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Markéta, this was your first movie. Was it what you expected it to be?
Markéta Irglová: “No, it wasn’t what I expected because to be honest, I didn’t know want to expect. It’s not like I ever went to drama school or anything like that, so for me I never even thought about it. For me, it was an exciting idea and I kind of jumped into without thinking about it. The thing that surprised me most about making the film was just how you don’t start with the scenes that are first in the film and end with the ending, which would make sense to me, because it would keep you in touch with the story and what’s happened so far and what’s to happen yet. But we would do a scene from the end and then a scene from the beginning and it would be really confusing because, especially when there’s a relationship that’s supposed to be evolving throughout the film, it’s hard to know how close you were supposed to be at different times. So that was very hard to do. And also, just, I didn’t know whether I could act or not until the first day of shooting. There was just no way to find out.”
But you took that chance.
John Carney: “I didn’t know. I kind of think everybody can act. I mean, everybody can be themselves, really, which is kind of what I wanted in this film. If we took like Cillian Murphy, like what I’d be doing with Cillian Murphy and whatever her name would be from the Czech Republic, a great actress who’s a famous star, if I had gotten them, I’d be getting them to try and act like these two. So I’d be trying to get them to do what I know these two could do. Really, my direction for Mara, more than Glen in a way, was to make sure you are comfortable so that you’re being yourself. You’re kind of reading my dialogue and you’re kind of sticking to the character piece that we’ve written together, that we’ve come up with.
We’re all good at what we do; we’re good at being ourselves. Most of my dialogue, if you transcribe what I’ve said I find a lot of times I’ve talked sh*t but I’ve sold it in my performance. You believe me and said, ‘Yeah, that guy’s good,’ but actually if you transcribe it and you write it down, the dialogue isn’t that great. The dialogue of most conversations isn’t that great. It’s the intonation; it’s just being yourself. So that was all we were really doing with Mara, was creating an environment where she was comfortable and felt that this camera wasn’t in her face and I think that’s what it is.”
Did being friends before working on Once help?
Markéta Irglová: “Absolutely.”
Glen Hansard: “What that meant was in the evening me and Mara could come home when we were finished. We were basically staying in a room quite similar to this during the shooting, in a flat in Dublin, and we got home in the evening and we’d take out tomorrow’s scenes and we’d just go over them. John had taught us this trick of always read it flat for the first few times. Literally go [in a monotone voice], ‘Listen, I’m really sorry about yesterday. It’s just I really fancy you and you’re really nice. I’m sorry but I overstepped the mark. Will you forgive me?’ And Mara’d be like [also in a flat voice], ‘Well I got a new job today.’ We’d just read it like that. John kept on telling us, ‘Read it flat every time so that once you know it, then you can inflect it,’ which I thought was a great bit of advice.
We got to that sort of point so we’d go in everyday then ready. Being mates made that absolutely possible. Also the other thing, the odd time I’d forget my line, Mara would just bend and jam the next line because she couldn’t go to the script because it wasn’t relevant. Then I’d jam the next line and John would just sort of go, ‘Yeah, I liked where you went there.’ Or he’d say, ‘Okay, I don’t believe you. Come back from there. Go back to there.’ It was just, and Mara, I’ll let you answer, but for me it was just a lot of trust. And plus, it made a lot of sense that I knew Mara because it’s not very difficult for me to look at Mara in very familiar, affectionate way because I know her so well.”
Markéta Irglová: “That was one of the comforts about shooting the film, the fact that I was working with somebody that I knew very well that I had friendship with, music with. I don’t think those scenes would have had that kind of thing if we didn’t know each other. You can feel from the screen that we had some kind of connection. And during the making of the film I just almost felt relaxed. It’s not like I felt I had to prove something to Glen, like as I would if I was with a proper actor, to constantly feel like I have to prove myself that I can do this. I’m quite shy around people that I don’t know and I do open up as soon as I get closer to somebody. But if there had been an actor that I didn’t know beforehand, I would have felt very shy, I think, and it would have blocked me a lot from doing the scenes the way I was supposed to do them. So in that way it was very comforting as well.”
Glen, did you write any songs that didn’t make it into the film?
Glen Hansard: “There’s only one B-side of one, and that’s a song called Leave which is on the soundtrack, actually. We put it on there because there’s like four seconds of it in the film where I press ‘record’ and I play on a tape. That’s the only song that we actually filmed in it’s entirety and then John pulled it out of the film because he just felt there was a little too much music in that part.”
John Carney: “It’s also that he’s at a happier stage in the film. But it would be kind of like we’ve got that point. We’ve got the point this guy is full of passion when he sings and he’s kind of not really that passionate when he talks. Kind of a quite bland kind of guy, but when he sings something special happens. In every musical…Tony is a gauche, 20-year-old in Saturday Night Fever but when he dances, he lights up the floor. But it seemed to me that we had gotten that point in the film so that was the one song we could lose.”
