“You have to be two steps ahead,” Sinéad O’Riordan says. “I’ve got punched in the face because I called the wrong shot.”
Now there’s a problem that producers rarely encounter on set. Or actors. O’Riordan, an assertive Cork woman with an unmistakable drive, is talking me through her dual role on the nifty, disciplined Irish feature Swing Bout. The punch was entirely accidental.
Maurice O’Carroll’s film is – if this doesn’t count as spoiler – a boxing film without any actual boxing (although it does feature a fair bit of brawling). We are backstage at a fight night. Ciara Berkeley plays a young boxer, essentially an understudy hoping to get an unscheduled fight if a space emerges. Meanwhile, corruption and intrigue boil at the end of every corridor.
O’Riordan both produces and plays the protagonist’s coach. No small challenge. Shot at Páirc Uí Chaoimh stadium, in Cork, the film involves long mobile takes that must have tested her powers of organisation.
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“The opening sequence is all done in one take,” she says. “So I suppose the challenge with that is you have a whole load of actors in a room. Obviously you need to block it and have everything properly set up before the cameras roll.”
In some ways long takes might assist with a lower budget. You have fewer set-ups. If you get it right – a big if – then things move faster. And nothing is so costly as time.
“We only had 21 days to shoot, and we knew that our most challenging times would be those dressing-room scenes,” O’Riordan says. “So we had to be militant in our pre-production process. Just say to the cast and crew, ‘These nine days that we’re going to actually be shooting are critical. We need quiet and for everyone to embrace it.’ Because you always have a few messers on set. But everyone was great.”
O’Riordan, from Ballyphehane, to the south of Cork city, has taken an interesting journey. She studied electronic engineering and began her working career a long way from arc lights and clapperboards. She would not be the first person to take such a professional swerve. But that sort of life-changing decision always takes courage.
“I’ve always wanted to be an actor,” she says. “I have been acting since I was six. I had done amateur stuff. I did all the qualifications. I did it for years in Cork, but really the money wasn’t there at the time to send me to Dublin. I don’t even think there was a course there at the time. And the money certainly wasn’t there to send me to London. My parents were working class. So there were no funds there.”
Her brother was doing a course in electrical engineering and, mathematical herself, she felt that might offer a “sensible path”.
“So I did that for four years,” she says. “I got my degree. I was always dabbling in acting. I was involved in the drama clubs in college and stuff. And then I went off to Silicon Valley and tested software there for four or five years for high tech. When I eventually moved home I had two boys. I said, ‘Okay, I’m actually going to follow my heart and my passion.’”
She set up her own company, called ORion Productions and produced three successful plays. She then met O’Carroll and they began their busy professional partnership with a short film before moving towards features.
It is becoming increasingly common for actors to take up producing as a way, among other things, of creating roles worth playing. I recently spoke to Cillian Murphy, soon to be seen in Small Things Like These, and Saoirse Ronan, coming our way in The Outrun, about making just such a move. Of course, those two actors came to producing when well established. O’Riordan did not have the comfort of celebrity.
“Because I came into acting late, I realised that I was not going to get any roles anytime soon,” she says. “I had to learn how to produce. I was self-taught. I didn’t know what a producer did. I hadn’t a clue. But you learn very quickly.”
O’Riordan notes that you need “grit and resilience” to climb back every time you get knocked down, and I can believe she has a tubload of both. There is a sense of thrust and agitation to her manner that suggests a person not happy to let problems slide. Being a producer is tricky. If a project collapses you often get the blame. If it succeeds the director tends to get all the credit.
“You know what? I thrive in that environment,” she says. “I was recently diagnosed with ADD, and it’s kind of my superpower. My thoughts are racing, racing. I always have the producer hat on. ‘What do I need to do?’ Ticking all the lists. But then, when it comes to the acting, I’ve got that hyperfocused ability to tune in and do what I need to do. ‘Okay, this is my scene now.’”
She has juggled the two professions with some skill. You can see her wearing her acting hat in the RTÉ shows Fair City and The Dry. She produced the series Sucking Diesel and the feature Dead Along the Way. Swing Bout seems like a cunning way of marshalling limited resources. The bug becomes a feature. A large part of the film’s appeal is its claustrophobic huddle in one space and its frantic race within something like real time.
“We didn’t go down the Screen Ireland funding road,” she says. “We wanted to use this as a calling card to show what we could do. We wanted to produce something that had the highest production values we could manage on very limited funds. We worked with great like-minded people and we are very lucky. But funding is always an issue.”
The film could hardly have landed at a better time. Fifteen years ago women’s boxing was still a minority interest. Then Katie Taylor blew the lid off the 2012 Olympics. Swing Bout arrives a month or so after Kellie Harrington successfully, and remarkably, defended her title at the Paris edition. If we didn’t know how long it took to get films into production we might naively assume this was all planned. It looks as if Harrington did them a big favour.
“She absolutely did,” O’Riordan says. “When Morris wrote the script we had just graduated. We’d both done the postgraduate diploma with Screen Ireland, actually. ‘Will we go in for funding? If we do, how long is that going to take?’ We were gunning to get it made. Covid was still around. But we couldn’t have timed it better. Kellie did us a great favour. It’s fantastic.”
[ Kellie Harrington becomes double Olympic champion with display of pure goldOpens in new window ]
The location is a vital flavour of the film. I assume it’s difficult to get access to Páirc Uí Chaoimh for the duration of a film shoot. I imagine O’Riordan had to wrangle and cajole. But she quickly disabuses me of any such notion. It seems they were originally planning to build a set.
“The costs of building were coming in ridiculous,” she says. “So our production designer said, ‘Why don’t you just approach Páirc Uí Chaoimh and see if you can just shoot some of the corridor scenes there?’ So I was, like, ‘Okay, grand.’”
They set up a meeting with Sinéad O’Keeffe, commercial director of Cork GAA, and found they were pushing at an open door.
“She was so curious about the film,” O’Riordan days. “And before we knew it, ‘Well, okay, you can shoot here for 21 days. No problem.’ We were very fortunate, because it was January. So the season hadn’t kicked off yet.”
The result is a taut film that feels comfortable in its surroundings. The actors playing boxers carry themselves like boxers. The actors playing hoodlums carry themselves like hoodlums. O’Riordan swaggers impressively as the unyielding manager. There is surely abundant evidence here of her gift for getting stuff done. Is there work on the immediate horizon?
“We have a few things, yeah,” she says. “We have a six-part TV series, a crime drama that Morris has written. So we’re hoping to pitch that. We’ve been very fortunate with Swing Bout in the sense that it’s opened a lot of doors.”
Still, shame about the accidental punch to the head.
Swing Bout is in cinemas from Friday, September 20th
