Could you have worked with an actor with cerebral palsy if you’d found one?
Yes, if we’d found one who could have done that. It’s such a big question though. I mean, I’m absolutely in favor of it. All the extras and stuff were people from care homes that we used. The two boys, James [McAvoy] and Steven [Robertson], gave acting lessons to them so they could prepare themselves for being extras. Some people wanted to do it, some people dropped out. But it’s such a very small pool of acting talents. It kind of threw up lots of questions for me about that whole issue of, let’s say, being politically correct. And I think to say that because you’re disabled, you have the right to play that part, is not acceptable in my mind.
I think that as a director, you want to portray the character on screen. You want to bring that character to life. And if you cast someone just because they have the correct disability, that is not, I think, a positive way of looking at it because all you’re doing is looking at the disability and the whole point of the film is about looking through the disability at the person behind it. So you wanted somebody to be Rory, not to be somebody with muscular dystrophy or somebody with cerebral palsy.
Realistically, how much time and money would it have added to the production to work with disabled actors?
It probably would have added something to it but that’s not a valid argument. I don’t accept that as an argument because you have to, if you want to cast people with disabilities, you have to then factor in what other issues that involves into your film. And I would never say we can’t cast this person because it would slow things down or would cost too much money. That’s a very negative attitude of the whole thing.
What I wanted to do was cast somebody who could play Rory and bring him to life and make him engaging on screen. And that required a lot of acting talent. That kind of talent is rare in the everyday world of actors, so it’s even rarer when you take such a tiny proportion of the acting world, which is disabled actors, and when you look for that kind of talent there, it’s less likely to be there, you know? And at the end of the day, it’s a performance and nobody goes to see “Apollo 13” and expects to see real astronauts. It’s not a documentary. It’s a film. We have actors.
The Americans have been much more embracing about that than, say, the UK and Ireland have been. I mean, I was at Sunset after one of the screenings where we had a standing ovation from the audience and then somebody asked the question, “Did those guys really have those disabilities?” And I said no, and the response was amazing. They just started applauding again. It was just so unexpected and inspiring for me to see such a positive reaction. People were applauding the performances of the two guys. They were saying what a brilliant job those guys did in the film, rather than some people who might’ve said, “Why didn’t you consider using a disabled actor?” They were just admiring the craft of the actors as you would expect in any film for people who were in those leads to be actors. It’s about the performance.
At the end of the day, the film demands a certain level of portrayal that requires, in my mind, a considerable acting talent. I mean, I made this film in Ireland and I couldn’t even cast Irish actors for the part. I couldn’t find Irish actors that I felt could do it. I had to cast two Scottish men and an English woman. At the end of the day, I was more worried about their accents being terrible than their ability to portray their conditions.
Did you ever consider using subtitles with Michael so the audience could understand?
Never. Not ever. That’s the whole conceit of the film is that the only person who can understand him is Rory. And that was part of the challenge. When I read the script, I was thinking I really like the script, but this is going to be a film about two guys in wheelchairs, one who can’t move anything except two fingers and the other who can’t be understood by anyone when he speaks. How is this going to work? We did talk about it a lot, but no, the whole point of it is that you can’t understand him.
To be honest, the thing about it, I’ve never seen the film and not known what Michael’s saying because his lines of dialogue were always in the script. So I’ve never had that, never seen it from a fresh audience perspective but I’m not sure what that would be like. I’m not sure… That idea was so old to me by the time we got to screen the film for the first time, so I’m not sure what that must be like to have this guy speaking for so long and not being able to understand what he says.
It was written with the instructions to say the lines in “CP voice”?
With cerebral palsy, with a Dublin accent. That’s how detailed it was that our voice coach, even though you can’t understand what he’s saying, his accent is Dublin. There was a lot of attention to that kind of detail.
