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DEEP DARK DISCO
Ciaran Carty CHIEF ARTS CRITIC
AS Elaine Cassidy remembers it, she was having a working breakfast in New York to discuss how best to promote the film version of William Trevor's Felicia's Journey.
"Because it was a hard film to market, they didn't want to give away too much," says Cassidy."
Bob Hoskins, who plays a seemingly innocuous canteen caterer who's actually a serial killer, was there with his PR assistant. So were director Atom Egoyan and producer Bruce Davie. "They said, 'Elaine, what are you going to say attracted you to the role?'" Cassidy, starring in her first movie, gives a derisive giggle. "I was like, is this a joke? Why did I take it? Because I got offered it, that's why. I wasn't being offered anything and I got offered this. D'you think I'm going to turn it down?" Her unaffected directness made headlines "a 19-year-old Irish sprite", enthused the Toronto Sun when Felicia's Journey was premièred at Cannes Film Festival two years ago. Now Cork is getting a charge of the same exuberance. She's here, briefly, to open Cork Film Festival with Disco Pigs, Kirsten Sheridan's electrifying film adaptation of Enda Walsh's hit play about Runt and Pig, a couple of teenagers who have been emotionally inseparable since birth, locked into their own gibberish world, refusing to grow up.
"It's like a relationship of Siamese twins," says Cassidy, who plays Runt to Cillian Murphy's Pig. "We feel love like no one else has ever felt it. It's so intense it touches every part of our bodies. Because it's so pure. And that's why it has to end.
It's so unfair. I was breaking up. I couldn't help my own feelings coming through.
Why does it have to be like that. Why can't it just be perfect forever?" Whatever about Runt, there seems to be no stopping Cassidy. The next morning she's flying out to Canada to start filming Tim Southam's The Bay of Love and Sorrows. And she plays a mute Irish maid opposite Nicole Kidman and Christopher Eccleston in Alejandro Amenabar's psycho thriller The Others, which opens nationwide on 19 October (having already grossed over $90 million in the US). "I hate to be idle," she says. "I'd so much free time on my hands between scenes on The Others in Spain that I went out and bought a 1,000piece jigsaw to keep busy." Born in Raheny she moved to Kilcoole, Co Wicklow when she was three she's the youngest of three sisters.
"I got to do everything a lot younger than them. I learned from their mistakes. I think by the time our parents got to me, they were exhausted. So I could do as I pleased", she says. When she was at secondary school, she had to journey to Bray to be with her friends. "I've never just been living where everyone else has lived. I've always been a sort of outsider in that sense. Perhaps it's made me more independent. It doesn't bother me doing things by myself. I enjoy my company more than a lot of my friends would enjoy being by themselves. I suppose it probably helps with film because if I'm travelling a lot, much of it is by myself and I don't mind that. It's just what I'm used to." She's always wanted to act. "It's all I've ever wanted to do since I knew what the word meant", she says. She made her debut, aged five, in a school production of Pinocchio. "I remember talking to friends in third class. Oh yeah, they told me, we're going to drama class now. So I told my mother. She thought it would be good for my confidence if I went too.
"We weren't poor, but things were tight raising three girls. Yet my mother was always behind us when we wanted to do something. She'd done dancing herself. She was supposed to go to London and dance in the Royal Variety Show, but it never happened. When we were growing up, we were her life. She didn't have another life.
She put everything into us. She paid money for grinds and things like that. Even when times were hard." Cassidy got her first acting job on a small film when she was 13. She appeared in her first feature, Geraldine Creed's The Sun, The Moon and The Stars, when she was 15.
When Atom Egoyan came to Ireland three years ago to cast Felicia's Journey, she was one of hundreds to audition for the title role as an inexperienced teenage girl who goes to England to look for the boyfriend who got her pregnant.
After four auditions the choice was between her and another girl. "Atom showed the tapes to William Trevor. 'This is the girl, ' Trevor said. And it was the other girl. 'That's her ', he said. But Atom was afraid of Felicia turning into a victim and decided to take a chance with me. Because I'm really the opposite to Felicia.
"I couldn't understand that someone could have so much respect for their father the way Felicia had. Her father told her she couldn't see her boyfriend again. If it had been me, I'd have said, 'excuse me, you're telling me that I can't see him? There's no way you're going to tell me what to do'." She adds: "but as I got used to Felicia, I realised she had an old-fashioned respect. You did what your parents said, even if you didn't like it.
Atom's such an intelligent guy. He keeps probing until he personalises the role for each person. There were things I didn't even realise at the time not in a bad way that he got me to do. He's so amazing." Having started at the top, Elaine is determined not to drop her standards even if it means not working. "Felicia's Journey kind of gave me good taste," she says. "It's like not knowing about food and being taken to a great restaurant instead of a fast food joint. It has raised my expectations. If that sounds up myself, I can't help it."
She was cast in The Others without an audition. "Alejandro had seen me in Felicia's Journey," she says. "That was enough for him. When I first saw the script I didn't have a clue what he was going to do with it. The Sixth Sense had just come out. I thought, oh yeah, here come the imitations.
But after reading it, I watched Alejandro's first film, Open Your Eyes, and thought, Omigod, I have to work with this guy." Elaine plays an Irish maid who turns up with housekeeper Fionnula Flanagan and handyman Eric Sykes looking for work at a remote mansion on the island of Jersey where Nicole Kidman lives alone with her two small children, hoping for the return of her husband, Christopher Eccleston, who is missing in action in World War II.
"It's not a big part, but I knew I wouldn't be cut out because all the scenes I'm in are turning point scenes." Elaine and Murphy who created the role of Pig in the original Enda Walsh play were the first couple to audition for Disco Pigs. "But then they went around the country interviewing others.
"It wasn't definite that we'd got the roles until a month before we started filming. We were doing a lot of stuff for them to get on film for the financiers. We wouldn't hear anything for a month and then we'd meet up and talk about it and do a few scenes.
And then we wouldn't hear anything for another month. Maybe that worked to our advantage, getting more familiar with the characters and with each other." To get her accent right to play Runt, she got a job in a Cork bistro for two months.
"So I don't know how that worked out. I used to walk down the road, talking to myself in a Cork accent."
Disco Pigs is so alive it looks as if the performances are totally intuitive. "The funny thing is that there was no improvisation," she says. "Everything we needed was in the script. Pig would say one word and Runt would take it up and they'd go into a role play. It was just playing off each other. It felt like improvisation. But the writing was so amazing, if we'd improvised we couldn't have done it justice.
"It was so immediate to us, when we finished filming we didn't want to let the characters go. The first day, I was crying. I went into a crying convulsion for about 20 minutes. I was in the house by myself. What am I doing, I thought. This is madness. I was amazed with myself. It was like breaking-up with someone. I just wanted it to go on and on."
'Disco Pigs' opened nationwide on Friday
© Tribune.ie
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