Sex, violence, perversion ... in Bray

We have become quite relaxed about watching British and American actors having sex on screen. But when honest Gaels start at it, that's another matter. DONALD CLARKE visits the set of Tom Hall's new movie Sensation, described as a "film about two people in a room having sex". But, as he finds, that isn't the half of it.

LEOPOLD BLOOM did not, as I recall, make it to Bray on his titular day, but the southbound Dart journey – past Martello towers and lots of snot-green sea – still feels satisfactorily Joycean. It is Bloomsday, and the seaside town, blasted by sunlight, is looking as good as it knows how to look. Yet down this street and round this corner something dankly disturbing is afoot. Sex, violence, perversion: all within a few yards of the resort’s unsuspecting ice-cream parlours.

On first glance, it seems that the bland apartment, which today is a film set, has been torn to shreds. Look closer and you will discern that, though feathers and trash litter the floor, the furniture remains free of scuffs and the carpet is unstained.

"It's a classic movie trashed room," Kieron J Walsh, producer of the profoundly intriguing Sensation, says with a snort. "We can't afford to actually break things, so we just scatter feathers and stuff on top of something that is still in one piece."

Squeeze past the soundman squatting in the hot press and the script supervisor huddling beneath the thermostat and you will discover a surprisingly relaxed, suavely unshaven man reclining on a double bed.

The director of the movie, Tom Hall, deserves a rest. Still best known as one of the three creators of RTÉ's Bachelor's Walk, Hall had barely finished shooting Wide Open Spaces, his debut feature, when the car pulled up to take him to the set of Sensation. Indeed, the tight shooting schedule on Sensationstopped Hall from attending last Saturday's premiere of Wide Open Spacesat the Edinburgh Film Festival.

He’s as busy as Ridley Scott these days.

"I think having recent experience makes life easier," Hall says. "It had been a few years since I had directed when I went on to the set of Wide Open Spaces. Driving to work on the first day, I was terrified that I'd forgotten everything about how to direct."

Happily, the shoot of Wide Open Spaces, based on a script by Arthur Matthews, appears to have gone quite swimmingly. The film, a comedy starring Ardal O'Hanlon and Ewen Bremner, goes on release in Ireland later in the summer.

Hall secured that gig a few weeks before the cameras were set to roll.

By way of contrast, the foundations for Sensationwere laid down two years ago. Though Walsh and Hall are irrepressibly bullish about the project, they both understood that it would be a difficult film to finance. This is, it appears, no Waking Ned. We are in altogether grimier territory.

“We knew it was going to be tough,” Walsh says. “We just didn’t know it would be this tough. We were sure there would be like-minded perverts out there.” Hall nods in agreement.

“It is now two years since I wrote the first draft of the script. Frankly it’s a miracle we got any money to make it at all. It’s as eccentric as anything you could find.”

Dómhnall Gleeson, the picture's lead, recalls that, when Hall first pitched the script to him, he described Sensationas "a film about two people in a room having sex". From what I can gather, the film has many more fetid strings to its wormy bow than that description suggests.

The story begins with Donal, a farmer, striding about an apparently sylvan glade. Hark, viewers! It is the morning of the world. Then the tone changes dramatically as he fishes a pornographic magazine from a bush and begins doing what men do with such publications. Later, he returns home to find his father dead on his stairlift.

“Donal doesn’t even walk up the stairs,” Walsh explains. “He just pushes the button and brings him down.” Events continue to drift in a disturbing direction. Donal consoles himself with a prostitute from New Zealand and they subsequently become business partners.

"It's a latter-day Risky Business," Hall says in a voice that drips with irony. "Actually, I haven't seen that film. Is that the plot? It's also an investigation of the sex trade in the midlands." There is such a thing? Naïve fellow that I am, I always imagined the sex trade as largely an urban affair. What is going on behind the hedges of Leitrim and the cowsheds of Roscommon?

“You’d be surprised,” Hall says. “It’s busier than you think. Just look on the internet. In the past it was just somebody with a mattress and a Hiace van. Now they will tend to rent a hotel room in Letterkenny or Westport or wherever. If you do the maths you realise there’s a lot of money changing hands.”

The scene being shot details the aftermath of the female lead’s encounter with a gang of local toughs. Dómhnall Gleeson, son of the mighty Brendan, is pottering about the kitchen with a plastic bag and a wad of money. Playing Kim, the Antipodean escort, Luanne Gordon wanders from the cooker to her distressed bedroom. Hall suggests that she might like to use one of those actors’ “tricks” to alter the emphasis in her seemingly innocuous line.

“‘Tricks?’ I think you mean ‘technique’,” she joshes.

Gordon was living in London when she received the script for Sensation. Having done a fair bit of television in her home country and the odd turn in Casualty, she knew not to jump at the first sizeable part that came her way. The script was good, but it was weird.

“I auditioned for it in London and then got recalled,” she remembers.

“Two other girls got recalled as well, but I got it. Lucky me. But when I first read it I immediately thought: I have to meet this director before going further. Reading the script, I thought he could be a total weirdo. Fortunately he turned out to be a very civilised, very intelligent guy.” Rather disturbingly, Gleeson tells a slightly similar story.

"Tom had directed me in a television series called The Last Furlong," he says. "Then one day he called me up out of the blue and invited me to dinner. I thought: I barely know this guy. What's he up to? He invited my girlfriend, so I was worried it might be some strange wife-swapping thing."

It should be made very clear that Gleeson is joking. Tom Hall is an endlessly well-mannered, middle-class boy from south Dublin who has, since last summer, been happily married to the actor Kelly Campbell.

Still, he has, it seems, managed to dig a particularly disturbing cinematic entity out of his otherwise unthreatening psyche. Kieron J Walsh, director of films such as When Brendan Met Trudyand TV shows such as Raw, keeps mentioning the work of the creepy American director Todd Solondz when discussing the picture. Yikes. Is Ireland ready for its own Happinessor Welcome to the Dollhouse?"The Irish Film Board were always very supportive," Walsh explains.

“But it was harder with funders. The response we kept getting was: ‘It’s very good. We really like it. But it’s not for us.’ I mean the first scene has this guy masturbating in it, and then he finds his father dead.”

Katie Holly, Kieron’s co-producer on the project, also encountered the odd euphemism. “The phrase I kept hearing was ‘execution dependent’,” she says. “That means they thought that, looking at the script, it could end up 10 different ways. It could be great or it could be just sordid and unpleasant. Come back to us when it’s finished.”

Still, with the help of some money from the Rotterdam Film Fund, the Sensationteam did eventually ease the picture into production. With a modest budget of €1 million, they are being forced to work 10-hour days and polish off the project in just over four weeks. What then? There is an undeniable fug of guilty enthusiasm hanging over the production, but one can't help but wonder what Irish audiences will make of something so proudly, deliberately squalid. For many decades audiences have been quite relaxed about watching the Americans and the British have sex. Yet one still detects a faint unease at the notion of honest Gaels bumping their Celtic genitals. Remembering that today is UlyssesDay, it seems appropriate to ask if the film-makers expect (or desire) their own obscenity scandal.

"I really don't think that people mind any more," Walsh says. "I don't think it will ruffle feathers. When we made Rawon TV, there was an expectation that it was going to disturb people. There was anal sex, oral sex, full-frontal nudity, but, you know, almost nobody complained. I think we are over that."

Later, scoffing meatloaf and salad in the catering bus, Gleeson, Gordon and Hall debate the underlying themes of the piece. It becomes clear that, far from being a cheap shocker, the script is trying to get at a very modern class of psychological disaffection. Donal may be isolated from urban life in his remote farmhouse. He may never have had sex. But, thanks to broadband, he has been able to post the most appalling things about strangers in Bangkok, Barcelona and Bridgetown.

It’s a disturbing thought.

“It’s emblematic of something else,” Hall says. “Here is a world where everything else has gone out of the culture. I was impressed by something somebody said about Fred West’s upbringing on a farm. They pointed out that animals got treated like machines and people got treated like animals. That’s a very brutalising environment.”

So it’s a film inspired, at least in part, by the home life of Britain’s most notorious serial killer. If only the good burghers of Bray knew what was going on in their quiet, sunny streets.

is set for release later this year

Sensation