Michael Connolly (Steven Robertson) has cerebral palsy, a bad speech impediment, and uses a wheelchair to get around. Rory O’Shea (James McAvoy) has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, is outspoken, and can only move a couple of fingers and his head. Together the two become allies in a fight for independence and a life outside an institution.
INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR DAMIEN O'DONNELL
Did you know that you’d be coming out after several other films about people who are paralyzed?
No, I didn’t, but I do now. I’ve seen “The Sea Inside.” It’s a great film and I know Javier Bardem quite well. It’s funny that we were trying to do a movie together a couple years ago, which didn’t happen. But we’ve kept in touch, and it was kind of ironic that the next movie we both did involved disabilities.
When did you develop your film?
I wasn’t involved in the development. It was sent to me as a script in April of 2003. For God’s sake, time goes so fast. And I just loved the script. I was completely engaged by it. I thought, “I really like these characters. It’s funny. It’s kind of humane.” And it was a little bit more sentimental than it is now, but certainly when I got involved and in further developing and for shooting, we just cut out a lot of the sentimentality.
Did you have to research the disabled community?
Yeah. The disabled community is like the secret community in any city or in any country. For the most part, it’s the kind of community that people like to hide away, so to speak. I just talked to a guy today about [it]. He [came] to LA, which I think is very progressive on disability issues. He was saying that he saw a lot of people in wheelchairs around here and he’s from Mexico and he never saw people in wheelchairs in Mexico. He’s thinking, “Why are there more disabled people in Los Angeles than there [are] in Mexico?” But the fact is actually that there [are] as many in Mexico, it’s just that they don’t have access. They can’t actually get out and about as much. I think Los Angeles, and probably most cities in the United States, are much more embracing and inclusive.
How realistic is Rory’s sense of humor in that world?
Oh God, that’s kind of toned down to be honest. We met a guy who has just a very, very dark, very brutal sense of humor. When we went to do our research, we went to a care home where these guys had made a film called “Ability,” which we thought was going to be some kind of nice, sweet, upbeat, lighthearted look at being disabled. And it actually turned out to be a horror movie where one of the residents goes around and butchers all the other disabled people by various ways, stabbing, shooting, smothering, shooting, poisoning and then wheels her way out the door to freedom. And when I saw that, I thought, “My God, that’s the blackest, funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” I knew then that we wouldn’t be able to offend them. It wouldn’t be a case of offending them. It might be a case of not going far enough in terms of that.
The character of Rory is inspired by a guy called Ed Jemison who had muscular dystrophy. And he would constantly be going out and getting drunk in pubs and then coming back and crashing his wheelchair. There’s a story where he’s so drunk one night, he drove onto a building site and his wheelchair turned over. It was hours before anyone came to collect him and rescue him. So he was quite a character.
What has the disabled community’s reaction to the film been?
From my experience, very positive. People with disabilities, for the most part, have been very positive about the film. In Ireland, it’s been completely positive. In the UK, there’s been some criticism of it but the criticism of it has mostly been about the actors not being disabled, which in my mind is not a valid critique of the film. But there are people, disabled actors who wanted to have an opportunity to be in the film but unfortunately, when it came down to it, the actors that didn’t have disabilities were actually better at portraying the spirit of Rory and Michael. And that was, at the end of the day, what we were selling was Rory and Michael. That’s what we wanted to portray on screen. We weren’t portraying a particular disability. We were portraying these two characters and these two individuals and these two friends. We wanted to get the best possible acting talent, and it just happened to be that these guys weren’t disabled.
