been observing the heroin addicts near his home on Parnell Street and had begun to take notes.
"I used to be fascinated by their language," he explains. "The way they talked in baby talk when they were stoned, which I used to find funny and touching at the same time. And the awful way people have come to regard them as invisible. I remember seeing two women junkies arguing over a choc-ice. They were pulling and pushing and then eventually it fell to the pavement. There was just something so unbelievably funny and terribly sad about that." That combination of pathos and absurdity is what drives Adam & Paul.
The film manages the fantastically impressive feat of allowing us to laughat its two hapless heroes while never inviting our contempt. The point at which we come closest to losing sympathy arrives during an extraordinary scene in which the lads mug a boy with Downs Syndrome (played very touchingly by David Johnstone). It is a stomach-twistingly awkward moment.
"The point about putting that in was because we became concerned that Adam and Paul were just coming across as being too nice," Speers says. "You have to get the impression across that they will do anything for a fix. And also the fact that we then continue to follow them and are divided in our view of them - that is interesting too."
Reading a bald description of its plot, you could, with some justification, jump to the conclusion that Adam & Paul must be a glum piece of work. It does, however, look rather wonderful. With only 400,000 to spend - the film was made under The Irish Film Board's low-budget initiative - Speers was fortunate that he could rely on the goodwill he had established while making commercials. Among those who worked for a fraction of their usual fee was director of photography James Mather.
"We did a couple of interesting things here," Abrahamson explains. "There is a bizarre convention in film that days are warm - orange, red - and nights are cold - blue light cast in puddles and so on. Horrible. We decided to reverse that. The day is cold and the nights are often lit by warm tungsten."
He believes that having a limited budget can sometimes aid creativity. "We shot with a lot of fast film, so we could get exposure in dark places. There was one shot of the bus stop in Ballymun that we really wanted. So we just put up a single light and waited for the natural light to come. If you were on a big film you could just pay to make that happen and it wouldn't look nearly as good. Having too much money encourages you to fake things."
It would, however, be a shame to focus too closely on the film's budget. It is a pleasure to relate that Adam & Paul is not just remarkable for a film in its price range or with its provenance. Here is a movie that manages the tricky business of breaking dangerously original ground while still seeming complete and fully formed.
As the interview began, Lenny talked about how he had reacted to the rare negative comments he had received so far.
"I just thought 'these people don't get it,'" he laughed. "I refuse to believe that you can have a validly negative opinion of it. So they must just not understand it. Simple as that." He's joking, of course, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
Adam & Paul is released on August 27th
