Altitude
Following a brief cinema release before they closed their doors late last month, crime drama Calm With Horses arrives on the digital formats from today. The film is a striking debut feature from filmmaker Nick Rowland and is truly one of the best movies of the year so far.
Last week, we caught up with the director to talk about the movie, bringing it to the screen, what it was like to see the film disappear from auditoriums as they closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and looking ahead to its new life, hopefully in front of a larger, brand new audience on the digital format.
Congratulations on the film. I really loved it. It’s quite a unique feature – how would you describe it? I think of it as a western but it’s very much a crime film. It’s very brutal from the outset but there’s much more to it than that isn’t there?
Yeah, we always kind of… a lot of westerns were kind of an influence I would class it as a crime drama with a kind of western style, I guess. Although it’s like rural Ireland. A lot of our references were sort of American indies and urban films actually, trying to almost treat it like an urban story taking place in farm areas. Yeah, we looked at the town as like a frontier town in the West and we wanted to give the stories of a heightened ordinary, and not feeling too much like social realism. I think some people have described it as a social realist film which I just don’t understand myself because it’s definitely not.
We wanted it to be authentic and we wanted the performances to feel really natural but the world is you know – we’re not creating an accurate depiction of Ireland so much. The collection of short stories that the film is based on – the writer Colin Barrett comes from [County] Mayo, a town called Castlebar, which is, I guess, what inspired the setting for Calm With Horses? Once we got the option, I sort of flew out there and spent a bit of time there just to try and get a sense of the place. And when I read the short story, it felt very dangerous and very isolated and had that Western sort of feel to it. But then I arrived in Castlebar and everyone was friendly. And you know, you drive through the countryside, there’d be lots of hedgerows and postmen waving at you, and happy farmers everywhere. It all felt very – it didn’t feel very dangerous – it felt very welcoming. So we tried to create a version of the west of Ireland, which was much more extreme, you know, so we shot the film in Connemara, where there are big mountain ranges, but also a lot of the land is sort of bogland. So it’s not really usable for farmers or anything. So you have this sense that there hasn’t been much. When you get to the landscape shots, you don’t see the footprint of civilisation in many places. Yeah, there’s not the hedgerows or, or pathways, and things like that – it seems quite empty and dangerous.
Altitude
So, about the writing process, obviously, it starts with that novella, Young Skins, which comprises of six stories. Out of those, why this specific one? And how was it crafted because obviously, you’re working with [screenwriter] Joe Murtagh, who you’ve worked with quite a lot before, and the author was involved in the process as well. How did it all come together?
I was in my final year of film school and I was writing my short film graduation piece. And I was struggling a little bit with it, and my writing wasn’t very good. So, I was just trying to read as many short stories as I could, at the time, sort of absorbing and consuming as many stories as possible, and I came across Young Skins. It just so happened that it was getting released that week when I was reading a load of short storybooks. And it really just sort of stuck out to me because a lot of what I found in short story collections were amazing, but there weren’t many collections that were focused on young people. This collection was about a tough world and I kind of connected with it. I grew up in a small fishing town in Scotland, partly, where my mum lives. So, I kind of identify with that a little bit, although I wasn’t from Ireland. Calm With Horses had the bones of a thriller. It was quite violent; it was a page-turner. It also had a lot of black humour and the characters felt very rich and very organic and alive, and I enjoyed the eccentricity to them. So even though they were quite bad people, I was kind of fascinated by them.
I was really interested in this kind of contrast in Arm’s professional life where he is sort of amoral and very violent and sort of unquestioning, but then he has so much heart when he is around his son. So I thought that was kind of interesting, really.
So Dan Emerson, who produced the film, he was an assistant at Working Title while I was at film school, and I sent it to him and said, ‘I wonder if you could option this?’ ‘Maybe we could try and turn it into a film?’ So he went and tried to try to go about doing that. Richard Madden and Michael Smiley are in my graduation film, and when I was trying to get in contact with them, I was talking with their agent or agents and I was telling them about my graduation film, and would they be interested? During that meeting, they asked me what I wanted to do once I graduated, and I said, I’m in the middle of trying to option Calm With Horses. [There was a] moment of serendipity, as it turns out that the agent I was talking to was also trying to option the same story for Michael Fassbender, and it turns out that we were actually bidding against each other without realising it.
So then they invited me and Dan to join [production company] DMC and [do] it together. So that’s how we got the option.
Altutude
You’ve got quite the cast. I was lucky enough to interview Cosmo Jarvis recently. He’s amazing. I mean, he is just a chameleon. He can pretty much do anything. So how did he become on board and obviously Barry Keown as well because he is also essential to the story?
So we kind of wrote the part for Barry, so he was the first piece of the puzzle. We were hoping to get him on board and we were very lucky to get him because, as you know, everything he touches seems to turn to gold. It was kind of interesting that he was interested in playing [the role] because it was quite different from a lot of the other characters he was doing at that time. When it came to casting Arm it was a traditional casting process. Shaheen Baig, our casting director – she’s you know, very famous and well regarded among the indie space. She cast Peaky Blinders and all sorts of things.
I had known of Cosmo since about 2009 because, very randomly, he was childhood best friends with my housemate at university. So I actually knew him as a musician. I used to watch all these music videos on YouTube and hear stories about my friend’s best mate from back home. I was very surprised to see him crop up in Lady Macbeth as I had no idea that he was an actor or a filmmaker or anything. I just knew him as this musician. I remember asking, or wondering if we could see Cosmo because he hadn’t done a lead role at this point. I guess he was a bit of a wild card, but it was one of those cliche moments that you sometimes hear filmmakers talk about when you know the moment an actor walks in the room, you just know. You found the right person kind of thing, and we all really got that feeling with Cosmo. He just really understood the spine of the character and is a very difficult character to pull off in a movie because he’s so… on the page, he’s very unsympathetic, and it’d be very easy for an audience to not root for him or to not stay with the character, but he brings so much humanity. His performance is very sensitive and [he] makes sure you’re empathising with him all the way, and [he also] brings some kind of damage vulnerability to the character, which is really important – rather than playing the character as too much of an alpha male or too much of a gangster. I’m not sure you would really stick with him through the whole movie. So what he does is pretty special and I’m really looking forward to seeing what people think.
We also have Niamh Algar. Her star is rising so rapidly and she’s taking over the world, or she kind of already has taken over the world. She’s worked with Ridley Scott, Shane Meadows… basically all of my heroes. You know, she’s, she’s just, you know, so hard-working, and she brings such a real sort of integrity to the role but also, what was really clever, is she brought a lot of history to the performance. So whenever you see them on screen together, you kind of see echoes of what their life used to be like together. It was really smart.
Altitude
Yeah, I agree. I think we’re very much ahead of the game with both of those two. Going back to Cosmo… I was speaking to this other director who compared him to Brando, you know? I mean, I’ve heard that he stays in character on set. Was that true for this film as well?
Yeah, he’s I’ve never worked with an actor that has done as much prep and hard work before. Before a shoot, you know, he [had] a big responsibility. You know, he’s in a very Irish film. He’s the only non-Irish actor playing an Irish character in the film. And he had a very specific West Ireland accent which even a lot of Irish actors wouldn’t be able to do. There’s a long history of bad Irish accents in cinema, and Cosmo was terrified of adding to that cannon. That was a lot of pressure on his shoulders, but he just completely nailed it. None of the crew realised he was English until we wrapped, which was a fun party trick for the wrap party when he went back to being Cosmo.
Altitude
So let’s talk about the journey of the film to the screen. I believe it premiered in Toronto, and then it’s other festivals and then finally arrived in cinemas, and then all of a sudden, the cinemas close. So what’s that journey been like? It’s a very unique time at the moment and the film’s release has been brought forward onto digital. What does that mean for the film? And what are your thoughts?
So we premiered in Toronto and we had a really great reception. You know, we played a few festivals, London and South Korea, at Busan and we finished off in Dublin a week before we released, so we’re getting really good word of mouth and we got good reviews. We got certified fresh yesterday, which is very exciting. The critics seem to really like the film and it was all shaping up for a nice release. We were on 110 screens, so a fairly wide release for an indie movie and it was looking like the stars were aligning, and we were going to get good traction. And then, I think two days into release, all the cinemas closed down. So that was a huge anticlimax, and it’s very heartbreaking.
We spent almost six years by this point working on the film. As you know, it’s quite hard to get a film off the ground as a young filmmaker. You never know when the next opportunity is going to come around and your work to get a cinema release. I have no idea what the landscape is going to be after this crisis but it was pretty heartbreaking but you have to put things into perspective you know, at least the film exists. If this pandemic had hit a year before then maybe we never would have even finished the film. A lot of my peers and other filmmakers who have had projects fall apart or cancel halfway through or have been delayed. I’m just thankful that we were able to finish the film and do the festival circuit, and all that kind of stuff. But ultimately, we just hope the film finds an audience. It’d be such a shame for people to not see what Cosmo does in this film, for example. I think his performance was really extraordinary.
Yeah, I agree. I think [the pandemic] will change the industry a little bit. I think we’re obviously all changing where we work, but I think a lot more people might have the opportunity to see [this] film now. Not necessarily on the right format because I think it deserves to be seen on the big screen, but, you know, we’ve all got to adapt…
Yes, you can’t change the situation, you can only adapt and look at the positives and you know, people have a lot more time to watch films at the moment and people are maybe taking a risk on the unknown a little bit more. If you’ve only got time to watch one movie a week, you probably can stick to what you know, that maybe people are willing to try out smaller films or more obscure films. People are maybe more hungry to discover new talents like Cosmo and Niamh. I think there’s a lot of positives to be taken from it and a lot of stuff to be thankful for. So we’re releasing on all the VOD platforms this week, and I’m just excited for people to see it. We put our hearts and souls into it so hopefully, people will find it.
In your short films, you’ve jumped genres all over the place. You’ve done a film on karting and there’s a horror film in there. You’ve had the BAFTA nomination for a Slap and then Calm With Horse, a crime-western. So are you keen not to stay the same genre? Or is it whatever takes your fancy?
I’m always thinking about how can I learn and I’ve always just thought that if I keep trying to tell different stories every time then I’m going to learn more about myself and I’m going to learn more about filmmaking each time rather than trying to refine the same type of story over and over again. My heroes are people like Danny Boyle and Ridley Scott who seem to be able to hop into any style or genre, and that’s the kind of career I’d love to have in my, in my dream. Not that I’m comparing myself to them but you know, I’d hate to get pigeonholed and I know it’s very easy to get pigeonholed. I like to think that the throughlines with all of my work is that there’s an emotional heart.
Where do we go next?
So I’m, I’m writing a film at the moment. It is going to be about rally driving. I used to be a rally driver before I was a filmmaker. There have been lots of motorsport films before but rally driving hadn’t really been explored that much in cinema before. Because I came from that world I thought maybe there’s an opportunity to set a story in that world. So that’s what I’m doing next, and yeah, again, whatever else comes my way.
Calm With Horses is available on digital download now.
