The Ghosts of Conor McPherson’s Past

The playwright talks about his breakthrough supernatural love story at the Tribeca Film Festival.

To echo the question that John Patrick Shanley asked during the Q & A that followed the premiere, where did the fascination with ghosts start for you?

Ever since I was a kid, it was my favorite thing. Of course, when you’re a kid, you get very scared by it too, because during the day time when you’re reading those stories or looking at those movies, it’s a great thrill. At night, you’re like, oh fuck. I’m really scared now. As a kid, movies that would fascinate me were George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and “Dawn of the Dead” — they’re just amazing, and in a sense, they’re such down and dirty films. They’re very real. You don’t know any of the actors in them. They have a weird documentary feel and that got under my skin, so that’s where I feel comfortable.

For me, that’s what life is about, ultimately — trying to understand (we never will, of course) the mystery of existence. Where do we come from? Where did the universe come from? That’s the context human beings live in. We’re aware that we’re alive and aware that we will die and we don’t know why. When I’m working on stories, it always has to have that feeling for me to make sense, because I feel that’s what life is ultimately.

Many people in audience expressed how moved they were personally. Did you feel this had the capacity to be so personally affecting as you were working on it?

As I get older and mature, even though my work can go to quite dark places, ultimately I do want to get it to a place of affirmation because we’re here on earth and we’ve got to make a go of life. It felt right that the emotional heart of the film could resolve itself in a credible way, which was positive, and move forward. It was overwhelming that I was hit by this very emotional response from the audience after [the premiere], and so many people have been coming up to me since, wanting to talk about it and their own experiences and their lives, which is surprising. I never thought of it like that. I was just trying to do the film, make the story, but it seems to have taken a step into a place that you can’t predict.

And my last question is a silly one, but a very serious one for your American fans — why hasn’t your last film, the Michael Caine comedy “The Actors,” never been released in the U.S., even on DVD?

That film was probably not the way of working that I was most comfortable with. I was quite young and I had an opportunity to make that film as opposed to it being my idea. It was like there’s this project, we’re going to develop it through DreamWorks. Okay, “develop a project,” that’s a whole different thing for me. Then DreamWorks wasn’t sure what it was and what to do with it, then Miramax picked it up and developed it and cast it, so finally we made it.

I really enjoyed doing it, but I wasn’t playing to my strengths at all. I’m not sure that that film sits comfortably in any particular place. It’s probably quite enjoyable if you just leave your brain at the door, but as a playwright, there’s often a certain weight of heavy intellectual expectation. I came out with a film that was sort of lightweight, and people were like “this guy, what’s he doing? He’s wasting his time with this stuff.”

“The Eclipse” is very confident about avoiding genre, whereas “The Actors” was slightly a misfire because it was going for a genre — it was the screwball comedy audience, let’s get them. They released it in Ireland and Britain and essentially the reviews were so bad — “this is the worst film of the year” kind of reviews. I didn’t think it was quite that bad, but because I was already at that time a successful and known playwright, it was very much a smack, and the response was so shocking the [studio] thought “oh, we can’t release this in America.”

“The Eclipse” comes from that place, because I decided I’m never going to make a film unless I absolutely know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. Coming off “The Actors,” it was very hard to get financed for a movie because of what happened. But it’s good, because it taught me that I had to knuckle down and be serious about what I wanted to do. I’m really pleased with “The Eclipse,” and I stand over it in a way where if somebody says to me, “What do you think of ‘The Actors’?” I’m very confused.

“The Eclipse” is currently without distribution.

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