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Did you stick to the dialogue on the page or did you come up with a lot of lines on your own?
Glen Hansard: “It was dialogue on a page. John is a great - I don’t want to blow his trumpet - he’s got a great talent for writing. He writes characters really, really well and writes dialogue really well, and guided us through it very, very clearly. There was improvisation but it was improvisation on all of our behalves. John would say, ‘Well, actually, let’s focus here. It’s not working. I don’t believe it. Try and do it another way.’ He would suggest something else and we’d do it a different way.
We just got to the point where we kind of were adapting and we were all just discussing. We spent a lot of time on the set just discussing what we would do with the thing. The camera would start rolling and John wouldn’t say, ‘Cut.’ There’d be no clapboard. It’d be kind of like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna try this.’ We’d come in and we’d start filming and the camera would just roll. We’d just go over and John would come into shot, discuss it, ‘Keep going.’ Then what he did was, which I thought was great, at the end of the film, at anywhere in the film where you get a bit of an idea of what the backstory of my character was or the backstory of the girl was, he’d just edit it out. You get this kind of - that’s much more of a technical question for John - but you get this much more vague story, having to tie things together yourself as a viewer, which I really like about the film.”
This is probably going to be a weird question, but does having a musical background help you write dialogue that isn’t necessary lyrical but flows well?
John Carney: “No, I don’t think so. I think that having a good ear… Like Conor McPherson, the Irish playwright, he’s made his career on kind of magpieing dialogue in a good way. All you are as a writer of dialogue is somebody that has a good ear and kind of picks up bits and can kind of put down on a page and kind of say things in a funny way and interesting kind of fresh way, but it doesn’t make a writer. I don’t consider myself as a kind of a screenplay writer at all. I’m quite good at doing dialogue, but I’m not great at kind of getting to exactly what I should say in two pages.
If you see a really well written scene, like a Todd Solondz scene on the paper, like you know that film Happiness? You watch like the scene between the father and the son where he says, ‘I wouldn’t f**k you but I’d jack off over you,’ to the kid is like breathtaking pieces of writing. You read the script and it’s two pages long. Two pages! And the scene is one of the most famous dark scenes now in the history of cinema. You watch it take about five minutes to happen, there’s loads of air, but you imagine it’s going to be about 10 or 15 pages long. You read it in the script and it’s two pages! Every line is just beautiful. Every beat is perfect. Everything is structured and organized and really well worked out. I can’t write like that. I waffle. I take a long time to make a point. I do make a point eventually, but you have to pluck it out in bits and pieces. I’m kind of long-winded, I guess.
But I think the dialogue I write is okay to listen to. It’s interesting to listen to, so I kind of think that’s where I come from as a writer. But I don’t think the musical thing; it’s more just having an ear for and thinking things are funny. I think the way people talk to people is very funny and entertaining. I liked the kind of the broken English between the two of them and the struggling to get to what you want. Like I’d love to make a film but with people that don’t talk, eventually, or talk so little. You know, I thought we really did that in the end. As Glen was saying, it’s like anytime anything was explained, anytime anything was clear, we just cut it out. We didn’t make it actively ambiguous or unclear, or irritatingly unclear. I guess ambiguous is a good word. You’re just left to kind of, ‘Okay, that’s interesting.’”
And you’re good at editing yourself in that way?
John Carney: “I mean editing is where you make the film. It’s where you’ve got all of this stuff, you think it’s in there, but it’s a hell of a job getting it out of it. You edit for longer than you do anything in a film. Ages and ages, finding you spend a day on a scene sometimes, just cutting and re-cutting. Each time you watch the scene you lose some objectivity for it. Each time it goes down, like a battery, until the next day when you’ve slept for 12 hours and you come back fresh and then it goes down again that day. It’s amazingly frustrating. That’s what I don’t understand about songwriters. I cannot understand how, after four or five runs of the song, trying to write lyrics - I’m just blind. I just cannot see the thing at all.”
Why is that different than writing dialogue?
John Carney: “Because dialogue… With a movie you wouldn’t go over and over and over it again. I do what Glen does, I think, as a songwriter - which frustrates me because I can’t do it as a songwriter - I’d write a scene of dialogue and leave it, put it away – come back to it the next day – ‘Ah, f**k, that page is gone.’ I certainly see it. And then the end of the third day, and the fourth, you’d overlap, which is why it’s good to take a while to write. I would never try and write and then re-draft immediately because the first draft is really long. There’s loads of extraneous dialogue and then you put it back and the next day you’d maybe re-write the whole thing or you’d take bits of it and you refine it as you come and go. It’s also because when you’re watching a scene, you’re watching it like that. You’re passive. When you’re writing, you’re actively involved in it so you do keep that objectivity, that kind of ‘above the page looking down on it’ kind of feel, but it’s a funny thing.”
