Three years ago, directors Kirsten Sheridan and John Carney decided to create a collective space for film-makers. Having found a building, and kicked out the wildlife, their plans keep growing
ON THE LARGELY derelict side of Grand Canal Dock in Dublin, propped up against Bolands Mill, is a warehouse space called The Factory on Barrow Street. It lies between Google and Facebook offices – “giant buildings called progress” as one Factory team member calls them – and leans against the calm water of the dock.
For five years, the building lay largely derelict, left aside as a space that housed music events and recordings, and a performing arts school. Two and a half years ago, when its main occupants were bats, rats, pigeons and mice, a group of film directors, with Kirsten Sheridan, Lance Daly and John Carney at its core, negotiated a lease with Treasury Holdings, and The Factory was born, with seed funding from the Irish Film Board. Now it’s a centre of innovation in Irish screen acting.
The people who work there can’t really describe what The Factory is and struggle to identify a philosophy for the hub. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” says Maureen Hughes, a casting agent whose office occupies a mezzanine space in the building, “but I know it’s good.”
The Factory is a collective space that a bunch of Irish directors, filmmakers, producers, casting agents, actors, and music producers call home. And later this year, the cooperative occupying the space will embark on its most ambitious plan to date, a year-long screen-acting course for 30 actors.
“The very, very start was when myself and John [Carney] met at the Galway Film Fleadh in July 2009,” Sheridan says in Hughes’ mezzanine office, where wine stains on the carpet indicate a recent party.
“We were talking about how lonely it is as a writer, and even as a writer-director because you don’t spend that much time directing. We didn’t want to sit in a room on our own any more and send out emails into a big black hole.
“Filmmaking in Ireland is generally competitive and isolative and, bar a handful of industry events, people don’t meet up ever. So the idea was to create a space where there would be an awful lot more of that. We approached Lance [Daly] pretty quickly because I had seen Kisses, and then we approached Maureen pretty quickly. Yeah, we just kind of jumped in together in two and a half years.”
The building is a warren of corridors, common areas, mezzanine and loft offices, balconies, small studio spaces, big studio spaces, a screening room, and dark suites for film editing and grading.
Darklight ran its festival from here last year, and Still Films is based in the building. And Sheridan – with father Jim and sister Naomi, an Oscar nominee for In America – put together her latest film, Dollhouse, here also. It was cast and test-screened here, and shot in her parents’ house. In a music studio in one part of the building, the score and additional sounds were created. It’s the first high-profile Factory film, and a real litmus test for how such a cooperative, with an entire mini-studio of elements working together, will work.
Carney, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning Once, is currently in New York shooting his next feature Can A Song Save Your Life?, which stars Mark Ruffalo and is produced by Judd Apatow.
“It’s not a think tank necessarily but a co-op space,” he says, the day before he leaves Dublin for the US. “It’s an experiment, you try out actors, look at stuff on a big screen. It makes the process more like a Hollywood studio back in the 1920s and 1930s, a place of excellence where you could explore practicalities a bit more than the theories.”
Carney echoes Sheridan’s feelings concerning isolation. “You feel quite alone when you’re writing, spending time on your own with your own ideas instead of bouncing them off people,” he says.
“That bled into the idea that the most important part of a motion picture is the actors. We found it would be interesting to run something parallel to that; shooting stuff, reading scripts, developing ideas for actors, so instead of just writing something and casting it, you could write bespoke pieces for actors. When we thought of that, we thought, what about bringing young actors in?
“Within that, what we found a little [when] casting our films was that there isn’t really a screen-training course in Ireland for real. A lot of actors were coming in from a theatrical background and just not knowing the screen in the same way that people who gained experience would.”
Laura MacNaughton, who was previously the general manager at The Gate, Hughes, and directors Shimmy Marcus and Viko Nikci will also run the Actors Studio, based on the format of New York’s Actors Studio founded in 1947. A cafe staffed by actors is also another Factory project for 2012.
Hughes trawls through auditions to cast new talent for programmes such as Raw and Love/Hate. “All of the training in this country and in the UK is designed for the stage,” Hughes says. “They’re coming out of these schools ready for the stage but very ‘ahhhh’,” Hughes says, adopting an exaggerated stage-acting pose.
“So you’re trying to talk them down from the very high hill they’ve managed to climb up to graduate from these schools, in order to take them down to a point where it’s just a completely different muscle really.
“I suspect a year’s course in here would be more than enough to rebalance that. I’m still in shock that all of these schools, which charge a fortune to go through, provide so little screen training, given that it is the one potential area that people might earn a living in.”
For Sheridan, it also offers a different way of making films. She talks about taking a more auteur approach to film. “Trying to apply a documentary approach to drama is interesting because you have a really small crew, you can go out and shoot, think about it, go back and shoot, instead of this, ‘You’ve got 21 days to prove yourself, you’re spending a fortune, you better not go past eight o’clock or everyone explodes’. You’re thinking, God, I hope I got it right – just because 20 people said my script is okay I’m kind of allowed to shoot. Whereas we’re saying to people, ‘Get a camera, go out and do it, come in and edit it, throw it on the screen and we’ll all look at it’.
“It’s a different way of developing material, and potentially that follows on to a different way of shooting. And then hopefully a different way of exhibiting and distributing.” She laughs at the ambition: “But that’s next year.”
MacNaughton says she has 200 actors waiting to join the 40 who are currently part of the free acting workshops in The Factory. On a Tuesday evening, Shimmy Marcus leads a workshop. On another day it could be Lenny Abrahamson or any of the new-blood directors that are coming into the space. Previous mentors have included Brendan Gleeson, Saoirse Ronan and Mark O’Halloran.
The group talk about the scenes they’re rehearsing. One pair picks Blue Valentine to raised eyebrows from Marcus. “We’re just going to improv it,” the young actor offers. “The whole film is improv!” Marcus retorts.
“Yeah, we just need a shower for it,” the other half of the pair says to laughter. “There’s a drainpipe outside,” Marcus deadpans.
They split up in groups and two young actors, one male, one female, head into a mirrored studio space to go through a scene from Pulp Fiction.
Sheridan follows them, documenting the rehearsal on a handycam. “Cool!” she remarks at one point.
“You never let us finish, do you?” the young male actor says with faux exasperation, since Sheridan cut the scene short with her interjection of praise.
The year-long screen acting course will cost €5,000, but the team will be approaching patrons within the film industry to fund 10 scholarships for young actors who can’t afford the fees.
“There’s no money, so we have to get really creative,” Hughes says, “And really, I think sometimes that just f**king works. I was really bored between 2000 and 2005 because there seemed to be money for everything, but no one was doing anything interesting.”
