Director Portia A. Buckley joins us on Close-Up Culture to talk about Clodagh. The short film follows Mrs Kelly, a lonely, devout, and rigorously honest housekeeper (played by Bríd Ní Neachtain) who discovers a young Irish girl with an exceptional gift, Clodagh (Katelyn Rose Downey). This meeting creates a moral conundrum for Mrs. Kelly.
What was your inspiration for the story?
The story was inspired by an archival video of a priest’s housekeeper, which we saw on an old RTE clip. She was being interviewed about ‘her’ priest. She was extremely polite and reverential, and she deftly batted away any suggestions that she was the gatekeeper to her priest, but spoke as if she was speaking about her father or even her partner. They are a dying breed, the priest’s housekeeper, literally, but we loved the idea of depicting the many faceted relationship between the priest and the housekeeper, both living together in such close quarters with their God present at all times too. The woman in the interview was also wearing a very jazzy sweater – red with sparkling sequins – which she must have chosen to wear for the interview and, despite being very religious, serious and extremely measured in her responses, we couldn’t get past that choice of sweater! We loved the idea that there was some part of her that wanted to be noticed or some artistic heart beating underneath that exterior and liked the idea of contriving a situation that could wake that up!
My previous film was set in Moss Side, Manchester and was very much a social realism piece, mostly handheld camera, street casting, and intense subject matter. I was keen to do something a little different with my next project and also very keen to shoot in Ireland again. We wrote this film to be shot on a tripod, almost exclusively, so that the frames could be more considered and composed more artistically. This allows a lot less room for error, as there is nothing to cut to, but that restricted, ordered, style really suited the life of Mrs Kelly, the housekeeper, who leads a very parsimonious existence, very rigid. I visited the Vermeer exhibition during pre-production and saw how he depicted his women, often in service, mostly framed off centre. It was not the traditional representation of women popular at that time. Women in service, no cradles or hearths or babies.
Those classical Vermeer’s became a huge inspiration when lighting the sets with DP Jomo Fray. We shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio to box Mrs Kelly in and shot on 35mm film so we could really push the contrast of light and darkness. All this was made to contrast with the bright exciting dance number in the middle of the film, a moment which turns Mrs Kelly’s world upside-down. What happens when joy, beauty and artistry crash that tight, ordered, rule abiding world?
What was the casting process like? How did you discover Katelyn Rose Downey?
The film centres around actor Bríd Ní Neachtain’s housekeeper ‘Mrs Kelly’ and what happens when ‘Clodagh’, an incredibly gifted young dancer arrives at the local Irish dancing class she runs and turns her life upside down. The script came together very quickly and it had a kind of momentum which we were keen to keep, but although writing the line ‘Clodagh dances as if touched by God’ was easy, finding that girl – a young girl who could dance that well and also perform the large dialogue scenes which follow the dance – could be impossible. We knew that if we couldn’t find a girl who could do both, we wouldn’t be able to make the film land.
It was very much in the spirit of the film how Clodagh’s casting came about… We were all set for this long, potentially impossible, search and began with one, long-shot email to someone we knew who worked in the arts, asking did they know any Irish dancers? We really just planned to start with the background dancers, get an idea of what good dancing looked like, then work our way towards casting Clodagh at a later date. The response came back “yes” they knew one dance school in Dublin who had agreed to see us. The head of the school was happy for us to audition the girls to play the background dancers and put her daughter forward for the lead role of Clodagh.
So we drove up to Dublin, to the Watson Twin Academy, and met the teachers Clare and Lisa and we watched their students dance. They were of such a high standard we were really blown away, but we were aware that there was one girl who wasn’t dancing and was just politely waiting to the side. This was Katelyn. All the time we were thinking “Is this the girl? God, I hope she’s good” And then she came up to dance solo. There was a certain amount of trepidation from us, but surely nothing compared to what she felt, having to wait her turn, but my God… She didn’t show it. She just took her mark and blew us away immediately. She’s the two time Irish World dancing champion – something we didn’t know beforehand – so needless to say we were gobsmacked.
Then came an awkward moment where my producer Michael Lindley and I approached Katelyn, both congratulating her, but thinking the same thing “Can she act?”. Acting and dancing are such different disciplines and child actors can be hit and miss. I always ask actors for a very truthful, naturalistic style but kids tend to go quite big, as they are often used to school plays or recitals. We loved the dance so much we didn’t want it to go wrong so, desperate to stall what we believed could be an awkward situation, we asked if she would like to read tomorrow, to give her time to get to know the material and maybe give her some pointers to consider overnight. She told us she was ready to read and, when we offered her the script, she assured us she knew all of the lines already.
We quickly set up a camera and watched, again just amazed, as she gave a perfect reading. I gave her some notes, three as I recall, to see if she could take direction. She read again and hit all three notes, not over-egging them, just subtly adjusting – like a seasoned pro. We were speechless, genuinely. Much like Mrs Kelly’s reaction to her in the film…. We’d just never seen anything like it. We gave her the part right there in the room. First girl we saw for the role. Never happens that way… ever… but we felt from that moment, with Katelyn as Clodagh and an established professional like Bríd attached as Mrs Kelly, we had something special.
The film is centered on a devout housekeeper who faces a moral dilemma. Was religion a big part of your upbringing?
My mother is Italian and my father is Irish, so I was raised a Catholic. Although I am not a practicing Catholic and only really attend church on the ‘big days’, it is part of my DNA and tends to bleed into my work. The moral dilemma of Mrs Kelly is such a trivial one, by design, it’s not world changing but it threatens to undermine how she sees herself. A rigorously honest, religious woman, who has probably never told a lie in her life is faced with a choice – to tell a lie and embrace the consequences of the unknown or to stick to her moral convictions and ignore what she has seen. There is also a more subtle connotation to Mrs Kelly potentially taking on Clodagh as a student… Clodagh dances in the Sean Nós style, an older, more traditional, style of Irish Dance – the hands move, the face is expressive and smiling, the whole body is involved in the dance. Although it is a more traditional dance, it looks very modern, something Mrs Kelly definitely is not!
The Irish dance popular now is po-faced, arms rigid and by your sides. It has been said that this is a result of the Catholic church coming into Ireland and restricting the dancing – moving hands could brush against other hands which could lead to impure thoughts and maybe worse, so compared to the Sean Nos it seems relatively joyless. Mrs Kelly, a devout religious woman would be aware that Clodagh’s dance, although incredible, goes against the churches rules on dance. We wanted this to further inform Mrs Kelly’s own moral dilemma.
How would you describe the stories that you want to tell as a filmmaker?
My films usually revolve around marginalised, but very strong-willed women. I like my work to be very naturalistic and the performances to be truthful. There are jokes in the film, funny lines, but I always want these to be earned and honest. I am very interested in character driven pieces, the choices of the character always drives to the plot. I also like my films to have a sense of urgency and I think shooting on film really gives that.
I have been fortunate to shoot film on my last two films (16mm and 35mm) with help from the amazing team at Kodak. It is quite rare and a huge privilege to be able to do this in a digital age. There are a lot of technical reasons for this, aesthetically pleasing ones, but the most incredible thing is that when you call “quiet on set” the entire room can hear the film spooling through the magazine and it adds an urgency, a kind of electricity to the whole set. Nobody is on their phone or distracted – the whole set is focused in. What you end up getting is a feeling of extremely high stakes, especially in a film like Clodagh where the stakes are deliberately low (by anyone else’s standards) but for Mrs Kelly they are incredibly high, both personally and theologically.
The downside is you get no playback and, in our case, we couldn’t see a frame of film until we had finished, as we would have had to send the film back to UK from Ireland for processing by ferry, as it can’t pass through the X-rays. There just wasn’t time for that. So, at the end of the shoot, we piled the film in the car and drove it back to London from Ireland, handed it to Kodak and hoped for the best!
My journey to making this particular film was an unusual one for me, personally. It was my first film since the birth of my son and, when writing it, the film just poured out. Anyone who writes knows that these occasions – where it comes easily – are so rare. When they do happen you have to go with them, to keep that momentum but also because you are aware that there is something unseen driving you. It was only in hindsight that I realised what I hade written – a film about a woman focused on her career whose life was turned upside-down by the arrival of a child in her life and all of the joy that brings. Of course, you only notice this retrospectively, but knowing that now, it does make the film very personal for me.
What do you want audiences to get from this film?
I would like the audience to see a world they haven’t seen before. The life of the priest’s housekeeper is quite lonely, monastic even, and, as such, is rarely depicted on screen. They live a very quiet life of service, taking care of their priest, the church and, by extension, their community. It is a life which they may have chose, but more often was chosen for them, many years ago, and they rarely have families or partners of their own. At its core, ‘Clodagh’ is about those crossroads which you occasionally reach in life, where you have a choice to play it safe or embrace the unknown. I’d like people to see the film and maybe make more of those leaps of faith themselves. Sometimes they don’t pay off but when they do… they can be life enhancing, life changing even.
Do you have any dream actors you would love to work with?
Yes… Michelle Williams please! I’ve always admired her work and the honesty in it. Ireland itself has such incredible talent and I would love to work with the likes of Fiona Shaw, Michael Fassbender, Barry Ward, Brendan Gleeson, Denise Gough, Jessie Buckley and, of course, I would love to work with Bríd Ní Neachtain again, who was so wonderful in this film. I would work with her again in a heartbeat. It really was an honour to see her at work, such a professional and such a great talent. She gave so much to Mrs Kelly and brought so many things which I didn’t even know were there. She is really very special.
Any plans on what you will be working on next?
We have two scripts we are working on. The first is a feature length version of Clodagh. Bríd and Katelyn brought so much to those characters, they feel so incredibly complex and rounded and I’m keen to see where we can take them. The second is the story of a single mum in Dublin whose drug-dealing teenage son commits a murder and goes into hiding. She is forced to sell his drug stash to finance his escape from the country, so it’s very far removed from Clodagh, but central to the story is exploring how far a mother will go for her son. What makes this story really interesting for me is when the mother enlists the help of a notorious ex-con to help her and finds herself caught up in this weird relationship, balancing manipulation and seduction.
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