The director Mark O’Connor is consistently drawn to stories about people on the margins of society: whether Travellers (King of the Travellers) or inner-city hoodlums (Cardboard Gangsters). For his first feature, in 2011, Between the Canals, he wanted to cast unknown kids and teenagers from north inner city Dublin, so he put a note requesting actors in a shop window in Summerhill.
“Barry Keoghan saw that note and rang me. He was ringing me for about two or three years as I was developing the film and writing the script.” O’Connor can recall the first time he met Keoghan at the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar. “He was a kid. He was asking me about films and he hadn’t seen many. I told him about Marlon Brando, French new wave and Italian neorealism and then he’d email me, ‘I watched that film, it was deadly, man. Give me more films to watch.’ It started out as a friendship: an older brother type of mentorship.”
What did the director see in Keoghan? “I thought he had an interesting face. I thought he was very naturalistic. He could take direction very well. He was good at listening. He’d take it on board and he was easy to work with.” At the age of 16 Keoghan had a small role in Between the Canals and then acted in King of the Travellers (2012). O’Connor then cast him that same year as a lead in Stalker, a psychological thriller again about homelessness.
In preparation for the shoot Keoghan and his co-star Connors wandered around Dublin in character. At one point during the making of the film Connors jumped on to the plinth during a protest against homelessness and delivered a speech in character while Keoghan applauded from the sidelines. The writer Stuart Carolan cast Keoghan in Love/Hate after seeing him at the premiere of Stalker in Galway. The rest is history. “It’s phenomenal,” O’Connor says of Keoghan’s success. “He keeps getting bigger.”
O’Connor premiered both King of the Travellers and Stalker at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2012. Joining him at the event was a squad of actors who frequently populated his movies, including Peter Coonan, Connors and a teenage Keoghan. At the festival Connors read out a manifesto that O’Connor had written about a new wave of independent Irish cinema.
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The manifesto was prophetic in ways O’Connor could never have imagined. The director had envisaged a new era for young directors, but instead it was his actors who would break the glass ceiling: in particular Keoghan, who received nominations for an Academy Award in 2023
for The Banshees of Inisherin and for a Golden Globe this year for Saltburn. Keoghan was not a one-off: O’Connor’s actors kept becoming successful. Coonan would act in Peaky Blinders and Connors also became a hit in Love/Hate. Alisha Weir, who O’Connor cast in his TV series Darklands (2019) for Virgin Media, went on to star in the Hollywood movies Matilda: The Musical and Abigail. O’Connor’s
career, however, largely remained in Ireland.
Now the director is bringing another feature, his fifth, to the Galway Fleadh. Amongst the Wolves tells the story of a homeless war veteran (Luke McQuillan) who befriends a young man (Daniel Fee)
while sleeping rough. The older figure has a troubled past and Fee’s character is in debt to a crime gang fronted by Aidan Gillen. It’s a harrowing thriller made in O’Connor’s inimitable DIY fashion.
“I don’t want to be an outsider, but for some reason that’s the way it’s turned out,” he says. “We had to make Amongst the Wolves outside the system. Sometimes if you don’t get funding and if you believe in a film you have to go ahead and do it. I didn’t even submit this [to funding bodies]. I thought there’s no way we were going to get funding because of how dark it is. We just went ahead and did it ourselves.”
O’Connor’s casting antenna is still finely tuned: McQuillan, who co-wrote the story, and Fee are both superb. “Luke and I were interested in telling a story about homelessness through the eyes of someone with mental health issues. It’s about a veteran returning home and struggling with PTSD. He’s not a drug addict, but he has issues that impact on his family life.”
As the director’s own career progressed, doors closed to him in regard to conventional funding routes. “Maybe it is the tones and narratives in my films,” he muses. “People might be a little bit wary because they’re dark and sometimes violent.” But it could also be due to a shortage of contemporary working-class films that are made in Ireland. Recent research from Equity, the performance arts and entertainment trade union in the UK, revealed that only 8 per cent of creative people in British TV and film are from working-class backgrounds. Ireland is probably similar. “They talk about equality but there are not many working-class actors in the industry. Acting schools cost money, so it’s harder for working-class people to get their breaks. Accents are at play too [in casting decisions]. I just go for the gut instinct of what I think works for me.”
In the absence of state funding O’Connor finances his work in novel ways. Stalker was the first Irish feature to be crowdfunded. Cardboard Gangsters was privately financed and became the highest-grossing Irish film of 2017, earning over €500,000 at the Irish box office before being sold to Netflix. Just as O’Connor’s actors went on to mainstream success, so the marginal corners of Ireland that interested him have been repurposed in big-budget shows like Kin.
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The director, however, has found a DIY aesthetic that works. He cast his young son Manco in a role in Amongst the Wolves, for example. “I’m used to doing funny videos with Manco and it’s quite easy to direct him and get a performance out of him because we’re so in tune. It also meant that I didn’t need
to worry about where he is or mind him.” O’Connor regularly posts a blog about film-making to his YouTube channel and he uploaded the whole of Stalker there for people to watch. He runs a Patreon subscription service for fans and he’s planning on financing his next project, a comedy called Oui Cannes, through crypto crowd investment. Other projects in development include a TV series about the Dubliners folk band and a film set in Peru, where his wife is from.
“I feel like I’ve been more productive than ever in the last couple of years. I’m planning to make one or two features a year from now on,” he says. “What really hurts me is the fact I didn’t make as many features as I could have. I haven’t done enough. I spent so much time waiting for finance and then getting turned down and feeling like, ‘Oh, it’s not good enough,’ and then dumping that script and trying to develop something else. I would love to be supported more as a film-maker because it would help me to make better and bigger films. But I’m going to continue making them regardless.”
Amongst the Wolves is screened on Jul 11 at 10pm, galwayfilmfleadh.com
