Filmmaker, radio documentary maker and screenwriter Eamon Little introduces That They May Face the Rising Sun, which Little and the film's director Pat Collins adapted for the screen from John McGahern's final novel, now in Irish cinemas.
At the Cúirt Festival in 2002 I filmed what was likely the first public airing of the opening pages of That They May Face the Rising Sun, published later that year. Jamesie Murphy's stealthy arrival into the Ruttledges’ house on Easter Sunday, chiding them mildly for not gossiping or going to mass, began a slow, gentle portrait of a remote rural community, in a decade only deducible later in the novel. Little inkling had I then how important that book and its author would become to me.
In 2004 Pat Collins asked me to record sound on his documentary about John McGahern. It involved just Pat, the late Donal Gilligan, 'Bob’ Brennan and myself spending five or six days with the McGaherns, three or four times that year - an extraordinary privilege, especially for an aspirant writer. By then battling his final illness, John gave a number of interviews that are now seared into my consciousness. It wasn’t long before I’d read everything he’d published. Pat’s film, A Private World, earned much-deserved acclaim in 2005, the year before John died.
A decade later, after years struggling to find collaborators for my en spec adaptation of another McGathern work, The Pornographer, I had a call from Pat asking me to try adapting Rising Sun with him. Another extraordinary privilege, even if it seemed nigh impossible to either write or fund. We each had been steeped in McGahern’s oeuvre since the documentary. This and our experience of John himself guided us into the work. He’d told us, "I think that all bad writing is judgement and statement and that all good writing, in some way or other, is suggestion. Because you leave the characters alone and through the suggestions and the images, their completed life is in the reader’s mind… and consequently, there are as many versions of the novel as it has readers." We were agreed from the outset that we’d apply this principle to the script. Also, we wanted our viewers parachuted into a world that didn’t explain, but rather revealed itself. Another footing was that our gentle narrative threads were not to serve plot, but to facilitate this revealing, that something other than storyline would have to keep the viewers in their seats.
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"By the end of writing a novel you could easily write a sequel, because you know the characters so well you could put them into any situation and know how they’d behave" was another memorable utterance of John’s, and that was true of writing the screenplay too. He had gifted us well-wrought characters in a society we’d known ourselves. It really wasn’t hard, when scenes needed inventing, to set them in motion. Naturally, they required endless reworking (honing that went on into the shoot and further on again in the edit). Through each of the seven drafts we stripped out more and more, discarding material we’d thought would never go. The novel was like a big Breughel canvas. We had to extract enough of the right images from it that, on screen, would reflect, or suggest, the larger canvas truly, in spirit more than detail. Just enough to allow viewers complete their own canvases.
Watch: That They May Face The Rising Sun wins Best Film at the IFTAs
Eight years on, I can scarcely believe the film’s been made, and so beautifully. That what were just tossed around words have been so richly brought to life by such a terrific cast and crew. Thanks John, thanks Pat.
That They May Face The Rising Sun is in cinemas nationwide now
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