Film Interview: One Hundred Mornings
Sunday, 24 January 2010 00:26
One Hundred MorningsI recently spoke with Irish filmmaker Conor Horgan about his feature debut, One Hundred Mornings, a brutal examination of the deterioration of two couples’ lives in the wake of some mysterious yet complete breakdown of all society. As supplies run low, hard choices are made all in the name of survival. The film is set to make its US debut at the 2010 Slamdance Film Festival.
Vegas Outsider: To provide a bit of background, how did this project come together in terms of both concept and getting all the elements in place, i.e., money, cast, crew, to finally commit it to film?
Conor Horgan: Well the Irish Film Board along with some partners ran a particular program in 2007 called the Catalyst program, which was basically a way to get a whole bunch of Irish filmmakers together; people who had not yet made a feature film but had made a number of shorts, documentaries, whatever. It started off as a range of symposiums where they brought over some interesting filmmakers from all over like the US. The American producer Christine Vachon came over and other people like that. So there were basically 160 of us in a room together for what was an offer for three of us, in a competitive way, to put in projects and make a low-budget film. 48 projects were put in, 3 were short-listed and then picked, and we were lucky that ours was one of them.
That meant then that between May 2007 and the end of August 2007, I wrote like a maniac. The idea had been floating around in my mind’s eye for a while. In some ways, doing something where a lot of what the story and world within it is about the absence of things obviously suited a low-budget film. We were working very much with what the characters didn’t have and what they must have needed. Having said that, finding locations for the film proved to be very difficult because you think “we’ll be very clever, it’s all set in one location” but then when you sit down and actually break it down, that location needs to be incredibly hard working. It can’t be near any street lights because of the film’s world, it couldn’t be near any major roads, or even any signs of livestock; so we really took a long time finding a place but when we finally did, it was well worth it.
VO: Given the story’s background, i.e. societal collapse, the film has an understated look in terms of communicating this rather than going all out apocalyptic. Was it a conscious decision to not play up the doom & gloom ala The Road and if so why?
CH: Absolutely, 100%, actually a fellow filmmaker told me after he read the script something I really appreciated. He said “this is the kind of film that people lean forward towards”. It asks you to lean forwards towards it when watching, you’re not sitting back and having everything served up to you and made digestible. But in that sense of leaning forward, of engaging with the film and really seeing what everything means, it is rewarding and that absolutely is the style of it. I would have made the film the same even if we had five times the budget we had or more, because those are the kinds of movies I like.
VO: The beginning is certainly misleading as you first look upon this seemingly idyllic scene with these couples, thinking that perhaps this is some vacation, and all too soon you realize it isn’t much more than a prison to them.
CH: Yes, definitely. Again the exposition of it was something I put a lot of work into. I did a very hectic write of the first draft, which was enough to get us the budget to make the film, but I continued writing it all the way up to the start of the shoot, where we were rewriting on the set. And then we chopped and changed it a little bit in the edit as well, in terms of just how we were going to set up this particular world in a way that would engage people so they would be thinking about what was going on without confusing them.
VO: Much of what makes the film work is the constant tension amongst the characters as they try to cope with this complete breakdown, a lot of it without dialogue. How did you and the actors work on calibrating the performances as they’re quite nuanced and the entire film rests upon them?
CH: Where that originated from was my desire, in writing the script, to make it as visual as possible and one of my self-confessed tasks was to have as little dialogue as possible. So I really pared it all the way down because again these are like the films I very much enjoy myself, where so much story is carried visually and by the interactions of the non-verbal communication as well as the undercurrents between people. The fact that we were on this location, which was located up in the mountains outside of Dublin, was quite remote and isolated along with a really small cast and crew meant that being there really felt like being in the film in lots of ways. It felt like we were cut off and that this thing could actually be happening around us; the actors and myself bonded very strongly, we were all living on site or just up the road from it and so there wasn’t such a huge sense of turning off at the end of the day so I think that certainly helped the performances. We did a week’s worth of rehearsals before hand and that proved very useful; it was a way for them to see what my intention was and how we might best achieve it. It also gave us a chance to get to know each other. I can’t praise the cast enough, because a lot of them had done quite a number of movies before and I was asking them to do things and restrain themselves in a way that might not have been the usual way they worked; but they absolutely committed to that. Without that level of commitment and bravery, the film wouldn’t have worked and I’m very grateful to them for how much they engaged with it and what it needed to work.
VO: Thinking back on it now, what I love about the film is that the human drama is first and foremost and that the societal breakdown mirrors the breakdown in these peoples’ relationships and lives. Yet it’s still optimistic in that as things constantly get worse those who are left still look forward. Would you agree with that assessment?
CH: Yeah I think so absolutely, that was a very important part of the thrust of the story; especially a particular key relationship, which I won’t spoil for people who haven’t seen it yet, would deepen and strengthen over the course of the film. But I think when you’re watching it, especially in the middle; it shouldn’t be obvious that that will happen. Again, it’s my hope that the shift there will further engage people watching it. And I think there’s honesty in the performances and in terms of what I was trying to do with the writing where people were behaving the way real people do rather than being archetypal protagonists. So that left me in the middle of the film of not knowing which way it was going to go but when it does go the way it does, again I don’t want to give anything too explicit away, it was important for me to have it end up as it did. But even there it’s a rather open ending and that is very much a part of the film’s style as well. A lot of conflict in the film is between a slightly, unrealistic optimism and a slightly, over pessimistic realism so it’s left up to you to decide which one of those wins out.
