PRESENTATION SPEECH
H.E. Mr. Boudewijn J. van Eenennaam
Ambassador of the Netherlands to the U.N
It is a great honor for me to give you this award. I have to find a quote that you have said, that you have made this movie together with your team and that they are to be thanked for that. You said that, “They [the team] got the whole idea of this not being your conventional film. So once my mates were making this film with me then I was, like, brilliant.” End of quote. My father told me that those who say they are brilliant are probably not, because if they would have been brilliant they would not have said that they were brilliant. But I have to take issue here with my father, because I think you made a brilliant movie. I think someone who is able to make a Hoover vacuum cleaner have that role in a movie is quite brilliant in itself. The fact that the two main characters in your movie have no names makes us feel that they are you and me. (I’m not sure whether that’s what you meant but that’s what I took out of it). Also brilliant is the way in which you have been able to integrate music in the movie-- the two go so very well together. I really thought it was a fascinating movie and I think you are brilliant, John. I would like to hand you this award.
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
John Carney
It is hard to follow that, that was very nice. There are so many good speeches, so many talented musicians, I feel quite stupid and inarticulate. I’m just trying to think of what I can say now. Because Robert said, in his lovely French accent, in our phone conversations, “Would you write a song?” I did actually write a song for this event but there is no way on earth I would follow those guys. I have it; it’s here in my pocket. I went to Denmark Street in Soho (any musician will know Denmark Street in Soho). [Audience: You have to play!] No, I don’t have to play, but I will give it to you. You can clap all you like, it’s not going to happen. If it were on my own and you hadn’t sung just before me, I would’ve tried to do a sort of Tom Waits impression and try to get away with the fact that I cannot sing. So, I went down to Denmark Street in a sad attempt to convince myself that I might actually sing tonight. I don’t actually have a guitar, so I went down to one of the lovely music shops that my brother used to work in. When I was a kid I used to come over and visit him down on Denmark Street. We only had one music shop in the 80’s--McCullough Piggots-- which was a pretty old school, old style music shop. To go to Denmark Street in London was to go to a haven of Gibsons and Fenders and Flying V Guitars, and I would go down there to play guitar. I went today, took a Gibson down, and took out these lyrics and started singing…and I just can’t do it. But I will tell you what I thought would be an interesting idea: to use the song that I wrote for this, in this little film that I am doing next, and we could put a little credit in it and say that this was actually written for tonight but I was too chickenshit to actually sing it. So we will do that, if you are into that.
This really is incredibly nice, particularly for this film. 2007 has been really good for once; it has been an amazing year for that film. But weirdly, this is the little clincher at the end that makes a lot of sense because the film was made very much, I think, in the spirit of award. My father and I were talking about the huge influx of immigrants into Ireland and into Dublin at the moment and the amount of stories that are coming from that. And rather than making a horror film or a film about Russian gangsters we thought we would just make something nice. Something we could leave in the world and something that connects these two characters, not through dialogue, not through sex, because that never works, or sometimes it works in films. (That’s not a great thing to say here is it really?). But you know what I mean? My girlfriend rang me from London when I was thinking about this film and she said, “You should make a film about having a relationship.” You meet a girl and you see here in a café. She’s gorgeous and you realize there is a connection between you and instead of trying to pursue her, you actually have a relationship with her that you can tell your partner about. You can be proud of this amazing woman you hung out with and wrote songs with for a week; that relationship is a lot more interesting than the kind of conventional sex scene in act one or towards the end of act one. This was much more a film about musical connection and artistic connection and how artists speak. Really this award is very meaningful to me, and to Glen and Marketa, and to everyone that made the film. I would like to thank you, Robert and Marion, for this whole experience. Thank you everybody. I am really touched by this. I will sing you the song when we have a few drinks later or something.