From the opening scenes of Lakelands, the milking parlour, to the GAA club dressing room and training session, to the nightclub, the world feels real. As it should. Patrick McGivney and Robert Higgins - the writers and directors - inhabited that life.
The milking parlour scene was shot on McGivney's family farm, both played football with Granard (McGivney at senior level until his recent retirement - get a few drinks into him, and he'll do a u-turn) and they queued for the Spiral Tree in Longford.
It is outside the nightclub - the fictional version is set in Cavan - that the seminal moment of the film happens when protagonist Cian Reilly (played by Éanna Hardwicke) is attacked and suffers a concussion.
A key member of the St Mary's Granard team who played a bit with the county (though not this year, "It's all politics in there," he tells Seamus O'Rourke's lotto ticket-hawking Mulherne), Cian begins to feel pressure to return too quickly. They need him for a league game against Killoe. Cian's identity begins a crumble as it becomes evident his football career is over.
Usually, dramas centred on small towns feature characters longing to get out. Though there is escapism through drinking and drug use, it's not the case in Lakelands, certainly not with Cian, who is content playing football and working on his father's dairy farm.
"People go away and they think they're different to the people who stayed," Cian tells Grace (played by Danielle Galligan), a nurse working in England who has returned to Granard to look after her ill father.
"It grates on us a small bit when you see these rural characters - not only in Ireland but globally - depicted as people who are yearning to leave and searching for the big city, the high life," McGivney tells Balls.
"That's not the reality we know. We're very proud to be from where we're from. Everyone that lives there is proud to be from Granard and from Longford. We just wanted to write a character (Cian) who was proud in the extreme, almost. It kind of goes into a negative place. He's nearly too insular.
"We wanted to have the character of Grace coming back, and she didn't necessarily have as positive an experience with her home town. Then, as she hangs out with Cian more, she realises the value of staying and being from a rural place."
Very happy to release the poster for our film ‘Lakelands’. It will be released in cinemas on May 5th. Big thanks to @WildCardDistrib and @candcfilmsuk for all of their work on it. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/aAb6MjdNH2
— Robert Higgins (@robhigginsfilms) April 14, 2023
Lakelands was shot in Longford three years ago between Covid-19 lockdowns. A grassroots, community-driven project according to its creators. That became clear during a recent screening at the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin as one Longford native declared, "That's Phillip Dobson, I went to primary school with him!" when the character of Clinger appeared in the pub.
"We didn't have the biggest budget but we did have a town that is its own film set," says Higgins.
"The local hotel was taken over by the actors for three weeks. The access we had from the pubs to the GAA pitch, to everything. They closed down the main street for us at one point. You don't really get that [elsewhere].
"Our old football coach is actually in the film. He's the lad in the hardware shop who gives Cian a dressing down."
McGivney adds: "We were like, 'Who could play Luke Reilly? Who could do it?' Then we were like, 'Luke Reilly could play Luke Reilly!' We put him in and he's really good."
During one scene on the farm, Cian assists a calving cow. Its authenticity is down to McGivney's father having cinematic instincts to go with his farming ones.
"We got Éanna up to Longford and put him to work for a few days to acclimatise to a rural life," says McGivney.
My dad put him through his paces. The calving scene came as a surprise. He had no forewarning of that. We had an idea there was a chance it might happen. The first day, we were on set on the farm, Dad came storming in and was like, 'There's a cow literally about to calve'.
We grabbed Eanna and threw him and the cameraman into the shed. We gave Eanna a 45-second tutorial on how to calve a cow. It just shows how good an actor he is because he absolutely smashed it.
The script initially featured games but the GAA element was pared back to focus on the characters, their relationship to the sport, and the culture around it.
We don't find out if St Mary's press the opposition kickout or play a zonal defence. What we do get is an engaging examination of rural Ireland and the young people who live there.
"We'd been talking about it for years," says Higgins.
"It was one of those that would pop up when you were in the pub. We grew up playing football together. We were always talking about how it was strange that there's very little of that world in Irish cinema.
"It's really confusing. [GAA is] featured in every second ad that you see on TV. It looks visually amazing. We felt the world of GAA was ripe to have a film about it.
"A few club players have come up to us and said, 'Yeah, you did a good job there'. For us, that's the acid test. Going into it, we wanted to do the world justice, wanted to capture it in a way that feels real, authentic to people that have lived it."
Lakelands is in cinemas from May 5th
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