Background

OFFICIAL SELECTION SXSW 2011

Feature Narrative Competition

CHARLIE CASANOVA

YOU DON’T KNOW HIM…BUT HE ALREADY HATES YOU

Frustrated by three green-lit projects collapsing during finance stage, writer-Director Terry McMahon had the words,
“ The Art is in the Completion. Begin.” tattooed onto his body then typed into his Facebook status:

Intend shooting no budget feature, ‘Charlie Casanova’ a provocatively dark satire, in the first couple of weeks of January.
Need cast, equipment, locations, and a lot of balls. Any takers? Script at terrymcmahon.org.
This is sincere so bullshitters f**k off in advance. Thank you.

“I hesitated, stared at the screen, pressed send, and had no idea what was going to happen next. No idea if such a naive endeavor so full of ambition, full of impossibility, or full of shit was doomed to still birth failure before it began. I had seen people make ten-minute short films that cost a hundred grand and here was I blindly believing a bunch of strangers solicited on a social network site could make a feature film for free. Would people, with full justification, snigger at another muppet wanting to make another pointless movie? Another egoist wannabe with no idea of the reality of what it takes? Would they think this, and would they be right? It took less than a minute for someone to respond. Within twenty-four hours a hundred and thirty people made contact. Camera department, designers, production managers,
assistant directors, continuity people, gaffers, actors... I got back to everyone insisting they had to read the script before going any further so they’d know what they were getting into. The script was a bit of a bastard you see, and, as we all know, bastards aren’t welcome in the land of legitimacy; but they read it and they ‘got it’ and, with the first day of principle photography only three weeks away, with this renegade crew of strangers and actors, lead by me as writer and director, a mass blind date was set, and Charlie Casanova was dragged
kicking-and-screaming to life.”

Independently financed by its writer-producer-director, Terry McMahon, the film has been embraced in America in a way that is unprecedented for an Irish film of this genre. The first non-American film to be selected in six years for the Narrative Feature Competition at this year’s legendary SXSW Film Festival in Austin Texas, and the first Irish film ever selected for the competition, CHARLIE CASANOVA has been defying the odds since its conception on Facebook.

“In any given set of circumstances you need to be mentally strong to make a film. In these circumstances you need to be borderline basketcase. That first day, standing with a young crew, these beautiful people, most of whom I had met for the first time that day, and a cast courageous beyond measure, most of whom were now shitting themselves because they had spent a couple of days rehearsing with me and were in a state of shock at the physical and linguistic gymnastics they were going to have to achieve in uninterrupted takes; all of them wondering if this freak show writer-director was going to drag everyone down the toilet with him. They weren’t alone. I was wondering the same thing, my sphincter, so tightly coiled, like the inside of a golf ball; one slight tear and...I had read several times that the best way to secure the swift respect of the crew is to select a simple shot, get it in the can with minimum fuss and move on. In and out. This guy knows what he’s doing. We’re behind him. A contended crew and an efficient director. It’s excellent advice. I recommend it. And if I weren’t such an imbecile I might have heeded it. Not that I didn’t consider it. I did. But a couple of days before we were due to shoot, the hernia inducing fear bringing with it its own insomnia, I was late night watching, probably for the tenth time, the documentary on the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire When We Were Kings ; Norman Mailer almost pissing his pants with excitement at his recollection of the underdog Ali beginning the fight with a leading overhand right. We started the fight to make the film as outsiders on every level but here I was subscribing to conventional thought on how to approach the first day and I realized whatever limited chance we had of succeeding by beginning brave we didn’t have a shot in hell if we restricted ourselves to a conventional approach. We had to be brave. Balls out brave. I contacted the cast and first AD, and, as news spread we were going to shoot twenty-three pages of script on day one, the crew instantly respected the crazy courage of their director. Did they fuck. Separately they may be of varying talents and intellects but the collective mind of a crew is a bullshit detector beyond compare and they accurately asserted that not only was their director a madman, he was worse, he was an imbecile. We shot the film in eleven days. Pickups or re-shoots were never going to be an option because the equipment, which had been donated, was due back at midnight on that eleventh day. Our final scene was shot on a dark and dangerous roof top in sub zero temperatures, the equipment was returned, we all went to a nightclub, where cast and crew made close by near impossible endeavor, raised a glass or twenty to a film in the can. It was done. Somehow. I went to a secluded corner of the nightclub with my mate, Johnny Elliott, who plays Jimmy in the film, paused a moment, gently smiled, and violently puked up my innards. It was done and I was done so I did what any director worth his salt would have done in those circumstances. I collapsed.”

“Next day, my three kids, who had forgotten what their daddy looked like, wondered who the stranger was in their home, and their mother wondered why in hell she hadn’t hooked up with somebody else. I looked at all of them, honest to God love in my heart, and lied that I had gotten it out of my system and now we could go back to our reality. I would get back to our real life and my real job - writing completely non-real fictions for bad television soap opera – and I would under no circumstances make the same mistakes all those other foolish directors had made by obsessing about the edit, and the sound design and the credits and all those other things that people with no grounding in reality like to distract themselves with. I would be the embodiment of restraint. And it worked for a time. The next day, as I sat at the breakfast table listening to my loving family, it was at least twenty minutes before I felt the pull of Charlie Casanova in the pit of my stomach. The day after that it was twelve minutes. The third day it wasn’t even a matter of minutes because it had seeped its way into my sleep and was determined to firmly plant its spoilt corpulent ass there until it had successfully solicited my undivided attention. I had become slave to this moving image mistress and had yet to learn that film is not just the most jealous of mistresses it’s a skanky succubus conjuring painful obsession even as it ridicules your inability to bring it to climax. It was supposed to be done but the bullying bastard hadn’t begun.”

“Then the country caved in. Incompetence and corruption became the order of day, mediocrity reigned, and, like too many under the new austerity regime, I got shafted in work, lost my writing job, and the bank took steps to foreclose on my home. This fickle foray into filmmaking was one thing with script commission cash rolling in but now that daddy wasn’t delivering paychecks anymore the literal reality of putting food on the family table put everything into perspective. There was always a political subtext to this filmic endeavor. Making a film outside any given system is, whether one intends it or not, in itself, a political act, but when we shot the film in January of this year, who could have possibly envisaged the degree to which the small but proud Ireland would be shafted by the controlling class? Yet, Charlie Casanova is about a member of the controlling class who kills a working class girl, negates all responsibility, becomes increasingly unstable and violent, blames the entire working class and drags everyone down the toilet with him. In order for me to spend the necessary postproduction time on the film food and rent cash was need fast. I had been hired as an acting teacher several times over the years with my bosses always reaping the financial reward so, in the same way as I had advertised on Facebook for cast and crew for Charlie Casanova, I hired an inexpensive room and, keeping the price affordable to those who had been shafted by bad teachers in the past, I offered my own brand of acting classes. They sold out within a week. As did the next class. And the next. Though far from flush, food could once more be bought and I could concentrate on conceivably completing Charlie Casanova. However, shooting for free is one thing. How in hell do you secure the insanely expensive process of postproduction for gratis? Now that’s a whole other kind of mayhem…”

Advance review from Chris Lee at LA2DAY Magazine:

“Eerily crazed…Intricately crafted…Wonderfully insane… Charlie Casanova is rich with narrative, potent with conflict, and oozing with the dialogue of Dublin's inner city. Smooth like the semiquavers of improv jazz, Charlie Casanova pulses with a voracious lust to provoke. ”

You don’t know him…but he already hates you

CHARLIE CASANOVA

Main cast and crew

Charlie: Emmett J. Scanlan

Una: Leigh Arnold

Kevin: Damien Hannaway

Saoirse: Ruth McIntyre

Donald: Tony Murphy

Linda: Valeria Bandino

Director of Photography Eoin Macken

Editor Tony Kearns

Sound Design Nikki Moss

Music Marc Ivan O’Gorman

Written Produced and Directed by Terry McMahon
 

Terry McMahon

Awarded the RKO Pictures Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Prize in Cannes and Los Angeles, the Tiernan McBride Screenwriting Award, and selected for the Tribeca Film Festival All Access Program. Commissioned to write the screenplays Soul Cages for Daryl Hannah, Swordland and Cancer Cowboy for Paddy Breathnach, Savage for Valerie Red Horse, Slice for Richie Smith, Fear for Robert Pejo, and, co-written with Mark O’Rowe, Sisk for Brian O’Malley, along with the original spec screenplays, Simple Simon, The Dancehall Bitch , Oliver Twisted , Charlie Casanova and The War Room. Central roles as an actor include, alongside David Carradine, Dangerous Curves , Don Wilson in Moving Target and Jonathan Pryce and Paul Bettany in The Suicide Club and most recently played ‘Charlie’ in Paul Fraser’s My Brothers. First Class Honors Masters Degree in Screenwriting from IADT, guest lecturer on Acting and Writing at DIT and IADT, The John Huston Film School, and Trinity College, Dublin.

Terry McMahon

+353 877 660 039

terry69@gmail.com

www.terrymcmahon.org