Since it was first staged at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork four years ago, Enda Walsh's play Disco Pigs has had the critics reaching for their superlatives and has gone on to garner several awards and considerable international acclaim. Given that it is a one-act, two-hander play spoken in a cross between Cork slang and baby talk, Disco Pigs might not seem the most suitable case for screen treatment. However, producer Ed Guiney, of Dublin-based Temple Films, detected its potential and the result is a film treatment which radically reworks and expands the play and is now in production in Dublin and Cork.
"I saw the play at the Da Club when it was in the Dublin Fringe Festival in October 1996," says Guiney on the set of the film. "It struck me that there were so many young people in the audience, that it was such a non-theatre audience, and how the play spoke so strongly to them.
"Of course, there would have to be changes to turn it into a film. It would need a more filmic structure that would be less anecdotal than the play and would re-enact a lot of the events referred to in the play. The dialogue in the play was great, but it would have to be more intelligible for the film."
He commissioned Enda Walsh to adapt his play for the screen, and after it went through any number of drafts, Guiney raised the movie's modest £1.8 million budget from Renaissance Films, the London-based film sales company which made Much Ado About Nothing and The Madness of King George, among others, and the Irish Film Board.
One of the most striking things about visiting the set of Disco Pigs is that Ed Guiney, at 34, is one of the older people working on it. The director, Kirtsen Sheridan, who is making her feature film debut with it, is just 23, and the two stars, Cillian Murphy and Elaine Cassidy, are a few years younger again. "Enda Walsh is around my age," says Guiney defensively, "but he looks a lot younger than he is."
The set for the day is Castle Park School in Dalkey, Co Dublin, which is playing the Allen Centre, a progressive remand home in Donegal where one of the two young central characters, Runt (played by Elaine Cassidy), has been sent. The love of her life, Pig (Cillian Murphy), has followed her, and he arrives in the grounds while she has breakfast in the canteen with the other young inmates - played by students from Newpark Comprehensive School who are doubling as extras for a day of their Easter holidays.
In a moment reminiscent of the scene towards the end of The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock character faces the closed door of the church, Pig appears by the glass door of the canteen and stares in. He enters the room, scanning the faces as he seeks out Runt. Spotting her, he climbs on to a table and walks down to where she is seated. The film's Chilean lighting cameraman and camera operator, Igor Jadue-Lillo, follows his progress as director Sheridan stands engrossed in the scene.
She believes that the appeal of the story lies with its two characters, Pig and Runt. "I think it's an incredibly beautiful love story," she says. "The two of them live in this world of their own and it's such an exclusive world. They want to stay like two-year-olds forever, living in this fantasy world. Then reality intrudes on their womb-like little world. We knew we would have to have a lot of gentler scenes to balance all the rage that's in the play."
Enda Walsh says he was surprised when Ed Guiney approached him about turning Disco Pigs into a movie. "He could see it as a movie, which I certainly couldn't. My first draft screenplay was atrocious, like an add-on to the play. The film script is inspired by the play, but there's a huge new story for those two characters. There are differences in scale, obviously, and in time - over two days in the play, over a month in the film.
Cillian Murphy, who is from Cork, made his acting debut playing Pig in the original Corcadorca production of the play, directed by Pat Kiernan. "He created it really," says Enda Walsh. "Cillian is lovely. All his sensibilities are correct for the part. I was trying to write about 17-year-olds and his instincts were closer to that age. He would pull me up on language, for example."
During his lunch break on the set, Murphy explains how, when he was in fourth year at secondary school, his class were given a theatre workshop by Pat Kiernan which sparked his interest in acting. While studying law at UCC, Murphy went to see Corcadorca's productions and he says he badgered Pat Kiernan for an audition. Enda Walsh auditioned him and gave him the role of Pig in Disco Pigs.
"At the time it was a very small thing that was in Triskel for three weeks," says Murphy. "I eventually did it for about 18 months, on and off, in Dublin, Edinburgh, Toronto, Budapest, Germany. I think the appeal of the story is its simplicity. It's a love story and Pig is nothing without Runt, so his existence is wholly dependent on her. He's not a complete person without her. I've tried not to let my performance in the play to inform my performance in the film. The more we rehearsed it for the different medium of film, the more I had to get to know the character all over again. I think it's dangerous to go into any project thinking you've got your character sussed."
In the three years since he started out as an actor in Disco Pigs, Cillian Murphy has gained experience in several movies - playing a young soldier in William Boyd's wartime drama, The Trench; a brash, irresponsible young Irishman in the US for the summer in Sunburn, in which he was adored by the camera; and a suicidal young man sent to an institution in John Carney's recently completed The Smiling Suicide Club. Pursuing his commitment to theatre, he has been in Garry Hynes's productions of Juno and the Paycock and The Country Boy.
A native of Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, Elaine Cassidy, now 20, started out in feature films when she was 16 and director Geraldine Creed cast her in The Sun, the Moon and the Stars. Last year she was feted at Cannes for her wonderfully natural performance opposite Bob Hoskins in Atom Egoyan's film of William Trevor's novel, Felicia's Journey, and remains unaffected by the experience.
To get her accent right for playing Runt, she spent nine weeks in Cork. "I loved it there," she says. "I got a job in a bistro and no one knew I was an actress." It got tricky at times, she says, like when she had go to London for a photo shoot for Tatler magazine - in which she was dressed as Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind - and when her performance in Felicia's Journey earned her a nomination as best actress in the Genies, the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars, and she had to go to Toronto for the awards ceremony. Elaine Cassidy will have one week off after she finishes working on Disco Pigs and before she goes to Madrid for three months to act in the Gothic horror movie, The Other, the first English-language film from the hot young Spanish director, Alejandro Amenabar, who made Thesis and Open Your Eyes. "I play a mute maid in the film, and Nicole Kidman plays the mother of the house," she says. "I'm going to try to get my sister a job as my stand-in on the film, so I'll have company while I'm there."
She did not know what to expect when it came to working with Kirsten Sheridan. "I'm amazed she's just a few years older than me," she says. "Kirsten is so focused. If someone told me this was her ninth film I'd believe it. She's taken to it like a duck to water. And she's a real actor's director."
Ed Guiney has seen Sheridan's award-winning short films, Patterns and The Case of . . . Majella McGinty, which convinced him that she was the right director for Disco Pigs. "She has a really strong visual sense and I loved the performances she got from the kids in those short films," he says.
I asked the young director if her father, Jim Sheridan, had given her any advice before shooting her first feature film. "All that matters is the actors, the feeling and trusting your instincts," she says. "That's what he believes, although this film is hugely different to what he makes. I'm living it completely."
The cast includes rising young actors Darren Healy, Tara-Lynn O'Neill and Zoe Gibney, and more established players - Brian F. O'Byrne and Geraldine O'Rawe as Runt's parents, Eleanor Methven as Pig's mother, Marie Mullen as the manager of the Allen Centre and Dawn Bradfield as a counsellor - along with writer Eoghan Harris as a Cork schoolteacher and singer Gavin Friday as "a guy in a karaoke bar".
As the lunch break ends on the Castle Park set and Cillian Murphy climbs back on to the canteen table for his close-up, Ed Guiney is looking ahead towards one of the production's most elaborate sequences. "Next week we're shooting a night-club scene over three nights with 200 extras," he says. "We're transforming the Round Room of the Rotunda into this club called The Palace. A lot of our resources have gone into that location."
Disco Pigs is his fifth feature as a producer, following Ailsa, Guiltrip, Sweety Barrett, and The Smiling Suicide Club, which was backed by the Hollywood studio, Universal Pictures, and now has completed post-production with a view towards an autumn release. Cillian Murphy is joined in the cast by the young American actors, Jonathan Jackson and Tricia Vesey, and Irish actors Stephen Rea and Gerard McSorley. "It's One Flew Over the Breakfast Club, sort of," Guiney jokes.
If he had to describe Disco Pigs by wedding film references, Guiney says it would be "Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet meets A Clockwork Orange - but without their budgets! And I think Cillian and Elaine have the same chemistry as Romeo and Juliet had in that film."