A version of this interview with “The Quiet Girl” director Colm Bairéad was first published in the International Film edition of awards magazine TheWrap.
Based on a novel by Claire Keegan, “The Quiet Girl” is the low-key story of Cáit, a young woman from a large family who is sent to spend the summer with a couple on a remote farm in an Irish-speaking area. The film is Ireland’s entry in the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category and director Colm Bairéad’s first narrative feature film after a career in documentary filmmaking.
Why choose this film for your first narrative feature?
I’ve made a lot of documentaries over the years, but with that being said, my first love was always fiction film. I was always trying to make shorts and trying to develop feature films and a TV series at one point. And I have always had a deep love for cinema that I inherited from my dad. He started my film education when we got a VCR, and he started by showing us early silent films. He showed us the first classics of the medium and made his way through the history of cinema.
And then as I got more experienced, I realized that working with actors to bring characters to life is like having these different chemicals come together. Create this beautiful new thing that you can control to some degree, but there is also a beauty in the lack of control. And then my short films often dealt with child leads. He seemed to have a particular interest in movies about childhood. And when I read this Claire Keegan story, it’s completely immersive, and the themes were my own thematic concerns.
In an immediate sense, I I was this young woman while reading this work. And I love movies that have a definite point of view. I love first person narratives. I love the set of rules that it imposes on you as a filmmaker because it’s strangely liberating. I knew that in making this film I would never need big wide shots or drone shots. I knew that in the car, the camera would never leave the back seat. That’s the key to why the movie works: it inhabits this young woman’s point of view and never leaves her orbit.
And that young woman is, as the title tells us, a quiet girl. Did that dictate a restricted cinematic style?
Yes, and perhaps it is also a reflection of my own personality. I knew that the film would embrace silence. There are many different types of silence in the film, and those silences reflect Irish society and certain aspects of our past. You have the silence of fear and shame, the silence of pain, and then, in a weird way, the silence of love, when language fails us in terms of being completely honest with each other about our feelings.
Given that silence and restraint, is it then a concern to keep the audience interested?
Maybe I was naive, but I never cared too much about it. I always had faith in this idea that if you can get the audience to fully sympathize with Cáit, even minor, mundane things will take on more meaning or more tension. I was aware that I had to include things in the film to maintain some tension, but from my own reading of Claire’s work, I always felt glued to the story, even though the narrative is very light.
You have a powerful tool for empathy in the person of Catherine Clinch, your lead actress.
When we got his self-tape, we were blown away. She understood the power of the camera and the need not to overdo it. I remember looking at the tape and finding myself leaning into it: it had this magnetic quality because of what it was hiding. I thought, “Okay, this young lady completely understands this character, and she also has this supernatural ability to allow the camera to see her.”
Read more from the International Cinema edition here.
