Yes, quite a lot, particularly in the music. I teamed up with Dirk Powell who was heavily involved in the music from the beginning, even prior to the film being made. So I hooked up with him a lot. We obviously went into the action pretty meticulously. We listened to an awful lot of tapes. Tim Monich, who is a fantastic dialect coach, sent out a whole pile of tapes of recordings and interviews he’d done in North Carolina. You kind of try and immerse yourself culturally in all that and try and find out the way people react and think about that life in general. Then you get down to the specifics about accent and just the way people hang about. It was good there are a lot of Scotch-Irish kind of roots in North Carolina so you could feel that they were very, very distant cousins (laughing). Somewhere along the line was a connection.
How quickly do you pick up accents?
Well, I’ve got a reasonably good ear. I’ve got a semi-musical ear, I guess I could put it that way. I’ve always been interested in them. You play about as a kid and all that, putting on accents and taking them off. I always found them fascinating, even at home. Every county has a different accent at home. And so all those kind of subtleties I was intrigued by. But when it comes down to it, your ear is never as keen as you imagine it to be. I’m aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music – or lack thereof – in a particular accent. It’s kind of one of my things that I enjoy a lot. It helps when you have such a great guide, such as Tim Monich, who is able to point you in the right direction and just tweak little things.
Would you have been cast in the role had you not already been a fiddle player?
(Laughing) Anthony [Minghella] said I would. I think it pushed me in a particular way. I know he wanted me in the movie, but I don’t think he was sure which one he wanted me to play. I actually think he had a couple of people he was interested in working with and he was kind of trying to figure out in his head who would be most appropriate for what. I think he might have had a number of options. Then I kind of let it be known that I could scratch on the fiddle a little bit, so it pushed him in the right direction. If I were to choose, Stobord would have been the one I would have wanted a go at. I find him fascinating. I had a hard time saying good-bye to him actually.
Why did you, in real life, start playing the fiddle?
I started hitching about the country when I was 16 or 17 years old. I found the music that was played around the country – Irish music – had a particular resonance. There seemed to be a quiet kind of dignity about it and hilarity about it, too. I just loved the company of the people who were involved in it, too. I was kind of tinkering around with the guitar at that stage and then I got myself a mandolin. My grandfather played a mandolin, so I got my hands on that. Then on down to a banjo, and I found I couldn’t play any kind of soft or mournful music with that so I took up the fiddle in my late 20s or early 30s – and that was far too late. But it keeps me off the streets (laughing). It has been a love of mine since I was 17 maybe. I just feel in love with it. There’s a kind of communication possible through music that isn’t possible without it. So it’s kind of my ‘thing.’
You and Renee Zellweger don’t have a lot of screen time together yet the father-daughter relationship on screen is so well developed. Did you two do anything special to get that chemistry?
Well, we liked each other to begin with, which is a help. The first scene we did was where my hand is being patched up after being caught in the trap. She’s giving it to me and I’m telling her I’ve changed. We spent a day doing that. It just felt really, really good. We both came out feeling, “Wow, we’re kind of nailing this in a lot of different ways.” It became very enjoyable. It’s like every so often somewhere in a job you begin to really enjoy the process. You are all the time trying to cover all the options and giving different colors and giving different choices, but ultimately it felt intensely quite right. We chatted quite a lot about it but we didn’t overanalyze it, I think. But she’s great. Back when we first met she said, “Okay, I can buy this.” We kind of did look as though we could be from the same family. That was a help.
PAGE 3: Ensemble Casts and Working with Anthony Minghella
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