From a peripatetic and artistically successful family, it took a move to Co Leitrim to help director Marian Quinn finish her coming-of-age film set in 1970s Dublin, she tells Donald Clarke
MARIAN QUINN, director of 32A, a nostalgic Irish coming-of-age drama, had such an itinerant childhood it's surprising she found time to accumulate any formative memories. Sister of Aidan Quinn, the charismatic actor, and Declan Quinn, the prestigious cinematographer, Marian was born in Chicago some 43 years ago, but managed to spend, by her reckoning, about half her adolescent years in Dublin.
"It is a bit confusing all right," she tells me. "My parents, who were both from Offaly, emigrated, had four boys and then they came back here. Then I was born in Chicago, so we came back again. Actually, we were all born in Chicago. But I didn't come here until I was seven, and then we came back here again when I was 13."
Got that? Despite the significant amount of time she spent in the US, Marian seems more unambiguously Irish than Aidan. Whereas her brother's accent can flit from Illinois to Dublin in the space of a syllable, Marian only allows the occasional soft consonant to contradict her unmistakable Irish timbres.
"I suppose I did spend more time in Ireland than my brothers," she says. "Still, people never seem to be able to decide if I am Irish or American. I only really felt like I fitted in when I moved to New York. Everyone's a refugee there, so those questions don't come up."
At any rate, she has somehow managed to put together an attractive film that skilfully encapsulates a particular section of middle-class Dublin life in the late 1970s. 32A follows a teenage girl from Raheny as she frets about her inability to develop a satisfactory bust (the title refers to a bra size, not a bus) and lusts after various dreamy boys in frayed hipsters. Made on a low budget, the picture nonetheless revels in low-key period detail. It is particularly impressive to encounter so many pop hits from the era. Such notoriously pricey music clearances are normally far beyond the means of this class of production.
"We were lucky with that," she says. "Gerry Leonard, who is our composer, works in a band with David Bowie. And he kept saying: 'If you are really stuck, I will talk to David.' So we eventually just had to say to him 'do it', and Bowie let us have Boys Keep Swinging. We had similar luck with Elvis Costello and Blondie. They were just very helpful."
Too many recent movies have treated the 1970s as dizzyingly camp, flared and fabulous, but Quinn is old enough to remember how brown everything was in those days. Accordingly, she instructed her team to head for second-hand shops and jumble sales.
"One thing that we were clear about was that the girls would wear their school uniforms in much of the film. And they would wear the same outfits more than once. One thing that bothers me about films set in that era is that the girls all seem to have all these changes of clothes. That's not how I remember it. It was definitely much more mundane looking. This is not the seventies with a capital 'S'."
True enough. By using shallow-focus to obscure modern cars and buildings in the middle distance, Quinn has done a good job of keeping Noughties Raheny out of 32A, but many of the film's concerns remain relevant today. Quinn's script tackles certain conversations from which teenage boys have forever been excluded. The picture's protagonist, played with gentle charm by young Ailish McCarthy, yearns eagerly to pass through the rite of passage that is the donning of the first brassiere, but her body is reluctant to deliver the required, erm, developments.
Is this really how it was for Marian? This is a foreign country for us chaps.
"Well, you know, it was a kind of a big deal," she says, laughing. "For me it was all about trying to convince my mother that I did need one. 'Oh, you don't need one yet,' she'd say. I guess you didn't want to be the first or last to get one. Of course, I lived with four brothers and they couldn't care less about my problem. I think these sorts of feelings you get on the way to being a woman are common to every girl. Meanwhile, many men who've seen the film say: 'I was the boyfriend waiting at the door who didn't understand what was going on.' "
I WONDER ABOUT the young Quinns. Their dad was a lecturer in English literature, so there was great respect for the arts in the house, but it still seems somewhat remarkable that virtually the whole family drifted into movies. Since his breakout role opposite Madonna in 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, Aidan Quinn has remained fruitfully employed as a leading man. Paul, another brother, is also an actor and Declan, arguably the most successful of the bunch, has photographed such good-looking films as In America, Leaving Las Vegas and Monsoon Wedding.
"It's funny. We are sort of like a circus family," Marian says. "It seemed obvious that we would all end up in the arts. My mother was great with the stories and my dad loved his books and his poetry. I think, maybe, I always thought I'd become a writer."
As things worked out, she made her first lunge into the artistic world as an actor. "I was in London bumming around and then went back to Chicago for a while and met Byrne and Joyce Piven, who run the theatre workshop that my brother had attended. They invited me to come along and try it. I was very shy, but I knew that I needed that kind of outlet. People do say that acting is the shy man's revenge."
Marian, who plays one of the mums in 32A, has quite a packed CV as an actor, but she never managed to secure the one big role to make her name. Meanwhile, Aidan achieved a degree of fame in Desperately Seeking Susan.
"Yeah, I guess that was the start of it," she says. "The funny thing is that Desperately Seeking Susan was really supposed to be Rosanna Arquette's film. He phoned me up and said: 'There's also this singer in it called Madonna.' I don't think I'd even heard of her."
Marian, now living in Brooklyn, soon realised that she wanted to generate her own films and, after linking up with one Tommy Weir, still both her romantic and professional partner, she began tinkering away at the project that would, years later, become 32A. In the interim, she accidentally moved back to Ireland. Again.
"I was acting and doing a bit of film work," she says. "But I was writing as well and I needed some space. New York's a hard place to live financially with kids. Tommy's mother had a cottage in the north-west. So we decided to take some time out and try and get our production company going. It was supposed to be temporary. It was temporary. Then our landlord in New York needed to move back in, so we lost the apartment. We've been here ever since."
MARIAN AND TOMMY (who produced 32A) live in a part of Co Leitrim that, if Quinn is to be believed, is rapidly turning into a bohemian enclave. It seems as if there is a performance poet in every barn and a musician leaning on every style.
"Oh yeah. No really, it's like the East Village in New York," she says. "There are two film companies in our village alone. Every time we are in Cannes, we say we really must get together. There are loads of visual artists. It's just a cheaper place to be than in Dublin, so that is where the artists drift to."
It sounds like a decent place to be. Let's hope, for once in her life, Marian gets to hang around long enough to put down roots.
