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1. Producer Finola Dwyer and Director John Crowley talk about how they related to the story in Brooklyn (2015).

Finola Dwyer: “I read the book and loved it, my mother went from Dublin to New Zealand in 1951 after marrying my father in Dublin, and she was probably homesick her whole life really, from once she landed there. And then I moved to London in the early 90s and every year I go home to new zealand and I very much feel that pull of home, London, where is home. So it very much spoke to me, and I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I don’t know how many of you have read the novel but it’s quite internal, she’s quite internalized, almost passive at first, and I thought how do you dramatize it? And I thought about it for some time, and then by chance really about a year later, when I thought I must check on the rights, I met Colm Toibin in New York. It was just a chance meeting, and we got on really well, and he had so many approaches that hadn’t optioned the novel, and by the end of our encounter he said the books yours.”

John Crowley: “I moved to London when I was 27 to direct plays. And, it felt to me very similar that Saoirse also felt when she left Ireland, which is this sort of degree of confusion. I’ve been going to London since I was about 10 and but when you move to a city it’s very different, and that state that a lot of people recognize as being sort of exile, where you’re not obviously from the city you’re living in, but your relationship to home has altered fundamentally, you sort of feel like there’s a doubleness to your life… you’re kind of hovering. You don’t actually feel like you’re at home anywhere anymore.”

But, for Crowley, the personal connection is less important than the universality of the story.

“I think the story is profoundly important, because it tells this sort of almost secret history, I mean there’s still an awful lot that’s not discussed about immigration and it’s a story that everybody feels like they sort of know, because a lot of people have a direct emotional connection to it in real life, but it actually hasn’t had a great deal of outings on the screen, certainly not the full story, going from Ireland to America and then back again, and even though it’s a very small story dramatically in terms of the events, for me it’s a story that’s got huge scale to it that it sort of has a reach which is far beyond the sort of scale of drama that’s in it.”

2. Crowley on his approach to the young female POV in Brooklyn.

Asked about how he approached directing Saoirse in the lead and bringing a story through the eyes of a young female to screen, John Crowley said, “I didn’t think about it in gender terms, to be honest. I didn’t try and think like a woman if that’s what you’re asking me. I found it very, very moving, and I think that’s what’s wonderful about Colm did which is why it’s also very fresh in the story, is that it’s from the point of view of a young woman, and because of that you get her negotiating her way through 50’s Ireland, 50’s America, it’s pre-60’s, it’s pre-liberation, it’s still very paternalistic, so they’re is quite a strong assumed power structure everywhere that she’s trying to negotiate her way through. And that’s really a great gift dramatically to work with because she’s bumping up against all sorts of obstacles all the time, and she quietly has to weave her way around them. So the small scenes, like when she goes back to Ireland and there’s that patronizing manager… She says “I’m going back to America,” and he says, “Well you and I will talk about that before making any firm decisions either way,” and you think, “What? You don’t have that power!” But he kind of does, because it’s a story of a young women coming into her agency or coming into her power. So it never dawned on me that it was any more female than anything else. I thought, you’re just working with actors, and it’s about story, and you try and be very specific to what’s right for that and work from the inside out. I never approach anything in terms of applying my style to it like spray-paint, anyway. It’s only ever about finding out what the heart of the story is, and then you work out from that. You figure out what the best form to express that is, literally in terms of what kind of a camera to use, how wide the shots should be, how close, how far away—that sort of thing comes from the emotion at the core of the film.”

3. Crowley on his directorial approach and how he avoids sentimentality in emotional scenes.

“The earliest, earliest memories I had, before we even started casting it and approaching crew, was I felt the only way to go for the film was for it to be flat-out emotional, never sentimental, but emotional in a way that’s not very trendy, and is risky, because of course you could fall flat on your face. And it’s easy to be ironic and a bit more detached with the material, and be cooler with something, and I knew that would destroy it, that it had to be really vividly emotional in order for somebody to get sucked into the drama. Because it’s not relying on chases and shootouts or anything that would get the pulse to race, so that was absolutely the thing that was the decision early on to respond to the material.

I don’t do vast numbers of takes. I know a lot of people shoot on set in a way which is shoot lots of stuff, a variety, and make up our mind later. And I tend to go after what you think is the truth of the scene, not exclusively, but usually with Saoirse by take six she’d really have cracked it wide open, and after that you just go, do 1 more, 2 more whatever you want, just let her [be] free with it. But you’re chasing after something, because I get very scared on the set if I genuinely don’t know what I’m looking for, and it’s rare that you go through the cutting reel and you haven’t got what you want. That’ll only happen if you didn’t have a shot, and I don’t think there was a case when we were in the cutting room where we didn’t have a take that was emotionally doing what we wanted it to do.”

In terms of avoiding sentimentality, Crowley spoke specifically of the scene in which Eilis tells Tony that the next time he tells her that he loves her, she will respond in kind. “It’s not about love—that scene’s all about fear. So you have to pitch your staff in a scene away from what they’re saying. So what’s very touching about that scene I think is that she looks terrified as she’s telling him that she will say that she loves him, if he tells her he loves her, because she’s assuming there’ll be a rejection, that it can’t quite work out, and he’s listening not quite believing the words. That’s what the scenes about. “I love you, I love you,” is boring. It’s not boring, it’s very touching [in real life], but in drama it doesn’t have any grit, or tension, and it’s been said a few times, so you have to always come at it from a different angle. And somehow that makes the experience of watching it… you want it to be OK for her. When I say emotional, the next problem is figuring out what the emotion is—it’s not obvious emotions. It’s very subtle writing, it’s a great book, great screenplay, right actor at the right time, so your job is to close the gap on everything and stay out of the way, not draw attention to yourself.

4. Crowley on the how the book was dramatized for film.

For Crowley, the most important aspects of dramatizing the film were increasing Eilis’ agency over her fate, as well as delivering her to America. “There’s two things to address, one is about the agency, which has also been dialed up a little bit. Which is in the novel the scene with Ms. Kelly is less confrontational, that scene is more about shaming, she gets scared in that scene, she doesn’t say what her name is, she sort of runs away and has to run back to America because it feels like her secrets are about to come out, and when you’re dramatizing something, which is actually genuinely about a clash or conflict of values, it felt like something needed to be fought in that scene, if there’s a point to watching it for an hour and a half, it felt that we needed to deliver her. Not a happy ending, because you couldn’t watch the scene with her mum or the scene with the young girl on the deck of the ship, and even Jim, and say it’s a happy ending because there’s such a lot of cost, but it felt like dramatically it did need to push back action-wise and land back in America.

Colm Toibin, we were talking about this at a Q&A about a week ago, and he paid Nick (Hornby, the screenwriter) the highest compliment, which is he said that as a prose writer, he felt he could never deliver her back to America because it would betray the reader, where so much of the reading is about leaving it to the reader’s imagination that you hand the rest of the story over for you to figure out what happened next. But that he felt that if he were writing a screenplay, he likes to think he would have smiled at the golden moment where he realized he could send her back to America, and back to Tony. And you deliver it back in a positive way, but it’s got a lot of emotional cost.”