For John Carney, there has always been music and film. As a founding member of the Frames, he spent the early 1990s playing bass with the group fronted by Glen Hansard. He made the band’s early music videos before branching into television— RTE’s Bachelors Walk — and feature films: On the Edge, Once, Zonad, Begin Again and now Sing Street.
As he poses for a photographer, a particularly arduous task given Sing Street’s Irish premiere the night before and the director’s subsequent 4am bedtime, he wishes he could be like Stanley Kubrick; enigmatic and unphotographed. He recounts the scene in Tootsie (1982) when someone asks the cameraman how far he’d have to pull back to make the eponymous character — Dustin Hoffman in drag — look good. The cameraman retorts: “How about Cleveland.”
While cinematic influences get brief references, Carney’s passion for music spills out in spirited rants. “There is no good pop music now,” says the 44-year-old emphatically. “That’s just the truth. I’m not being an old, balding man going, ‘Oh it was better when the Jam and the Cure were around.’ It’s not that it was better because of them; it was better because you had mainly English artists talking about politics, separation, not just going, ‘Girl I love the . . . and I wanna.’ Every song now is about how we met, how much I love you, girl. Or about female empowerment: ‘You’re beautiful! Don’t ever believe you’re not! Follow your dreams!’ Of course it’s not going to speak to me or you. It’s going to speak to my 14-year-old niece or nephew or whatever.
“Corporations have gone, ‘Rock’n’roll? We’ll give you rock’n’roll.’ Whereas in the 1970s, it was, ‘We’re in a band, f*** you, don’t tell us how to dress.’ Kids now are constantly looking for adult approval. Do you rate this? Do you like it? Do you give it five stars? And I’m like, you should not want my approval. I want my kid not to want my approval. Because if my dad said something was cool when I was young, I would do the exact opposite.”
Sing Street is about a middle-class teenager who moves to a rough Dublin school and starts a band in order to impress a girl. It’s also about brothers. The central character looks for the approval of his older sibling, a character based on Carney’s brother Jim, who died in 2013. It’s sweet, smart and full of cultural references — as if John Hughes had directed The Commitments. It’s set in the 1980s; not because the music was better then, but so it wouldn’t date quickly. Still, the retro setting allows for great fun with costumes and make-up, as the band repeatedly arrive at school dressed like whatever group were on Top of the Pops the night before.
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“That’s totally what it was like,” says Carney, who recalls coming home to his middle-class family and declaring himself a mod. He’d borrowed a parka from a friend who had two, and listened to the Jam’s Town Called Malice. “I knew nothing,” he says. “My older siblings said, ‘What are you wearing?’ I’m like, ‘I’m a mod now.’”
The events in the film mirror Carney’s own transition from a well-to-do primary school to Synge Street CBS. “I was a posh kid in a tough school, trying to play my accent down and not say ‘Mummy’,” he says. Carney also started a band and loved music, but that’s where the similarities end. No film is ever wholly autobiographical because so many other people become involved along the way, he claims.
“Every song is about how we met, how much I love you, girl
“I mean Ferdia couldn’t be further from me,” he says of Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, the teenage lead in Sing Street. “He’s like Harry Styles — a gorgeous kid. He doesn’t need approval from anybody. He’s never going to be knocked down.” Carney, by contrast, had “unbelievable inner self-doubt”. Moments of happiness were more about relief. “I didn’t go to a co-ed school, but can you imagine? The idea, for me, of having to deal with girls? Just forget about it. Trying to look reasonably cool, not get beaten up by the bully, do the exams — way too much. I’m not a good multitasker.”
Carney collaborated with Tom Hall on his debut film, November Afternoon, released in 1996. They co-directed Park (1999), while Carney made On the Edge (2001). The early films were serious in tone and small in audience. Then Hall, Carney and his brother Kieran made Bachelors Walk. The story of three young men living in an apartment in Celtic-tiger Dublin ran for three seasons.
“Those were the best three years of our lives,” says Carney. This period included meeting his partner, the actress Marcella Plunkett, who makes an appearance in Sing Street. Two of the other main cast members — Don Wycherley and Keith McErlean — are also in the new film. “I was trying to get Simon [Delaney] in,” says Carney. “We all hang out together. We should do a second run of Bachelors Walk.
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“We all grew up after Bachelors Walk, in a way. It was like we were in a band, and the band split up and we’ve all gone off and done these solo projects: Tom made a fantastic film, Sensation; Kieran’s written a bunch of stuff, had three kids; I’ve got a mortgage to pay now — I never thought I would say that. And unfortunately we haven’t found the time to reform the band.”
The director carried this nostalgia and naturalistic approach through to his second wave of more commercially successful feature films. Although Carney has also made a horror — The Rafters — and comedy — Zonad — in the past 10 years, it’s the musical trilogy that brought him to international attention. First came Once, made on a budget of just over €100,000 and which won a best song Oscar. Then there was Begin Again, a €7.4m movie starring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo. Now Carney is back to Dublin and smaller budgets for Sing Street.
With Begin Again, Carney refused to adhere to Hollywood film-making rules and alienated people in the process. “Making [films] look like there’s no director — that’s the key to film-making for me.” Ruffalo, James Corden and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine enjoyed his hands-off approach, but Knightley wanted every direction specified. “Casting certain people is the direction,” says Carney. “With certain actresses, though, there’s one story at the interview and then another story on set. There’s, ‘Oh, I’m all gung-ho and I loved Once and totally down with this,’ and on set the reality is, ‘I just want to go home; I don’t feel that this guy knows what he’s doing,’ I think.”
After a career of collaborations, the director was working on his own. As to the music focus, Carney thinks it’s important for film-makers to specialise, see what they can sell, and “make that work with what excites you”. He says the films have become lighter as he lacks the same desire to deal with dark material. Carney, who is now developing a TV series about a New York music talent scout, is trying to balance being an artist with being an entertainer.
“That’s a difficulty I’m going through in my life at the moment, for sure. I considered myself a great artist when I was 19 and I’ve become a little bit of an entertainer. I have to steer that back, and find the sweet spot where you make art entertaining,” he says.
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Carney believes Boogie Nights is the greatest film of the past 30 years but says director Paul Thomas Anderson seems to consider it his jester work and is always striving to make something more serious. He points to Noah Baumbach, director of The Squid and the Whale, as another man caught in the middle — every time he gets entertaining, he pulls back.
“It’s important in life to find the chair you’re comfortable in. That’s real maturity. That’s what your dad does. This is my chair; I’m comfortable, I’m good with this. I don’t need to change seats ever again in my life,” says Carney, whose dad role will be completed by the birth of his first child later this year. “I’d like to arrive at that stage pretty soon.”
Sing Street is in cinemas nationwide from March 17