{"id":18450,"date":"2012-03-24T14:21:24","date_gmt":"2012-03-24T21:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=18450"},"modified":"2012-03-30T08:34:59","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T15:34:59","slug":"irish-film-week-2012-interview-with-gerard-hurley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=18450","title":{"rendered":"Irish Film Week 2012: Interview with Gerard Hurley"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his film The Pier<\/em>, Gerard Hurley takes a poetic yet unsentimental look at the relationship between a father and son, reuniting in Ireland after many years of silence and separation. Hurley plays the role of the son Jack McCarthy, and this talented jack-of-all-trades wrote the screenplay, directed and produced the film. The Pier<\/em> will be shown in a festive screening at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 as the opening film of Irish Film Week, with Hurley in attendance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Gerard Hurley<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In anticipation of Hurley\u2019s arrival in Israel, Midnight East had the opportunity to talk with the filmmaker.<\/p>\n

Ayelet Dekel:<\/strong> The Pier has the feel of a personal story, I was wondering if there is a relationship between your own experiences and those depicted in the film?<\/p>\n

Gerard Hurley:<\/strong> It\u2019s personal story but it\u2019s not autobiographical. It\u2019s personal in the sense that I wanted to honor the part of Ireland that I come from. I really don\u2019t like the way Ireland is portrayed in movies a lot of the time and I felt that I wanted to be true to the people and tradition that I come from, so in that sense it is very personal.<\/p>\n

The specifics of the story, touching on subject matters of immigration and the difficulty with the males communicating, I felt that that\u2019s a situation that\u2019s not intrinsic just to Ireland, that\u2019s a universal problem. For males, problems of communicating with one another, especially when it\u2019s emotionally loaded\u2026it\u2019s very easy for males to be angry or to be funny, but to deal with subjects a bit more complex emotionally, it\u2019s very difficult.<\/p>\n

AD:<\/strong> What are the kinds of things you don\u2019t like about portrayals of Ireland in film?<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> I find that I don\u2019t like stereotypes in anything. I think that human beings are very complicated, and we\u2019re all very capable of breaking the mold of generalizations. I wanted to get into an honesty in portraying the people that I know, and where I come from without falling into any clich\u00e9s that normally surround how Irish people are presented in movies. I think that a lot of times with Irish movies they can either be portrayed as terrorists or drunks you know kind of always the IRA as a backdrop, or the drunken thing, or simple minded people but kind of crafty. There\u2019s a lot more to us as a people and it actually gets a lot more diversified as you go into more regions of Ireland. The Irish don\u2019t fit into one mold – we all don\u2019t get drunk and start shooting at one another or shooting at everything that\u2019s British.<\/p>\n

AD:<\/strong> The Pier<\/em> is your second feature, was it a very different experience for you compared to The Pride<\/em> (2008)?<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> The first film I made was about the Irish traveler culture in America, and the Irish traveler or gypsy culture has been going on in America for about 200 years. The story was about domestic abuse from a male perspective. Again for me it was very personal, I wanted to get into exploring that subject matter because growing up I knew a number of people that came from dysfunctional homes.<\/p>\n

The movie was a fly on the wall, very realistic very gritty kind of tale, whereas this story [The Pier] is very romantic, in the sense that it\u2019s a mixture of the landscape and the people. The pier is a third character [in the film] and the pride was all about the characters and the surrounding didn\u2019t really matter as much because they were a very isolated community so cinematically I wanted to do it very differently this time because the tone was so different from the first one.<\/p>\n

AD:<\/strong> In both films, you were the writer, director, producer and actor. Could you talk about your work process, it\u2019s fairly unusual.<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> What happened was\u2026 I\u2019ve worked at a lot of different things in my lifetime: construction, bar business, I\u2019ve worked as a clown, I\u2019ve done everything and travelled all over the place.\u00a0 I started writing screenplays about twenty years ago – I worked on movie sets and I loved film. So for years I\u2019ve been writing scripts and a number of my screenplays have been optioned and then they fell through, and I just got fed up with it. So\u00a0 about six years ago I said: I\u2019m gonna go out and I\u2019m just going to make a low budget movie myself on credit cards, you know – 50,000 budget or less. I wrote the screenplay [The Pride] for an actor that I knew and he didn\u2019t want to do it because the character was a wife beater and he felt uncomfortable with it. I knew what I wanted from the character, so I decided to play the character myself.<\/p>\n

I try for an emotional intensity and I like getting into the real nitty gritty of stuff, and then when you write a character, and then actually bring the character to life, and the real bonus is that you get to interact with your fellow actors and that I love\u2026 that whole process I absolutely adore it! So you know what happened was, after I finished the first film, it went around and it was well received so I thought: next time I may want to do this again.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Karl Johnson and Gerard Hurley in The Pier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AD:<\/strong> So it starts with the writing\u2026<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> Oh yeah\u2026I love\u2026 I\u2019ve an over-active imagination and I\u2019m always thinking about stories.<\/p>\n

AD:<\/strong> Is that the main thing that you seek to convey in the film, the story?<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> The story is a secondary consideration for me since the characters are more important. In Hollywood movies anyway, there\u2019s a tendency\u2026 it\u2019s always about the story, the events. And I\u2019m more intrigued by character than I am by story. If I\u2019m observing someone on the street or on a bus or the subway or whatever my mind starts breaking down the person, I look at what they\u2019re wearing and start thinking about that person.\u00a0 I get very engrossed in personalities and I start wondering where they\u2019re coming from and where they\u2019re going to\u2026I have this tendency to look at minutiae and then worry about the grand scale afterwards.<\/p>\n

But when I work I\u2019m very disciplined, with the scope of the projects I do \u2013 my first film had a budget of 50,000, the second was 100,000 \u2013 I have to plan meticulously. Everything is very precise because I don\u2019t have any time for error. I can\u2019t waste people\u2019s time.<\/p>\n

AD:<\/strong> Where did the idea for the Pier originate?<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> [Avoiding spoilers \u2013 Hurley mentions a particular scene in the film] What happens to me, I\u2019ll start thinking\u2026 I\u2019ll get sometimes, it\u2019s very emotional. I\u2019ll think about something\u2026and thought of that scene first, without any story.<\/p>\n

I just thought the idea of someone spending a lifetime in denial, to me that\u2019s tragic – the amount of people who go through life and they\u2019re not emotionally honest with themselves. I started thinking a lot how sad it is for\u00a0 someone to go through their life completely repressed, feeling like they have to fit into either a mold put on them by society or by themselves and not being able to express their true emotions about things, I think that\u2019s absolutely tragic. So I started thinking first about that scene and then I had to figure out how do I get to that scene and how do I get away from that scene and started thinking about the characters\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Lili Taylor and Gerard Hurley in The Pier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AD:<\/strong> You have a wonderful international cast, how did you select the actors?<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> Lili [Lili Taylor – Grace Ross] I\u2019ve known for years, about 12 years.\u00a0 We\u2019ve always wanted to work together. I\u2019ve written her into past screenplays but they never came through. I wrote this screenplay and then I wasn\u2019t sure who could play the father. A friend in London told me about Karl [Karl Johnson – Larry McCarthy]\u2026I went to see him in a play in Belfast and we met afterwards. After half an hour talking to him I just knew that he was perfect for the role. The rest are local, except June Driscoll [Mary Foskett]. She was in my first movie and I like working with the same people and I like June [actress Mary Foskett] and we work well together. I was lucky it\u2019s a small community down there in South West Cork, but there are a lot of really very talented people.<\/p>\n

What does filmmaker Gerard Hurley have to say about the essence of this father-son film?<\/p>\n

GH:<\/strong> I think that the core of the story is that it\u2019s all about love at the end of the day and it\u2019s all about women at the end of the day.<\/p>\n

The Pier<\/em> will be shown at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on Tuesday, March 27th at 21:00; Haifa Cinematheque March 29th; Jerusalem Cinematheque March 31st, Sderot Cinematheque April 5th at 21:00 and Rosh Pina Cinematheque April 5th at 19:30.<\/p>\n

For the full list of films & screening times, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cinematheques:
\nTel Aviv Cinematheque, 2 Sprintzak Street, Tel Aviv. 03-6060800
\nJerusalem Cinematheque, 11 Hebron Road, Jerusalem, 02-5654356
\nHaifa Cinematheque, 142 Sderot HaNasi Street, Haifa, 04-8104299\/302
\nSderot Cinematheque, 4 Hadegel Street, Sderot, 08 \u2013 6849695
\nRosh Pina, 04-6801453<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his film The Pier, Gerard Hurley takes a poetic yet unsentimental look at the relationship between a father and son, reuniting in Ireland after many years of silence and separation. Hurley plays the role of the son Jack McCarthy, and this talented jack-of-all-trades wrote the screenplay, directed and produced the film. The Pier will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}