John Carney felt very comfortable with the people around
and involved with the film. He explains. “They 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!’
Once is the inspirational tale of two kindred spirits who find each other on the bustling streets of Dublin. One is a street musician who lacks the confidence to perform his own songs. The other is a young mother trying to find her way in a strange new town. As their lives intertwine, they discover each other’s talents and push one another to realize what each had only dreamt about before. Once is their inspiring story. Written and directed by John Carney (On the Edge Bachelors Walk), Once is a nod to the classic musicals of the past, while it is also grounded in the bohemian world of struggling young Dubliners that he knew from his days as a young musician.
In the early 1990’s, before devoting himself to a film career, Carney was a musician playing bass guitar with Dublin band The Frames. He understands and appreciates the power of a song, and how it can carry more weight than swathes of dialogue. In fact, conversations about this project started in 2005 at a Frames’ concert. “As a filmmaker with a background in music, I wanted to try and make something that relied less on your conventional 90 page script, something that was a little bit more organic, and something that included a lot of songs. That was the original starting-point,” he explains.
As he developed the concept that would become Once, he sought “something that would express itself in ten pages of dialogue or script. A two-and-a-halfthree- minute piece of music, I always feel, can be as powerful as a day’s conversation with, for example, a young lady. You can talk and talk and talk…”
However, Carney did not want Once to be a classic song-and-dance musical where scenes ended with the key characters breaking into verse. As he recalls, the fleshing-out of the characters became a part of his early morning routine. “It originated with just me sitting outside, having my breakfast, coffee and cigarette every morning, playing songs and thinking for months and months, how could I make a little film that has all these songs in it,” he explains. “I came up with the idea of a story of a busker mainly because I wanted to keep the characters in a musical world. I didn’t want them just singing, I wanted them to be musicians and singers. So it was more natural that they would sometimes say to each other, ‘Look, I’ve just written you a song and I want you to hear it.’ It would be natural for them to sing. So I came up with the idea of a busker and a pianist, who then ended up being an immigrant.” The music in the film would not work if it wasn’t incorporated in to who they were.
The story is set in Carney’s native Dublin, with Frames’ singer Glen Hansard as a songwriting guitarist, and Marketa Irglova – a musician from the Czech Republic who has collaborated with Hansard - as an immigrant pianist.