(Julia Wakeham and director/actor Liam O Mochain in WC, above.)When I first visited Irish filmmaker Liam O Mochain ten years ago on the set of his debut feature, The Book That Wrote Itself, one of the first things I noticed was that he had managed to pull together production elements that would have been difficult for a film with ten times the budget. On the first day, he had managed to get the City of Dublin to give him a double-decker bus, complete with driver, to shoot on throughout the city. I, and a few dozen other tourists, had just paid the equivalent of $20 each for a tour on a similar bus, just the day before. Later in the production, he visited the Venice Film Festival with a small crew, attended a press conference, and asked a variety of celebrity luminaries questions, in character as Vincent, the lead. The big names included George Clooney, Melanie Griffith, and director Bryan Singer. And now O Mochain had those people in his film, playing themselves, although they didn't know if for awhile. Mind you, this was at least a half-decade before Sasha Baron Cohen started using similar techniques to get marketable, and equally unsuspecting, public figures into his films and television shows by combining a non-fiction style set-up with a fictional character. Something that also occurred to me at the time was that O Mochain was so resourceful and determined to succeed that he would probably already be running a small country while wearing a general's uniform, had he been born into a different set of circumstances and had picked up a gun instead of a camera at a young age.
The Book That Wrote Itself, a charming travelogue-style comedy, which starred O Mochain and the luminously beautiful Antoinette Guiney, went on to screen at some 30 different international film festivals, was released worldwide on DVD, as well as theatrically in a number of cities. O Mochain's second feature is entitled WC, and while he's working with a somewhat larger budget now, and a lot more experience with a number of shorts and producing projects under his belt, he still had to scramble to get the most bang for his buck. But because this is O Mochain, for the price of a studio feature's coffee budget, we've got high-end locations, from a prison to a rollicking night club complete with jazz band, along with aerial shots of Dublin. No celebrity cameos this time, but he does have a bang-up cast of Irish and UK actors.
W.C. centers around one night in the life of O Mochain's character, Jack, who has just gotten out of prison for a robbing his own father's night club. He reluctantly takes a job working as a washroom attendant at that same night club, where he agrees to stay until he pays off his debts to his family. Also working in the washrooms is Russian émigré Katya (Julia Wakeham of “The Tudors"), who has just recently escaped a Dublin-based sex slavery ring. Both are stuck working in the washrooms and form an unlikely friendship.
In addition to O Mochain and Wakeham, WC also stars Adam Goodwin of My Boy Jack, Julie Hale of Ash Wednesday and My Left Foot, Mary Murray of The Magdalene Sisters, Karl Shields of Batman Begins and Eden, and Rory Mullen of Hunger.
WC had its premiere at last year's Dublin International Film Festival, and then had its International Premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival. The film also screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the Galway Film Fleadh, the Zimbabwe International Film Festival, the Portobello Film Festival in London. It won Best Foreign Film at the Las Vegas Film Festival, and screened in Competition at the Cairo International Film Festival. It was also the closing film at the recent Arizona International Film Festival in April 09. It won "Best Feature Film" at the Waterford Film Festival.
The Hollywood Interview: Did anything in particular inspire the story of WC?
Liam O Mochain: I was working on another movie which didn't happen. I spent three-four years working with, or I thought I was working with, the Irish Film Board. I was working on the project, and they were working on the project not happening. That took 3-4 years. And when eventually, after 6, 7, or 8 times of me back and forth with them, and realizing it wasn't going to happen, because they kept saying this would happen and that would happen….I realized finally that they had no intention of doing it. I was just being strung along. I had wasted years on it, and I needed to make another film. I had done The Book That Wrote Itself previously, and at that point, it was 6 years since I had shot a feature. If you only have one film done in a certain number of years, you know, you sort of need another one to keep yourself current, and also, to just do something.
There was a news show on in Ireland about people working in low-wage jobs, and I thought that this was very, very interesting. It hadn't really been tackled that much in movies in Ireland, or the UK. I also didn't have a lot of money, and I needed to think of somewhere, or somehow, I could make a film that wouldn't cost that much money. And when you're making a film, if you're traveling a lot or you're moving locations a lot, that can cost you a lot of time and money. The film Phone Booth, with Colin Farrell, had just come out, and that was set in one location, with the general public around it. So, that was sort of an inspiration. Then I went and did research and found that no one had ever done a film set in toilets! [laughs]
While writing the film, did you visit many public toilets purely as research?
[laughs] I did spend a good while going into different toilets across Dublin, getting very strange looks when I was trying to find a place to set it, and possibly also to shoot it.
Was it taking pictures that motivated the strange looks?
Yeah, I went and took pictures in 70-80 toilets. I would just show up at a bar, or a night club, and I say, “May I see your toilet?” [laughs] They would just look at me, and think, “This guy is crazy!” So, I'd have to get the manager and explain what I was really doing, and while you're explaining, there are always like 10-15 people listening. Once they hear that it's a film, they're more interested. But that experience wasn't as strange as it was assembling the opening credit sequence, in which I took photos all around the world of different types of toilets, sinks, wash basins, and stall doors. I'd be taking a photo of a stall door and then somebody would come out of it [laughs], and I'd have to pretend that I wasn't taking a photo, but I was, and it looked even more suspect because I had a camera in my hand.
(O Mochain's Jack lays down the law with some rambunctious patrons in the women's toilet.)
How long did it take to find the right toilet to shoot the film in?
We had to look at many places, because there was something that was very specific for me in terms of location: I wanted to have the guys' toilet door and the girls' toilet door pretty much right next to each other, so that you could have the guys' toilet attendant and the girls' toilet attendant come out and talk to each other easily. And also, you could have people congregating in the hallway where the toilets were, before they went in and out, so we could do scenes there. I didn't want one toilet on one level, and another on a different level, I wanted to keep it all together, so it would be very intense and keep the drama central.
Production-wise, you also have to find toilets that are big enough to get all of your lighting equipment, the cameras, and your actors inside, with room to work.
Yeah, that can be tough. We sometimes had 20 crew people in the toilets while we were working, just sitting in the different cubicles. 4-5 people per stall, sitting on top of each other, trying not to make any noise. And they're not big toilets [laughs]. You find ways of doing it, but it's worth it because you do get a different vibe shooting at an actual location, then you would if you chose to build the toilets yourself on a set. I didn't have the budget to make that choice anyway, but it worked out.
You shot at a night club, which was functioning at night but basically closed during the day.
Right, we found a place which wouldn't open until 11 at night. We'd sometimes be in there shooting at 7 in the morning, sometimes right until 10 at night.
It must have kept you on a tight schedule, because you couldn't go too long on a shooting day as the club had to open.
And things would be moved in the toilet each night, so we'd sometimes have major continuity problems trying to figure out where a particular bar of soap was left, or if somebody had smudged the mirrors during the night, we'd have to find out how it looked the previous day. The fact that the film is set during one day….the toilets all have to look the same, all the time. The one-day setting was good in that it saves you time and you don't have to move, but you have other headaches at the same time.
Rough things happen in night club toilets at night too. I'm having images of showing up to the set in the morning and there being puke on one of the toilets.
That didn't happen, but you might find glass on the ground, things like that. The first day of shooting, the two kids who were playing the lead characters as children, they came in to just have a look around, and one of them slipped on a piece of glass. That was just a half-hour before we did our first shot. You know, well, if this is how it starts, then this is how it starts [laughs].
(Julia Wakeham, after a rough night in the WC, above.)
You have a cast filled with various well-known actors from the Irish acting community. You knew that you were filling one of the lead roles. How did you go about getting the rest of these actors?
I'd say about half of them I picked from people who I had seen in other things, and whose work I found interesting. Julie Hale was in Ash Wednesday and My Left Foot, and I had also seen her in a lot of TV stuff. And Mary Murray was in The Magdalene Sisters. For the main characters, I had written one part for myself. In The Book That Wrote Itself, I had played this character who was completely manic and just wouldn't stop and kept talking all the time [laughs], and so I wanted to do something this time where I barely talked and was more laid back, so I wrote the character that way. For the Russian character of Katya, I auditioned loads of people from all across Europe, and then this girl (Julia Wakeham) who came in from South Africa….I had lots of girls come in previously and say that they could do the Russian accent, and I thought, “Oh, here we go again…” but she was fantastic. She nailed the accent. But to get back to your question, half the people I cast were from auditions and half the people were people whose work I knew previously.
Ten years ago, when you shot The Book That Wrote Itself, you were one of the few Irish filmmakers really doing guerilla-style work at a feature length. Has that changed in the decade since the advent of digital, and are there more Irish filmmakers doing real low-budget, indie filmmaking?
Yeah, and actually, last year, we screened at the Galway Film Fleadh, and they had set up a section called The Wild Card, which were basically films by filmmakers who weren't being funded by traditional institutions such as the Film Board. And there actually more films last year, and this year, in that particular section, than there were films that were funded through the government. And now, it looks like the Irish government isn't going to be funding Irish films from here on in. Partially because of the economy, this is one of the areas that the government can cut back on. And so, I think you're going to see a lot more filmmakers having to go out there and do it themselves, which I suppose, in essence, means that people will have to start thinking more on their feet. Necessity sometimes equals creativity, you know?
I remember when I came to the set of The Book That Wrote Itself, I was blown away by the fact that you had managed to get the City of Dublin to donate a double-decker bus to be shot on for the day, complete with driver. Stuff like that would be hard for a low-budget filmmaker to pull off in the States. People just aren't that receptive to helping in that manner, particularly in a city like Los Angeles where the studios pay top dollar for services such as vehicle rental. Do you find that type of willingness to help filmmakers is common in Ireland?
Yes, and you might recall that I also got use of a train on Book [laughs]. On WC, I got to shoot on the new tram system, which was just built. And not only did they give me sponsorship, they also gave me funding as well. We also managed to get helicopter aerial shots of Dublin into the movie for free. You know, I think if you just want something really badly and you ring up and make a case for it, and if they have it available, and it's not going to cost them anything, and you're willing to give them something in return such as PR…..they are willing often. Sometimes, other people are just afraid to ask, I think. If you don't ask, you don't get.
The film partially focuses on the sex slave trade in Dublin. Is that something which has been a problem in Ireland for a while, or is it more recent?
I actually based a lot of my writing on cases I had researched in the UK. It was during post-production and during the festival tour, that more stories have started to come to light in Ireland. It was only a week ago that there was girl from Romania who was found in an apartment in Dublin, and she had been promised the job of a cleaner. And of course, the job never existed, similar to one of the main characters in WC. She had been here for awhile and had been a prostitute.
Did you find that people in Ireland reacted to that plotline in the film in the manner of “That could never happen here,” or was there more pre-awareness of the problem?
It's strange. Some of the press wrote great stuff about [those plot elements] in Ireland. Others said, “That just doesn't happen. That type of story is in the past.” Some of them were actually quite insulted by it. So, you either get a good reaction or you get a bad reaction. And both are quite good reactions to get, if you know what I mean, because the story is making people think.
How did you handle the challenges of both starring in the film and directing it, all on a low-budget?
I rehearsed like a play and shot it like a documentary. With a play, you usually get around three weeks of rehearsal and with most films, you don't really get rehearsal. So, I put aside three weeks of rehearsal so I could become very familiar with both the material and the other actors, so we could work out a sort of short-hand. And I also had around five weeks of preproduction running concurrently with the crew. The more prepared you are, the easier it is. Not that it's ever easy.
How had your directorial mindset changed during the time between Book and WC?
Well, my crew was a lot better on WC [laughs]. Most of the crew on my first one were right out of college. Some knew that they didn't know that much, and others thought they knew more than they did [laughs]. It wasn't fun to really navigate between that. Thankfully, I had come right from directing and producing a lot of TV shows, and lots of theater and radio, so I was used to just sort of picking up the camera and doing it. It was sort of a baptism of fire though. Whereas, on this one, I decided that I needed people who had a lot more experience and better credits, and work where I actually could see what they had done, you know? I knew what they were going to bring to it in terms of creativity and style. So, in that sense, it was a big change. But still, not having money…I still had to spend a few months in post-production to try and get the sound right and the picture right…whereas if you had a bit more money, when you were actually shooting it you could take more time and maybe have better equipment.
Let's talk about the distribution schedule for the film. You're doing a simultaneous VOD (Video-on-Demand) and theatrical release in the U.S.
We're releasing theatrically on Nov. 13th in the States, in a limited release in cinemas. We're starting in Tucson, Arizona and then moving on to Minneapolis, and from there, we'll be going to other cities across the States. At the same time, pretty much, we're going out on VOD via Cinetic's Film Buff channel. As far as I know, they're in 30-40 million homes already and will be in more by the time we go on their VOD channel in late October-early November. The DVD will come out after that. That will possibly be in January. It will also be available for downloads on Itunes and Hulu and other spots.
It really is a completely different world from when you traveled around the world with a 16 mm print of Book.
It is. I went to a lot of festivals with Book. We didn't have a major distributor, and we went through three different sales companies and distributors. We learned a lot. A lot of what not to do the next time. I had quite a few sales companies interested in WC, but they were all quite small, and I decided that I didn't want to have the same experience of trying to get the movie back from people after 3-4 years and they had done very little with it, or they made money and you hadn't seen anything from it. In the last year, of course, things have completely changed. Many of the major independent distributors are gone - New Line to Warner Independent - and there are very few people out there left to buy movies. So, you have to go down a different route. Lots of movies aren't even going to theatrical - they're going right to VOD. Then, DVD is being squeezed of course and TV isn't paying as much as it used to be. So, everything has completely changed. A lot of people are seeing VOD as the way to go. I suppose we will see in time.
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(O Mochain's Jack, above, deals with the end results of a night's festivities.)
What are you working on next?
A couple of months ago I finished the “Making Of” documentary on WC, called “Lifting the Lid.” [laughs] That will go out worldwide in a few months. I'm also producing a lot of radio still, and I have two short films I've been working on which will come out next year, then I'm going to make another short, and I've also been given a little bit of funding to make a feature film in Gaelic, the national language of Ireland.
WC will be released theatrically in the US in cinemas beginning on November 13th. It will be available on VOD (Video-On-Demand) in North America from the end of October for two months, and on DVD in the UK beginning on Monday October 26th. The VOD release is being handled by Film Buff, the new independent film channel just launched by Cinetic. New York-based M&L Banks are the distributor for North America. Cinetic are handling the worldwide digital rights for the film.
More information on WC can be found at:
http://www.wcthemovie.com/
www.myspace.com/wcthemovie
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