'Flora and Son': Why director John Carney believes only Eve Hewson could lead movie
Carney looked at creating the new Apple TV+ movie like forming a band for a few weeks
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There's something particularly lovely and heartwarming about John Carney's movies, which makes the audience so emotionally connected his characters, and that's very much the case in Flora and Son (now on Apple TV+), starring Eve Hewson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Orén Kinlan.
Following Hewson's killer performance in Bad Sisters, the actor (who also happens to be Bono's daughter) plays Flora, a single mother to her teenage son Max (Kinlan).
Set in Dublin, Max has a regular pattern of getting in trouble with police. In an attempt to find him a hobby (after she forgot his birthday), Flora takes home an acoustic guitar someone was throwing away, and gets is cleaned up for Max.
When her son doesn't show an interest in this used guitar, Flora uses it for herself, taking virtual lessons with Jeff (Gordon-Levitt), who lives in California.
As Flora and Jeff spend more time together, there's a spark of romance that ignites between the two. But at the same time, music becomes a way for Max and Flora to connect as well.
Watch Flora and Son on Apple TV+. Start watching with 7 days free, then $8.99 a month.
While Carney is essentially the master of mixing music and love stories, Flora and Son has the added element of Flora and Jeff's love story developing with the barrier of a computer screen.
"Those are the kind of challenges you're looking for, in a way, because if it was just boy meets girl, kisses, and moves on, ... it would be pretty straightforward," Carney told Yahoo Canada during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where the film made its international premiere. "It's nice as a writer to put up barriers and to go, how do I get through this now?"
"How do I have a love story that ... has a piece of glass between it? And for me, that kind of forced my hand in a good way, which was, well theatrically, how do I do this? Are there lighting changes? Or are there effects I can do to merge these characters? And should they ever meet? Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe they should never get a plane ticket and make it an actual relationship. Maybe it should continue to be virtual. But that's what you want as a writer, I think, the challenges."
Initial images of Flora 'tell you a lot'
In terms of how Carney worked with his actors, on the songwriting components especially, he described his process as quite "fluid."
"I looked at this movie more like the formation of a little band for a few weeks," Carney said. "I was kind of the bandleader and had to keep an eye on all of the characters, but it was more like that than the conventional rehearsal, let's sit down and have a read through of the script."
"I don't even think we did a read through of the script and we certainly didn't rehearse it. So it did feel a little bit like we were a bunch of kids sort of forming a band, seeing how it would sound. Are we punk? Are we rock? ... Let's find out."
Carney has a particular skill for developing characters, and relationships between characters, in a way that makes the audience feel very invested in their journey. The filmmaker identified that for Flora and Son he really started by thinking about "an image of a character," likening it to a drawing.
"The beginning of this movie was an image of a woman pulling a guitar out of a skip and I didn't know what kind of woman she would be, but even that gesture tells you a lot," Carney said. "What kind of woman climbs up to a skip and pulls out a guitar, and bothers to bring it home and clean it up. Where is she at? That should tell you a lot."
"It told me that her financial situation was precarious. It told me that she couldn't afford a gift for somebody, so she was retooling this piece of garbage as a gift. ... From those kind of images and those ideas, I sort of come up with the character and the limitations of the character, and tried to sort of find her in here and write in that lane. And not have her jump to having a bunch of awards in her hand at the end of the movie and going, 'Oh thank you, I just followed my dream, and yay me.' But go, I'm actually not far from where I was, in terms of Hollywood story, but in terms of real life I'm massively far from where I began."
Eve Hewson made it seem like there was 'nobody else' who could play Flora
After watching Hewson in both Flora and Son and Bad Sisters, she's quickly become one of the actors we're most excited to watch, now and in the future. Playing Flora, she brilliantly executes such an interesting complexity with this character that really elevates the love story.
"She did a very cool thing when I first met her on Zoom, she kind of made it seem like I might be able to get a better actor, or a different actor, sure, ... but you're not going to get what I've got," Carney revealed.
"It was more an atmosphere and it was the humour, a sense of like, I'm not going to be poised and beautiful. I'm not going to be vain. I'm not going to try and look great. I'm going to try and trip up and make this funny, and salty ... and I'm going to try and push this character really to the far edges of acceptability, but try and keep her likeable and lovable in a weird way. Not a lot of people are going to approach it that way."
Watch Flora and Son on Apple TV+. Start watching with 7 days free, then $8.99 a month.
Carney added that Hewson being from Dublin also really added to the depth of the character.
"She lived and grew up in Dublin, that's a unique mindset," Carney said. "Dublin is like a little village, we've been to the same places and bars and streets, we know what Grafton Street means, we know what Dollymount Strand means."
"That's going to be invaluable to this character, because this character is a real Dub and she says salty, weird things that Dubliners say that throw you, but then you're like, 'Oh no, it's quite funny.' They're mischievous and witty, and she got all that and it seemed like there was nobody else for [Flora] by the end of the meeting."
'I'll keep doing them as long as there's more than seven or eight people in the audience'
In terms of what ultimately made Carney decide to move his work in movies centred around music and love in the direction of Flora and Son, the filmmaker said he's, "always trying to use the same toolbox to tell different versions of the same thing."
"Could I take a song, could I take a Dublin character, can I take these ingredients and not just have it be boy meets girl, which is the kind of trajectory of most musicals," Carney said. "Boy meets girl, they put on a show and the world loves them, has generally been a very dependable narrative to hang music on."
"To see if there was a way that you could take the sort of frivolity of a musical, but put it in a more realistic setting, and that's what I've been doing, I've realized. I've actually really been trying to tell a naturalistic style story that feels like a kitchen sink drama, but has actually all the ingredients of a big old, nice musical."
Carney stressed that he ultimately tries to do that in the world that he knows, which is Dublin.
"I'll keep doing them as long as there's more than seven or eight people in the audience," Carney said.
How to watch Flora and Son
Flora and Son is available to stream on Apple TV+.
