Aisling Walsh's powerful new film about life under the Christian Brothers is the next step in a notable career, writes Michael Dwyer.
Schooldays are supposed to be the happiest years of our lives, but for the generations of Irish people who went to school in the decades when corporal punishment was legal and liberally practised the equation they were most likely to learn outside of maths class was that between violence, education and religion.
"As a young child at the Mercy convent in Navan I had quite a tough time, more because I'm left-handed than anything else," recalls the Irish director Aisling Walsh. "I had appalling handwriting. Now when people look at my writing they say it's amazing, and I tell them the nuns taught me that. I was slapped on a regular basis. There was this combination of violence and fear. I remember some of the girls being terrified all the time. I was never afraid of the nuns, and I loved going to school socially. I later went to Sion Hill, in Blackrock in Dublin, where they didn't slap you."
We now know the regime was much more sadistic in the confined institutions run by priests, nuns and Christian Brothers; Walsh has addressed the scandal in two unflinching dramas - last year in the television film Sinners, charting the experiences of girls at a Magdalene laundry, and now in Song For A Raggy Boy, her powerful film based on Patrick Galvin's book, set at a forbidding Christian Brothers institution in Co Cork in 1939.
When we met this week the controversy about who should foot the bill for compensation claims inevitably arose. "I don't believe the taxpayer should pay for it all and that at least a middle ground should be reached," Walsh says. "The religious orders have to pay their share. I think we probably have a collective guilt here about it, but we shouldn't be made to feel that."
She first read Galvin's book in the mid-1990s. "I was drawn to it right away. It's a very emotional read, and I was quite angry after reading it. I believed it could make a very strong film, and I thought I would find people who felt the same as I did about it and that it wouldn't take too long to get made. I had no idea at the time it would take six years."
In contrast to the depiction of nuns as ogres in Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, Walsh's more balanced film features a single perpetrator of sadism, in the ice-cold Brother John (Iain Glen), and surrounds him with men too old or scared to interfere - until an idealistic lay teacher (Aidan Quinn) joins the staff and rocks the boat.
The film's most disturbing scene takes place on Christmas Day, in an act of extreme violence by Brother John; harrowing as it is in the cinema, it could have proved traumatic for the young actors who worked on the film. "The boys came a week before we started filming," Walsh says, "and I went through each child's story with them beforehand, explaining who their characters were and why they were in this institution. The kids had gotten to know Iain by the time we shot that scene, which helped.
"I have to say it was the most difficult scene I've ever shot, because of the reaction of the rest of the crew. Grown men were in tears on the set, to the point where we couldn't finish the scene in one day. When the time came for the little lad, Michael Sloan, to start crying, the sound was banging off the walls of the handball alley where we were shooting. People were very affected by it, but the kids were laughing again afterwards."
Finding the right boys for the film involved an extensive casting search that began in Dublin. "Some days we would see up to 150 boys, but they were too modern, too beautifully spoken," Walsh says. "When I started working in English television I worked down in south London, where the Irish people are quite different from those in Kilburn, and they're very into boxing - so is Lynda La Plante, and we used to go to fights together.
"I got in touch with boxing clubs and we found our actors, and some were just amazing. Also, because they're boxers they can concentrate. John Travers has most of his scenes with Aidan or with Iain, which is scary for a boy to do, but he just took it on, and Aidan and Iain were wonderful with them. At the end they went home in tears because it was all over and they had such a great time."
The film was shot in a former seminary and boarding school in Ballyvourney, in Co Cork, on a tight budget of €3.7 million, raised in a complex financing jigsaw from sources in Ireland, Denmark, Spain and the UK. "Aidan and Iain stuck with it for four years. We came very close a few times, but then one of the financiers would pull out. There was one time when it looked certain to happen and didn't, and it broke my heart to have to tell Aidan the news.
"I could never let it go. I said to Aidan . . . that we should have kept all the Walsh-Quinn e-mails, because they would make for incredible reading - hundreds of e-mails every time we came close to getting into production. We had such a good book and such fine actors, and I was determined that we had to tell this story for the rest of the world. I've seen it at festivals all over the world now, and it's had an extraordinary effect on people."
Walsh learned her craft when she enrolled to study fine arts at what is now Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology. "I was only 16 when I did my Leaving; the National College of Art [and Design\] wouldn't take me in because I was under 18, so I went for the interview in Dún Laoghaire and they took me in. I'd always loved films, ever since my parents took me as a child. It all just made sense after I did my foundation year at Dún Laoghaire. There was no turning back."
She continued her studies at Britain's National Film and Television School, outside London. Having made the award-winning short Hostage, she directed her first feature film in 1989 - Joyriders, an Irish road movie starring Patricia Kerrigan, Andrew Connolly and Billie Whitelaw.
There was a long gap before she made Song For A Raggy Boy, her second feature; she spent the intervening years making her mark in television - Doctor Finlay, which earned her a BAFTA award; Roughnecks, a series set on an oil rig in the North Sea; Forgive And Forget, the first gay-themed drama on ITV; and the two gritty, ground-breaking Trial & Retribution miniseries, scripted by La Plante.
La Plante, who had set up a production company, had seen a couple of episodes of Roughnecks and asked Walsh to meet her. "She said she would love to work with me on a project, so I made an episode of The Governor, which was shot in Dublin, and then she asked me to do the first Trial & Retribution, and six months later I did the second one, which Iain Glen was in.
"Lynda is tiny, smaller than I am, and with flaming red hair. She's a great storyteller and has terrific energy. We know each other so well now - she can get into my head and I can get into hers so easily."
Having worked on tightly organised television productions proved invaluable when it came to shooting Song For A Raggy Boy. "Television teaches you to work in a very sharp, tight way. You can still get in all the detail you need. Raggy Boy was to be an eight-week shoot, went down to seven and then to six. At one point someone suggested trying to do it in five weeks, and I said that's when I walk away. I knew what I could achieve. So we did it in six weeks."
Touring the international festival circuit with Song For A Raggy Boy has emphasised the film's universality, she says. The journey started at the Sundance festival in the US in January. "That was our first public screening, and I thought I'd live or die by the end of that 93 minutes. I had seen it so many times that I sat in a bar with Aidan during the screening and we went back down to the cinema with about 10 minutes to go. When the lights came up and we came on stage there was this incredible ovation. I just couldn't believe it."
It went on to be named best picture at Copenhagen International Film Festival and won the Women in Cinema prize at Seattle, but she was particularly struck by the reaction at the Karlovy Vary festival, in the Czech Republic. "The cinema holds 1,300 and they let another 200 people sit on the floor; they stood up and clapped and cheered at the end," she says. "It's very much an Irish story but a universal story too. I think everybody understands a story about the struggle for individuality and freedom, and especially when it's do with children. If you set that story in Mexico or France or Russia it would work too."
Walsh is planning her third cinema film, Return To Sender, scripted by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who wrote Die Another Day. This US-set drama deals with a defence lawyer who starts to correspond with convicts on death row, falling in love with one of them. She has offered the role of the condemned woman to Connie Nielsen, the Danish star of Gladiator. "We showed Raggy Boy at the Tribeca festival in New York and Connie came along to see it. We spent a very nice evening together and we've kept in touch since then. The idea is that we will try to do it in the spring."
Song For A Raggy Boy opens the 48th Cork Film Festival on Sunday, going on general release next Friday
