CAPTURING a “moment of truth” is always the aspiration for Co Down film-maker, Sam O’Mahony, whose debut feature film, The Wise Guy, will be screened at the 37th Foyle Film Festival in Derry this week.
Certainly, in his coming-of-age “dramatic comedy” about an 11-year-old boy befriending a gangster in the woods, he had some of his own dramatic moments from childhood to draw on.
“I think so many first films are often a veiled exploration of a moment in the author’s life and there are similarities here, to a degree,” ventures the Dublin-born actor-turned-film-maker who now lives in Holywood with his partner and three-year-old daughter.
“This story is about a young boy whose parents break up and he is left with a profound sense of loneliness – all he has is this box of video tapes of gangster movies and then, lo and behold, he bumps into a man in the woods, develops a friendship with him and the man turns out to be a gangster himself…”
Well, you couldn’t make it up, you might think, but sometimes, as O’Mahony will tell you, truth is stranger than fiction. “Elements of this were indeed inspired by my own experiences,” he reveals. “My parents did break up and my father did live beside a criminal – a big international criminal, as it turned out.
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“I remember my brother and I found out when there was this big expose in some tabloid - there, in the centre pages, was an aerial photograph of his massive compound and just in the corner you could see our little tree house.
“I often wonder what would have happened if I had ever met that man... what could have happened... it was a strange moment, finding out our dad lived next door to an international criminal who was, essentially, hiding out in Ireland.”
O’Mahony is both writer and director of The Wise Guy, developed through Northern Ireland Screen’s New Writer Focus scheme. He also made his young protagonist, Francis (Senan Jennings), an atheist “on a journey towards reality” – another parallel with his own life as an adult.
“This kid makes a decision, he embraces the reality of the situation,” says O’Mahony, a graduate of London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). “I think reality is the best place to be in our lives – not stuck in our heads, hoping for something else.
“I think reality is the most beautiful thing – like the character in the film, I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Heaven; I believe existence is just one remarkable coincidence with so many beautiful opportunities open to us once we embrace that. That’s how I see it.
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“Film has always been the guiding light in my life. I went to see movies and I watched videos - I turned to them for my answers. It makes me feel like a little kid again, going out into the woods with a camera... I don’t know if I will ever find something else that brings me as much satisfaction and maintains the magic I felt when I was a kid.”
Despite this, he ended up acting for the most part of his early career - covering everything from stage performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, to appearances in TV drama, Casualty – while never really feeling the ‘buzz’ of being someone else.
“The worst thing that happened with acting was not that my career dried up, I just got bored with it,” reflects the writer and director whose other credits include short BBC film, Best Served Cold (made for talent development initiative Two Minute Masterpiece), and Taxi, a music video for Belfast band Arborist (who provide the score for The Wise Guy). “I am a storyteller – the feeling of being in someone else’s story... I never really enjoyed that very much; I just wanted to be with the nerds trying to figure it out rather than with the cool kids in front of the camera.
“Even though I began by making film – I made films as a kid and I wrote scripts as a kid - I kind of got side-tracked into acting for many years, even while continuing to make short films and videos. I do wonder about my acting career sometimes and if I ever did it right, because I never felt like I was revealing anything of myself through the parts that I played. In many ways, I felt like I used characters to hide behind, but when you are a writer and a director, there is nowhere to hide; you expose the person that you are - and that can be terrifying.”
Shot in and around Belfast – “mostly in the woods” – in just under three weeks with a limited budget, The Wise Guy is “deceptively simple” says O’Mahony, who also runs his own production company, Second Part Productions. “It sounds a simple plot, but the underlying themes running through it are complex and I think far more reflective of reality.
The whole film is from the perspective of this 11-year-old kid, so we only really see what he sees; he’s not looking at Belfast landmarks, he is just looking at a small room or a beautiful tree... he is our narrator, even if, at times, he is an unreliable one
— Sam O’Mahony
“It is certainly an exploration of faith, it is an exploration of the power of nature and it is an exploration of how stories, and particularly films, can inspire and provide answers to our lives.”
More than anything, he intended the story to be a celebration of childhood, lending a “beautiful innocence” to the film, while capturing in real time the last days of childhood for young actor, Senan Jennings himself.
“It is a very small world,” adds O’Mahony. “The whole film is from the perspective of this 11-year-old kid, so we only really see what he sees; he’s not looking at Belfast landmarks, he is just looking at a small room or a beautiful tree and that was always so important to me – that we are with him the whole way; he is our narrator, even if, at times, he is an unreliable one.
“We hear what he hears; we see what we sees, until a certain moment. There is a beautiful innocence about it all and the film is a celebration of those last moments of innocence in a child’s life, as portrayed in a remarkable performance by Senan Jennings. We had a beautiful cast – Darrell D’Silva who played the gangster, Lisa Dwyer-Hogg and Paul Mallon who play the parents… just brilliant people and everyone just worked so hard; that’s how you can do it.”
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Now doing the rounds of the various film festivals – Galway, Belfast, Newport Beach, California, and Austin film festival in Texas are now over, with the Foyle screening set for later this week – the hope is to see a move towards distribution.
“We were in Newport for our US premiere and then we screened at the Austin Film Festival where we were nominated for best narrative feature,” enthuses O’Mahony. “The response in the US has just been incredible.
“People couldn’t believe how films are supported here in Northern Ireland and they are sickened - but the arts is supported for very good reasons, not just for employment and for the economy, but to champion storytellers.
“And why do we tell stories? We tell stories to help us understand each other so we can become better people and we can become better societies. It is an amazing investment and a very worthy one.”
The Wise Guy, written and directed by Sam O’Mahony and starring Darrell D’Silva, Senan Jennings, Lisa Dwyer-Hogg, Paul Mallon and Joanne Crawford will be screened at Brunswick Moviebowl, Pennyburn Industrial Estate, Derry, on Thursday November 28 www.foylefilmfestival.org
