Screening Times: Apr 25th, 8:30pm (19th St. AMC), Apr 27th, 5:00pm (Village East), Apr 29th, 4:30pm (AMC Village VII), May 1st, 7:15pm (Village East), May 3rd, 4:45pm (Village East)



Based on Eugene O'Brien's play, Reck's lauded Irish relationship dramedy centers on the run up to the 10th wedding anniversary of working class couple Billy and Brenda (Aiden Kelly, Eileen Walsh). Bound by devotion to their pair of children long after their marriage has grown stale, they desperately cling to selfish fantasies that have more to do with their own vanity than the well being of their partner. Eden is a grown up look a whose needs and desires have grown in vastly different directions than their partners.

Filmmaker: Tell us alittle bit about your background in filmmaking.

Recks: I studied film at what is now the National Film School in Ireland. I left there in 1989, and at that time there was no Film industry to speak of in the country. The Irish Film Board had been disbanded and Irish broadcasters weren't making drama. But I was lucky enough that my graduation film Big Swinger won a number of awards and was screened as support to films in London's West End and I got a film into development in England with the producers of one of my favorite films Gregory's Girl. Unfortunately after about four years of almost getting into production the project stalled. That was pretty devastating, but I learned a lot from the experience. I formed a production company with a friend of mine from college and we managed to get some shorts of the ground and eventually produced a few Feature films. But I really wanted to concentrate on directing. So about seven years ago I started to direct series TV in Ireland and eventually packed in the company and have been pretty much directing TV drama non stop, all the while developing film projects at the same time.

Filmmaker: How the script for Eden come about?

Recks: I was in LA in late 2000 at a festival of Irish Films showing a one hour drama I directed called "making Ends Meet" (which was written by Damien O'Donnell who directed East is East). Eugene O'Brien was also there showing a short film he had written and we got talking and we were there for a week having the craic, doing all the bars in LA and over the course of the week Eugene started telling me about this play he was writing called Eden. Eugene used to be an actor so he would pretty much act out parts of the play for me and I thought it sounded great and asked him to send me the manuscript when we got home and optioned it straight away. Eugene wasn't keen to write the script himself as he had spent so much time with the play so I started working on the script. The play went on in The Abbey (Ireland's National Theatre) and was a huge success. It travelled all over. The play was essentially two monologues performed by two actors and the translation to film script was proving difficult. Eugene began to get involved in the writing of the script but at the same time he was writing a six part TV series called Pure Mule. Pure Mule went into production in late 2004 and I directed the first three episodes, which meant that Eden took a back seat for a while. But when Mule went on air in late 2005 it was a huge success and I suppose off the back of that we decided the time was right to push Eden into production. Eugene took over writing duties and we started from scratch with the script. We asked David Collins who had been one of the producers of Pure Mule to produce the film and within 2 years we were in production!

Filmmaker: How do you know when you're ready to shoot a scene? Do you prefer to work quickly or more methodically? Is rehearsal or spontaneity given preference on your set?

Recks: I don't like to rehearse during prep. I like to bring the actors in for a read-thru and have a chat with them about their character. I like to shoot on location and have the actors down for a week before the shoot so that they can hang out and get used to the place. Not just to help with accent but just to get into the pace of the place. I'm from the midlands of Ireland, as is Eugene, and the pace is very slow and I think its important that the actors acclimatize. Once I'm on set I like to work things out with the actors and Owen McPolin (DP). I will have a plan which myself and Owen will have worked on during prep, but I try to give the actors the freedom to move around the space, whatever they feel comfortable with. I don't over-rehearse on set I like to get the shoot in the first couple of takes and move on. Having done a lot o f TV drama where the schedules are ridiculously fast I tend to move fairly quickly. We shot the film in 24 days. Which is short by most peoples standards, but when you're used to shooting two fifty minute episodes of TV drama in fifteen or twenty days, having 24 days to shoot 90 minutes felt like a luxury! The one scene in Eden which I didn't have a plan for was the final scene between Billy and Breda. This was a late edition to the script. The film had always ended with Breda in the bath. Billy arrives home and goes into the kids bedroom, wakes them and breaks down and we leave the family at that point. We decided that we needed some hope of a positive outcome for the family so Eugene wrote this final scene where Billy and Breda are in the bedroom and they have a real conversation for the first time in the film , and for the first time in their marriage. We spent a good deal of time reading that scene with Eugene and Aidan and Eileen in the week before shooting. But we never put it on its feet 'cos I wanted to save that for the shoot because I knew it would be an emotional scene for both o them and I only wanted them to do that for camera. When it came to shooting the scene, we were up against it time wise and we ended up shooting one take on both actors and then I think we just picked up the end of the scene in a two shot and that's it. I think even if we could have gone for more takes we would never have matched the performance in each take and both Aidan and Eileen were so good in take one we just moved on .


Filmmaker: What, if anything, surprised you as you constructed the movie in post?

Recks: It became clear very early on that the first twenty minutes as we had shot it didn't work. The order of the scenes was wrong. None of us had seen the problem until we sat down to watch the cut, I think David had always had and inkling that we needed to re-order but we had never nailed it before the shoot. So Gareth Young (editor) and myself spent a week just throwing the opening up in the air and trying new ways to start the film. Of course this causes all sorts of problems with continuity, particularly as far as what people are wearing and in the end we had to ignore a few obvious costume changes and hope that people wouldn't notice..I'm not going to say where they are 'cops I think we get away with them. Eileen Walsh only noticed one of them on her third viewing of the film so I think we're safe! Myself and Gareth have cut a lot of drama together. Probably everything I've directed for in the last five years. Having worked in the 52 min format for so long, it took a while to get into the rhythm of a feature film. That extra half hour makes such a difference. In TV you're always working from commercial break to commercial break, making sure you hook the audience to get them back after the ads. But this was totally different, you have time with film to let the audience ease themselves into the film, you don't have to have the relentless pace you do on TV. In theory you've got a captive audience in the theatre, they can't change channel, we both learnt a lot from the experience.


Filmmaker: If you could make this picture again (or any of your movies for that matter), what would you do differently?

Recks: I think I would have cut back on the dialogue some more. When we were editing we lost a lot of dialogue and Eugene and I have talked about this a lot since finishing the film and I think it's only something that you learn from experience. When we did the TV series together dialogue is so important, you don't have the time that you do with a film to get everything across in visuals so you end up filling in a lot of story and back story with dialogue. With film you have more space and the script can afford to be sparse.

I also felt, and I felt this before shooting as well, that we could have done with a bit more humor. The characters of Tony, Feggy and Breffni always provided levity in the script. But as the script developed and we focussed our story more and more on Billy and Breda some of the Color that those peripheral characters provided was lost.

Filmmaker: What's next for you?

Recks: I'm working on another film script with Eugene. It's very different from either Pure Mule or Eden. A psychological thriller set in the midlands! It's early days with it yet but I'm looking forwards to spending time working with him on that. There's also the possibility of a mini-series later this year that I would love to do. Apart from that I'm reading lots of scripts and looking for stories that excite me!

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 4/27/2008 05:42:00 PM

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