Saoirse ronan domhnall gleeson

BORD SCANNÁN NA hÉIREANN/THE IRISH FILM BOARD,

SODEC and BFI Present
a WILDGAZE FILMS/ FINOLA DWYER PRODUCTIONS /

PARALLEL FILMS / ITEM 7 Co-Production

In Association with BAI RTE and HANWAY FILMS

SAOIRSE RONAN

DOMHNALL GLEESON

EMORY COHEN

with JIM BROADBENT

and JULIE WALTERS

DIRECTED BY JOHN CROWLEY

PRODUCED BY FINOLA DWYER &

AMANDA POSEY

SCREENPLAY BY NICK HORNBY

BASED ON THE NOVEL BY COLM TÓIBÍN

CO-PRODUCERS PIERRE EVEN

MARIE-CLAUDE POULIN

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS CHRISTINE LANGAN

BETH PATTINSON

THORSTEN SCHUMACHER

ZYGI KAMASA

HUSSAIN AMARSHI

ALAN MOLONEY

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY YVES BÉLANGER C.S.C.

PRODUCTION DESIGNER FRANÇOIS SÉGUIN

EDITOR JAKE ROBERTS

MUSIC BY MICHAEL BROOK

COSTUME DESIGNER ODILE DICKS-MIREAUX

MAKE-UP DESIGNER MORNA FERGUSON

HAIR DESIGNER lORRAINE GLYNN

MUSIC SUPERVISOR KLE SAVIDGE

SOUND DESIGNER/SUPERVISNG SOUND EDITOR GLENN FREEMANTLE

LINE PRODUCER CAROLINE LEVY

CASTING BY FIONA WEIR

Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn, one of the most acclaimed novels of the last decade, is adapted by screenwriter Nick Hornby (WILD, AN EDUCATION) and director John Crowley (BOY A). At the heart of the book’s power was a classic immigrant’s tale told in a voice that has rarely been heard. While there have been numerous stories of ambitious or desperate young men driven to seek their fortunes in America, the novel tells a different tale – one of a quiet, unassuming but luminous young woman called Eilis.

Eilis has lived her whole life in tiny Enniscorthy, Ireland – where everyone knows everyone else’s business and then some -- when she is swept away to America, thanks to her sister, who wants to see her flourish. She arrives into the diverse tumult of Brooklyn already homesick, feeling like an exile. But as Eilis dexterously learns to adapt to life as a New Yorker, she meets a funny, sweet, charismatic suitor determined to win her devotion. Just as she seems on the verge of beginning a new life, a family tragedy brings her back to Ireland where she is pulled back into the life she left behind … and a decision that could affect her future forever.

Caught between two different calls to her heart, Eilis confronts one of the most breathtakingly difficult dilemmas of our fluid modern world: figuring out how to merge where you have come from with where you dream of going.

As for Eilis’ climactic decision, Hornby observes: “I think Eilis can see a life in America and she can see a life in Ireland, but she cannot maintain those two pictures at once. She knows you cannot square these two lives. So I think that’s how she momentarily manages to love two people at once, because they are in separate worlds. But ultimately, she has to live in just one.”

Says Tóibín: “This is the secret history of two countries, of my country Ireland where over the last 150 years every family has lost one or two members, people who left and who never came back. But it’s also the secret history of the United States. These are the grandparents and great grandparents of today’s Americans. This is how they came. And this story has not often been told.”

In her review of the book, the novelist Pam Houston described it as a “classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound…there is only the sound of a young woman slowly and deliberately stepping into herself, learning to make and stand behind her choices...”

The book delivered a rare portrait of the female immigrant experience – of a powerless young woman not only learning to navigate her new country but her complicated heart, survival and how to stand up for herself. The uniqueness of that viewpoint, one nearly lost, is what initially drew Oscar® nominated producers Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey (AN EDUCATION), of London-based Wildgaze Pictures, to envision the novel on the screen. They were inspired by the idea of telling a seemingly familiar story from an unseen angle.

“BROOKLYN is not only the story of an immigrant’s journey from Ireland to America, it is also Eilis’ journey of becoming the woman she wants to be,” says Posey. “It’s a story about a woman finding her true voice and finding her ability to choose, especially during a historical time when a lot of choices were restricted.”

Adds Dwyer: “It’s also a very universal story, about the equal pull of home and wherever you end up making your adult life. You don’t have to be thousands of miles from home for that feeling to resonate. We all have places and people we have left behind.”

They were fired up to move ahead, but Dwyer and Posey knew they faced a major hurdle right out of the gate: finding a screenwriter capable of bringing Tóibín’s work to a feature film for the first time. Was there anyone who could capture the story’s drama while keeping the understated lyricism intact that has made Tóibín so beloved as a writer?

Fortunately, they felt they already knew just the person: Nick Hornby, with whom they had collaborated on the Oscar®-winning AN EDUCATION, the story of a 1960s English schoolgirl headed for Oxford but tempted by an entirely different kind of life. Hornby, a critically praised and popular novelist in his own right (High Fidelity, About A Boy, Juliet Naked, Funny Girl), had most recently adapted Cheryl Strayed’s memoir WILD.

For Hornby, the resonance of BROOKLYN lay in Tóibín’s ability to capture the human heart when it is divided in its commitments – whether to country, family or a lover. “The way Colm depicts the pain of wanting to be in two places at once, it’s a beautiful balancing act -- and it seems to lend itself particularly well to film,” says Hornby. “I think if you identify with the characters in Pride and Prejudice you’ll identify with BROOKLYN – because at its heart, there is that same timeless choice a woman must make between very different kinds of young men.”

Though naturally he hasn’t experienced the life of a mid-century immigrant, Hornby resonated personally with Eilis’ curiosity about a life that might break away from the confines of her small Irish village. “As someone who grew up in the suburbs and was counting the days until he could get somewhere else, I could identify with the essence of her journey,” he notes.

Indeed, Hornby says the adaptation came quite organically, despite many thinking that turning Tóibín’s deeply internal prose into screen dialogue would be daunting. “Because Colm’s writing is very precise and he pulls away and leaves gaps, you might think it’s a very internal book, but it didn’t feel so internal to me,” the screenwriter explains. “What happens to Eilis actually seemed ripe for dramatization. I was interested in capturing this lovely mix of tones: the comic, the romantic and the tragic. Mostly I wanted audiences to go through the wringer with Eilis, to come to love her and the people around her and to be affected by her journey.”

Hornby’s delicately contained but deeply romantic approach gratified the producers. “Nick really brought out all of the book’s many emotional layers and at the same time he brought out a lot of the humor,” says Dwyer. “Most of all, he brilliantly evoked Eilis’ voice.”

Tóibín was especially pleased with Hornby’s adaptation. He says of his reaction: “I was really amazed at the clarity of it. Nick truly understood that the central emotion of the book is love, that it’s about someone being torn between possibilities – and that if you simply followed that idea through, as he did, that you would get something very pure.”

Colm Tóibín felt a kinship right away due to Crowley’s familiarity with the emotions of leaving … and leaving Ireland in particular. “John has been through that experience of being from an Irish place, yet living under English skies, and moving between the two places, so as soon as we started to talk, it was clear this was something he understood,” the novelist says. “It was his life.”

The novelist enjoyed watching the director be inspired by his characters. “John’s very careful and very precise about what he wants. But what he put most into this film was his heart. He’s kind, intelligent and funny, and all these things are on display in this film.”

For his part, Crowley had read Tóibín’s novel long before there was a script, and been swept away by it purely as a consumer. Now, he saw it as offering the chance to evoke a time, a place and an unforgettable character who might enlarge the picture of the American immigrant experience.

“Despite having an element of familiarity about it, BROOKLYN really felt to me like a side to the story that hasn’t been told,” the director comments. “Everyone knows about the earlier waves of European immigration, but the story of someone emigrating from 1950s Ireland to America is one of the least discussed aspects of what was happening in that period. The way Colm told the story was so un-melodramatic, yet so fantastically emotional. It’s a deceptively simple book but I actually think Eilis’ choice between two countries and two men is about as dramatic as it gets.”

He also feels that the motif of leaving one world for another is as relevant now as it was in the 1950s. “This is a story about exile,” Crowley states. “When you leave a country and choose to live somewhere else, you’re no longer from that place, yet you’re certainly not from the place that you’ve chosen to live in either. So you become a member of a kind of third nation, a nation of exiles. Today, vast numbers of people in the world do not live in the country they were born in. The story of BROOKLYN as Colm wrote it, and then as Nick developed it and took it to a cinematic level with his screenplay, is completely truthful to that experience.”

To Crowley, BROOKLYN also evinces a modern conception of love. “It’s a story that says love is complicated,” he muses, “and that the heart isn’t necessarily loyal to just one person; it can perhaps, unlike a head, conceive of loving two people simultaneously. Eilis’ choice between two men is also a choice for what kind of life she wants to lead. But she has trouble reconciling the fact that she has to almost cauterize one part of herself in order to do that. It costs her a lot emotionally, yet the only way for her in life is to keep moving forward. Love in this story is a very real force that can potentially be destructive or liberating depending on which way it bounces.”

For the producers, Crowley’s vision of combining a sense of Old School romanticism with a 21^st Century candidness was exciting. “In our first meeting, John described BROOKLYN as a modern fairy tale,” recalls Posey. “He felt that there was something archetypal about Eilis trying to reconcile her two halves. But he also brought this very real, very personal understanding of what that is like.”

Crowley says he wanted to echo the stark grace of the novel and screenplay in his filmmaking -- by riding the thin line between grittiness and sentimentality, without giving way to either. “As in the book, I wanted the power of the story to quietly creep up on you,” he says. “I also wanted to bring out the humor and the scope. It’s not a story that is meant to be grandiose, but I think this story of one 1950s Irish girl contains within it the larger story of Europeans in America in the 20^th Century.”

Creating that power on screen required a very patient, hands-on directorial style. Finola Dwyer says that’s exactly what Crowley brought. “We knew this was going to be a real actors’ piece, and John is simply great with actors. He brought out astonishing performances from everyone.”

Colm Tóibín says of Eilis, “I think in the book I was trying to build a character who wasn’t self-conscious; who didn’t spend her time looking in the mirror and wasn’t pushy, yet had beneath her a depth of feeling and almost a stubbornness at times. Everywhere Eilis goes people like her. But she has no real sense of how this is caused. She doesn’t do it deliberately.”

The novelist also says of Eilis: “She is, in a way, happier in the shadows … so for me that was a more dramatic subject because even though she doesn’t naturally assert herself, by the end of the book she’s running the universe. She makes her way in the world in ways which are impressive but not loud.”

The filmmakers searched for an actress who would allow the audience into the world of a young woman coming into her own, with gentle wit and determination, as well as one who could understand Eilis’ longing for Ireland. That perfect fit was Saoirse Ronan.

Born in New York to Irish parents and raised outside Dublin, Ronan first found acclaim in Joe Wright’s ATONEMENT, garnering a Best Supporting Actress Oscar® nomination for her performance as Briony. She went on to starring roles in THE LOVELY BONES, HANNA and most recently Wes Anderson’s Oscar winning THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, all by age 20. Now entering her prime, she was ready to take on a complicated, emotionally demanding lead.

Ronan says she felt an immediate, almost uncanny, affinity for Eilis as soon as she read the script. “Nick Hornby isn’t from Ireland, yet he managed to completely capture the spirit of the country. The writing was so beautiful, and so beautifully subtle,” she comments. “It felt close to my heart because it was about my people. It was the journey that my parents went on back in the ‘80s; they moved to New York and went through all these same things, even though it was a different era. The biggest hurdle anyone goes through in life is leaving the security of your family and your friends behind for something new.”

The film is also about a girl leaving home on her own and her journey to womanhood.  Once Eilis arrives in America, the close bonds she had with her mother and sister in Ireland transfer to the owner of her new boardinghouse – the inimitable Mrs. Kehoe (played by Julie Walters) -- as well as to the other young girls living there and helping each other to adapt to a changing new country and culture. 

Ronan says she was drawn to the way the film highlights the profound ways women support each other through generations, not only in times of romance but in times of confusion, a theme rarely brought to the fore at the movies.  “Several women in my own life have helped me to become the  woman I am now through the wisdom that they've passed along to me,” Ronan observes.  “I think that's a huge part of what attracted me to this film:  the idea that the real heart of Eilis lies in her relationships with all these different women in her life.  They are really the ones who help carry her to the place she is meant to be.” 

Eilis’ dizzying feeling of being split between two worlds hit especially close to home for Ronan. She continues: “I’m very Irish in some ways but I have an American sensibility as well, as I was born in New York. I think that made the story even more emotional for me, because I have such a strong connection to both of these places, much like Eilis. Everything that Eilis goes through was exactly what I was going though at that point in my life, and I’m still going through now. So emotionally, it was extremely close to me.”

Once on the set, those emotions were close to the surface and, though she carefully cultivated them, she notes that at times they carried her away. “I’ve previously always been someone who was able to separate myself at the end of the day, leave the story behind, just go home and be myself again. But there were times on this film that it was so realistic for me, and I was so deep into the character, that it would move me to tears,” she says.

The mix of emotions that Eilis confronts – from confusion and grief to joy and devotion – was also an exciting challenge as Ronan calibrated the balance between them. “We would go from beautiful, heartbreaking, completely sad scenes to gorgeous, fun scenes to do,” Ronan notes. “Eilis is going through all these very natural things that human beings go through: grief, relationships, jobs, your relationship with your parents, independence. But I loved the subtleties of it. The challenge is that you can read so much into Eilis’s experiences and she could be played in a number of different ways. And it was also about balancing the drama of real life circumstances with the humor that people use to handle that drama, which is something that I know Irish people use an awful lot. We use humor as a way to deal with life and death. So it was about balancing all of that.”

Ronan especially loved finding all the undercurrents in Eilis’ unfolding romance with Tony Fiorello. “With Eilis and Tony, it’s literally two completely different worlds colliding,” she observes. “The Fiorellos are not only Italian but they’re so American to Eilis. They’ve grown up in New York with that feisty attitude and she comes from rural Ireland, but luckily she’s got a bit of a fight in her too. Again, both sides use humor to communicate.”

Similarly, she was intrigued by the sudden mood and perspective shift when Eilis returns to Ireland as more her own person. “She’s got this whole other life now that people in Enniscorthy aren’t aware of but as soon as she comes back, she kind of falls back into the pattern of her old life, allowing herself to be told what to do again. The difference is that she’s aware of it now, whereas she wasn’t before. And I don't know in a case like this if you ever know if you’ve made the right decision. I don’t think Eilis will ever know. But that is part of the beauty of her story.”

The heart of BROOKLYN for Ronan lies in the re-defining of home. “I love the piece of advice Eilis passes onto the young girl near the end of the film -- that when you move away, you’ll feel so homesick you’ll want to die and there’s nothing you can do about it, apart from endure it, but it won’t kill you and one day the sun will come out and you’ll realize that this is where your life is. That gorgeous piece of writing means so much to any person who has ever left their home and family. Eilis needs to go through this incredibly happy, heartbreaking, exciting, scary journey in order to make this choice about where she feels she wants to be. And for me that’s what BROOKLYN is about. Your relationship with home is something you carry with you as move to different places in your life and endure different things. The trick is carrying it without letting it weigh you down.”

Though he was aware of her talent, John Crowley was astonished by how many different charming and heartbreakingly honest facets Ronan brought to her performance. “It seems like this is the part that Saoirse has been waiting for,” he muses. “There’s an intersection between actor and role which happens, if you’re lucky, once in your career. It felt as if every word Saoirse spoke on set she could have been saying in reality. Her performance has an immediacy to it and an emotional depth that is astonishing. The role is completely hers.”

Colm Tóibín was equally impressed by the way Ronan inhabited the character. “Saoirse has an extraordinary ability to suggest a great deal emotionally while doing very little. That’s a most fascinating quality to see, not only for people watching the film but for a writer because that’s what you always try to do on the page,” he comments.

Tóibín goes on: “The camera loves her … you might not notice her in a crowd … but the minute she has to perform, something else emerges that’s catches the light. And I think Eilis has that quality too. In certain moments she really doesn’t want to be noticed, but the minute she’s needed or under pressure, light comes on her.”

Finola Dwyer notes that this is a departure role for Ronan. “We all felt very lucky to have captured Saoirse at this particular moment. She’s been an outstanding child and teenage actress, but this is really her first role as a woman, and she has created an unforgettable and distinctive portrait of coming of age unlike any other,” says the producer.

Ronan says she was able to go to such deep, raw places in part because of Crowley’s support. “John was so tuned in to everything that’s going on within one scene – emotionally he knows exactly how to map out where you should be. The script is beautifully simple in a way but John saw the complexities. He digs up all these secrets, in a way, that you’re let in on as you go along. And that’s what is so fantastic about working with John.”

In the end, Ronan hopes Eilis will resonate for her quiet strength. “I hope that people look at Eilis as someone who becomes strong enough to choose the life she wants and feel proud of it,” she concludes.

While casting Eilis was vital, it was equally important that her two suitors – one American, the other unexpectedly found when she returns to Ireland – be as alluring and true-to-life. To play the boyish plumber Tony Fiorello, who woos Eilis with bravado and tenacity despite her uncertainty, the filmmakers chose rising star Emory Cohen. Known for his roles on NBC’s “Smash” and Derek Cianfrance’s THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, this is his first major romantic lead.

Cohen, who is a New York native, was drawn to the character as both a timeless symbol of youthful passion but also as a very real Italian immigrant who believes in the 1950s ideal that the measure of man is doing the best by the woman he loves. “Ultimately, I think this is a story that makes you think about a lot of things in life then and now,” he says. “What does it mean to love whole heartedly? What does it mean to be a good man? What does it mean to enjoy the simple things in life?”

He also says it made him think about the notion of love at first sight. “When Tony sees Eilis, he’s hit by a lightning bolt. I read this line in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather that said when you get hit by a lightning bolt you can’t even go to sleep because you can’t get the girl out of your mind. So I thought about it like that. Tony sees love in that kind of way.”

Cohen’s portrait of Tony was inspired by a number of cultural references, from the naturalistic Italian performances in THE BICYCLE THIEF to Marlon Brando’s working class character in ON THE WATERFRONT. He even took swing-dancing lessons so that he would feel confident in the life-altering moment when Tony first asks Eilis for a spin.

Crowley says that on top of Cohen’s probing approach, that actor brought an unaffected instinct for charm. “From Emory’s first reading, it was immediately apparent he was our guy,” says the director. “He not only had the charisma and masculinity but also the vulnerability and authenticity.”

There was also an immediate, palpable link between Cohen and Ronan, which was able to play out beyond words, in fleeting gestures and expressions. “Both Emory and Saoirse were so into their characters that the chemistry always flew,” Crowley observes.

The magnetic contrast between Eilis and Tony appealed to Cohen. “There’s this very interesting kind of reversal where my character is open, adventurous and passionate but underneath all that there’s fear -- fear of losing Eilis. And I think in some ways she’s almost the opposite of Tony, where on the surface she can seem more rigid and cautious than Tony but underneath that, there’s a real spirit of freedom and knowing exactly what she wants to be… and it was kind of perfect because Saoirse is like the Queen of Ireland and I’m like this New York junkyard dog,” he laughs.

The key to building their romance in a deliciously slow way was in knowing when to hold back. “Me, John and Saoirse were always figuring out how to not go too far, to keep some of the emotions in reserve, not letting it fully rip right away,” he points out.

Dwyer saw in their performances the rawness of love in its earliest, most thrilling stages. “Watching them, I always really believed they loved being with each other. There’s a lot of humor between them and you sense not just physical chemistry but a meeting of the minds,” she says.

Tóibín had a similar reaction to the pairing. “I thought ‘Oh wow, look at this guy. I know exactly how he’s going to win her, just by being so funny, so good, so innocent, and so sweet.’ She keeps looking at him for signs of darkness and there aren’t any, so I thought he was great.”

If Tony Fiorello is sweetly seductive, his more provincial but gentlemanly Irish counterpart, Jim Farrell, had to be both an opposite attraction and a legitimate threat. That led to the choice of Domhnall Gleeson, who has been coming to the fore as one of the most versatile actors of a new generation with roles in ABOUT TIME, CALVARY, UNBROKEN, EX MACHINA and the much anticipated STAR WARS: EPISODE VII – THE FORCE AWAKENS.

Gleeson knew he, too, had to find a subtle but visceral chemistry with Saoirse Ronan, to put the question mark in the audience’s mind. “Life in Brooklyn may offer Eilis more, but it was my job to make Jim seem worth staying in Ireland for,“ he says. “I really wanted to create a connection with Saoirse that you would feel is worth fighting for.”

Like his castmates, Gleeson related to Eilis’ experience in his own way. “I think everybody’s known a sense of displacement at one time or another, of not having a clear home,” he says. “I’ve certainly been familiar with that at various times in my life -- and I thought it was captured brilliantly in this story. Then there’s a lot of romance and fun to the story, which is very appealing.”

Crowley says that Gleeson’s take on the character brought out the bittersweetness of the story. “There’s a consummate intelligence to Domhnall,” says Crowley. “He thinks very deeply about all his roles and he brings an intensity and maturity to Jim that bounces beautifully off of Emory as Tony. It was so important that Jim and Tony occupy vastly different spaces, that they be totally opposite versions of men that Eilis could see herself with – and Emory and Domhnall brought completely different but equally compelling feelings that underline her choice.”