NEIL JORDAN and COLIN FARRELL on ONDINE

MAKINGOF: What freedoms come with working outside of the studio system?

(Neil Jordan): Oh, um, well the great freedom that comes is that no one tells you what to do. And the great, kind of, terror of that is that you’re entirely responsible for everything you do yourself. When you work with a studio, you can always blame someone else and say, “well, they made me do that!” or “they made me reshoot the ending,” and in a way that’s why so many films, I think it’s to be so, kind of mundane in a way, because that’s…once you’re forced to take responsibility for every decision you make, you have to make decisions. But this was lovely, this was a film that a studio would not have made, really, you know, it was so small.

MO: When did you decide to work together on this project? And how did that come about?

(Colin Farrell): We’d looked at working together for about six or seven years, there was a treatment, a script, that Neil had written about the Borjia family in Italy and that never came to fruition. But he’s making it as a TV show. Then a couple of years ago, when he handed me the script and said, “I’m thinking of doing this, let me know what you feel about it.” And I read it and I loved it, I just loved it. I really did, I thought it was just tasty, tasty stuff.

MO: And how did you prepare for your role, how did you two work together to create that character?

(CF): I really, really, more than a lot of experiences I’ve had, there’s so much on the page, that I was kind of feckoned with detail and with life that, um, I took that and ran with it. I went down for two weeks, before we started shooting, and we rehearsed a little bit, just to familiarize ourselves with the scenes and it was great to get to know Alicja (Bachleda) through that and particularly to work with Alison (Barry) as well. She’d never worked on a film before, so it was nice for us to have that little rehearsal space just to play. And that was it, really. The story just kind of took care of itself. It was very, very…there was a lot of good direction in the script, even.

MO: How important was filming on location?

(NJ): This was basically, didn’t have a huge budget, so we put ourselves in a position, in a place where we can let the landscape tell the tale itself, you know. It’s a fairy tale that arises out of a series of coincidences, a series of events that are interpreted by the characters in a mythical or a fairy tale manner. And so, it was essentially that I didn’t let…the camera doesn’t tell any lies really. So, even when we’re on the boat that we, uh, we don’t even use the big…we don’t let the machinery of filmmaking get in the way. So for me, that was the whole key to it.