Charlie Casanova – an independent Irish feature that’s recently been nominated for 5 IFTAs – tells the story of a man caught up in a hit-and-run incident who turns to a deck of cards to decide his fate. Terry McMahon, director-writer-producer of this new highly acclaimed feature, sits down to talk about the IFTAs, his love of film, and how Charlie Casanova nearly cost him everything.
So your new film, Charlie Casanova, do you think your experience as an actor helped you a lot on this film?
It was imperative. The reality is that you don’t have to be a psychopath to play a psychopath but if you’re going to create a psychopath you got to have the courtesy to do a bit of fucking research. There’s no other art form where you are told on the spot – make magic happen right now – and fucking action. To have the ability to generate an alchemy within the viewer that makes them forget about their reality and submerge in your reality because it’s more desirable and more compelling, that’s an extraordinary gift.
Where do you start when coming up for an idea for a film like this?
I love broken characters but I don’t need that character be emphatic and I don’t need that character to be anchored with a whole series of prerequisite characteristics that allow us to engage with them. I’m as equally compelled by a piece of shit character as I am an aspirational character.
Obviously politically at the time in Ireland and sadly it hasn’t changed, we have lying scum in power, we have weak-willed weak-minded mediocre people controlling our destiny. And we don’t question them we allow them to drag us down the fucking toilet. And I wanted to combine all of those in the manifestation of a character that is so out of control that you’re asked time and time again through the film when are you going to tell him to stop when are you going to engage, when are you going to be culpable when are you going to realize that these fuckers are killing us where we stand.
In the Variety article on the film you mention that the way you produce this film was a one off, you couldn’t do it again. Why?
Well you can’t. The journey I’d quite happily go on again because it’s a sick twisted obsession, I can’t wait to go on a set but it is back to that notion of two actors a camera and a taboo that’s all I’m interested in. But Charlie cost me two years of my life, nearly cost me my family, nearly cost me my home, cost me my job, nearly cost me my fucking sanity. And every morning you’re going to engage with a day that’s going to kick the living shit out of you for a film that no one gives a fuck about.
Is it moments like nominated at the IFTAs that make it all worth it?
No. Genuinely the one thing that will make it all worth it for me is something I will never witness, is the possibility of someone sitting alone in a room putting on that movie and feeling one tenth of what i felt when I used to watch movies alone. If they get that excited, one person, when you watch a movie and you want to turn to someone and talk about it and there’s no one there. Yet all you can do is think about. I would genuinely love to know, that if there’s only one person out there that it happens to, that would mean more to me than all the public stuff.
Because the public stuff you can’t really take on board because you end up addicted to it, you end up devastated by the negative and overinflated by the positive both of which are naive beyond measure.
Charlie Casanova is in cinemas from the 11th of May.
Words: Joseph Orr
