Three Monkeys Online Magazine

A set of moving paintings – Making The Bridge of San Luis Rey. An interview with Director Mary McGuckian.

The film has an all star cast, including Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates, Gabriel Byrne, F.Murray Abraham and John Lynch amongst others. “It was a crazily involved project, assembling everything, a big project for a small company” McGuckian explains, and continues, laughing, “and for a small Irish Director!” Possibly best known until now for her previous film Best, a biopic of Northern Ireland’s legendary footballer George Best, McGuckian has previously worked on films with a specific or cultural connection to Ireland. Her first film Words on the Windowpane was an adaptation of a Yeats play of the same name, while her second feature This is the Sea was based in the peace process era Northern Ireland. Was it a big change then working on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, that has no apparent Irish connection? “It was a huge change. That world is not a world I’m from. It was a good place to make that departure, with a totally fictional piece – it [the novel] is its own world. Wilder created a world that doesn’t have a real or historical context, it’s a total piece of fiction. The traditional way, and I was really old fashioned in this, the traditional way to make an adaptation, is to enter the world of the material and to stay there. So the cultural reference, the entire reference of the film related back to the novel. That’s all I had. I was shooting in Spain, and post shooting in France, and working with American actors, so I was very out of my own comfort zone in terms of cultural references, style, approach and all those things, so the trick was to rely on the originating material".

McGuckian entered the film world almost by chance, “It was an accident. I was an actor/writer. I always loved writing, writing plays. I started off going to drama school, becoming an actor and working in theatre, there was no film in Ireland then. I worked solidly in theatre in Ireland for about five years in order to sustain my playwrighting. I think that Brian Friel was about the only Irish playwright who actually earned a living from playwrighting at that time. The plays were going on, and then between one thing and another, there was a fledgling Irish film industry and Jim Sheridan and Noel Pearson had seen me working, and asked me how quickly I could write a film script. I said “But I’ve never written a film script”, but they commissioned me to write one of the plays as a film script, and that’s how it started. I thought “Oh well, this is easy money” [laughs] A terrible attitude, I suppose! So I started to do it, and really put some effort in. I started watching more film then as well. I’d been quite anti-film in a kind of purist way. I’d had no ambitions to direct, I approached it more from a writing point of view, but as the picture was getting financed, Pat O’Connor and Jim Sheridan said to me, “You’re so close to this material – you should direct it”. This was my first film Words on the windowpane. I hadn’t really thought about it until then. That said, I met an old friend from college about fifteen years ago and he said that I came up to him at the age of seventeen and said “I’m going to direct films”, but [laughing] I don’t remember that! It just happened organically. You see people now who start out going to NYU and Film school, which would have been a marvellous thing to do. I had to learn on the trot. I suspect that a bit of film school wouldn’t have done me any harm. In Ireland back then most people found their way into film through writing and through the theatre. It was a sort of thing about finding your way there”.

She adapted The Bridge of San Luis Rey herself, working on a number of scripts. What were the main challenges in adapting the piece to film? “Inevitably with a piece like this. It was written by Thornton Wilder in 1927, in a very original idiom, as it was set in 18th Century Peru which would have been a Spanish speaking environment, but Wilder developed his own sort of idiom. So in the script I had to come up with a speakable idiom, a totally fictional and made up idiom. It seemed right to me that what it shouldn’t be was a version of received pronunciation/turn of the century or 1930s British accents, or British period piece speak. So we kept the American idiom, which becomes a kind of American version of Spanish spoken by people who can speak well! I wanted it to be spoken in a mid-Atlantic American, really quite a strange sort of accent, and then some of the more international characters speak in a very standard British accent. It becomes a real issue for an English language country, what the perception of status is with dialect. All of us as a group were very conscious of that, and so a lot of the preparation was on voice work. What it also meant was that it’s not very natural, so the actors didn’t have a lot of freedom with the text. To the extent we collaborated it was to get to a place where the text was comfortable before shooting. It’s a tough text, with very complex language. Of course with such established actors, they’re very sure of their process, and my job was to understand that process and make it work for the film. They were all fairly individualistic processes, and all very different. All from different countries – we had a cast of American actors, Irish actors, Spanish actors, French actors, and English actors. The culture of film performance is very different in all these different countries, I find. I had to try to get everybody to the same place, not that I wanted the film to be homogenised in any way, but just that there would be a consistent, credible performance style in the film”.

Any fears that The Bridge of San Luis Rey may be an ill conceived cash in on the renewed popularity of this Pulitzer prize winning novel by Hollywood melt away in conversation with McGuckian, whose voice is suffused with enthusiasm and respect both for the original text, and the project of bringing it on to the screen. It comes across very much as a labour of love, both on her part and that of the crew: “It was a beautiful, beautiful thing to do. In a way it’s a very nostalgic, melancholy feeling piece, and it was also a nostalgic piece of film making. We did it in a very old fashioned way. I’d a very experienced, much older crew, all either at retirement age or past it, with clutches of Oscars between them from over the last 40 to 50 years. It was almost like a great European bow to the old way of making movies. We had model makers from Italy, and amazing costume makers from France, and the best of everything. It was very beautifully done, in an old fashioned way – so there are no digital effects. It was shot in a very formal, structured style, we came up with, we tried to do that classical thing of making it a set of moving paintings, and I think we achieved that”.

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