Close-Up: Director Dan Ireland
Though he hasn't struck box office gold yet, director Dan Ireland is happily working away with a definite knack for spotting fresh talent. Whether breaking in Emmy Rossum, Renée Zellweger or Thomas Jane—or Pride and Prejudice's Rupert Friend, who debuted in Ireland's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont—the ex-studio executive favors an old-fashioned, character-driven approach.
As Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, starring veteran actress Joan Plowright, rolls out across the country, Ireland, who co-founded a movie festival in Seattle, where he also owned an old theater, sat down with Box Office Mojo and talked at length about his pictures, his productions and his philosophy.
Box Office Mojo: Did you see movies frequently as a child?
Dan Ireland: My mother was a movie freak. She would take me to see movies like [Billy Wilder's] The Apartment and Separate Tables. She took me to see I Want to Live! when I was five years old. By the end [when Susan Hayward's character is executed in the gas chamber], I was crying and sitting forward in my seat. With my father, if it was a gangster or war film, we were there. We were dragged to The Longest Day like five times. We saw Dunkirk and Sink the Bismarck! My father served in the Canadian Armed Forces during World War 2. He was at Normandy. He saw his best friend get his brains blown out. I couldn't watch Saving Private Ryan because the [Allied beach invasion depicted in the] first 30 minutes [happened to] my dad—I had to go back later and watch it all the way through. But my mother had us watching I Want to Live! and Separate Tables.
Box Office Mojo: How did Terence Rattigan's stage play Separate Tables influence Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont?
Dan Ireland: I was completely inspired by that Rattigan world—keeping the characters individual and unique and caught up in their own eccentricities, like the David Niven character in Separate Tables. It's absolutely about class structure and formality—a dying thing in London—and it is still inherent in London. It had to be at the Claremont.
Box Office Mojo: How did you approach casting?
Dan Ireland: I don't offer a role to an actor unless I get to meet them. It's so important. A lot of times, it's all about the name—and that's sometimes how you end up with actors who are not right for the role. You have to be in love with actors. You have to treat them well and be objective and be like a stern parent with them—and watch them. I know it sounds funny, like: parenting Joan Plowright? But you do have to do that.
Box Office Mojo: How many actors auditioned for the role of Ludo, played by Rupert Friend?
Dan Ireland: 65 talented young actors. They were all good—the preparation that British actors do before they come to an audition is unbelievable—but Rupert was amazing. When that character, Ludo, walks through that dining room with Mrs. Palfrey on his arm, when heads are turning and the room comes to life, he had to be right. Rupert came in and he was the only one out of every actor who brought a guitar—there's that scene where the character plays "For All We Know"—and that was it. I knew it was him.
Box Office Mojo: Will Rupert Friend appear in your future movies?
Dan Ireland: Hopefully. He may be doing a part in Dillinger as one of [Chicago gangster John] Dillinger's right hand men, John Hamilton, a womanizer and, hopefully, he is going to play a role in The Beauty of Jane, which is about a younger guy and an older woman in 1912 in England, right before World War 1.
Box Office Mojo: Was Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont developed with Joan Plowright in mind?
Dan Ireland: Finding an actor that you want to be with for two hours is a big challenge, so there was never any doubt after I read the script that Mrs. Palfrey was Joan—completely Joan.
Box Office Mojo: How does the movie differ from British writer Elizabeth Taylor's novel?
Dan Ireland: The original source material was bleak. All the characters have ulterior motives—I mean, Ludo settles [for less] in the novel and I didn't want him to settle [in the movie version]. Elizabeth Taylor was dying of cancer when she wrote the book and she died two years after she wrote it—it's her last novel. I knew because of dealing with the elderly that I was going to have a real struggle getting an audience. Yet, I saw this universal story in the base of it, the soul of it, with a humanity that I wanted to examine and dissect more than the book did.
Box Office Mojo: How do you regard the criticisms of your movie?
Dan Ireland: If you have a problem with emotion, and a lot of people do, you're going to think it's maudlin. I never looked at Mrs. P that way. Under the surface, there's something stronger, something to be said about how we treat the elderly, how we ignore them, what we can learn from them—and what they can learn from us.
Box Office Mojo: What challenges did you face?
Dan Ireland: I made it for $750,000—in the U.K., circumventing the unions, shooting in high definition, though I would have preferred to use film. I'm really happy with it now but it was the toughest act to get this to look the way I wanted it to look in the time allowed. Instead of color-timing it originally with a projection, it was timed on a 30-inch television monitor. You can work on a monitor and get it right and, the moment it's projected, it's completely different. So when I saw it projected, I freaked out. It was completely wrong. We probably could have done it on film and it would have cost the same. But maybe not.
Box Office Mojo: Any favorite production stories?
Dan Ireland: My producer bought us all coach tickets for the train. Joan had no idea that we didn't have permits—we had no permits, nothing—and we went to first class on the train, shot the coverage on Joan, got off the train and on the way back shot more coverage and then, the conductor comes up—just as Joan's stepping off the train. Those scenes in the park? We didn't have permits. But, look, it's a love letter to London, as much as I could get in for 28 days. We did have a permit for shooting in Beaulieu Castle, and we were the first film to shoot there since The Lion in Winter.
Box Office Mojo: Did you like working in London?
Dan Ireland: Loved it. Most of my friends or their parents are British and, growing up in [British Columbia,] Canada, I had a real British upbringing. Also, my heritage is Irish from my father's side so there is an affinity to this material. I love London—the people are frank, direct and they'll tell you exactly what they think. I'm dying to do another movie there.
Box Office Mojo: How did you cast Renee Zellweger for The Whole Wide World?
Dan Ireland: Renee came in and I was just blown away—her intellect, her charm, she was right there. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Renee within five minutes; she'll have you wrapped around her finger.
Box Office Mojo: And then she was cast in Jerry Maguire due to her performance in The Whole Wide World?
Dan Ireland: For sure. I'd heard from [composer] Hans Zimmer that [producer] Jim Brooks was looking for a girl to play opposite Tom Cruise. Jim came down and I showed him the film. Hans Zimmer phoned me back and said he'd loved it—and that he loved my film. Then, [director] Cameron Crowe came down to look at it, and Renee was asked to read for it. I had a call that Tom Cruise wanted to see it, and he went in and met Renee. She got the part.
Box Office Mojo: How do you elicit a good performance?
Dan Ireland: If I had to dissect it, I'd say I'm like a professional audience. I know what to look for. My whole background, from when I was a kid, is as a moviegoer. From the time I was running the Seattle Film Festival, seeing 300 films a year, I was able to be a spectator. You have to be. If you can't be, you're doing a disservice to your story, your actors and your audience. It's so important to take that on board—or else you wind up like one of these directors who has contempt for the audience. I still love being lost in a movie.
Box Office Mojo: How did you come up with the idea to use the classic romance Brief Encounter in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont?
Dan Ireland: It is one of the things that every young romantic in the U.K. gravitates towards—it's David Lean's purest movie, written by Noel Coward. It's about unrequited love and having that moment in a complacent relationship when something spontaneous happens in your life—with Rachmaninoff playing in the background. It's bittersweet, not tragic.
Box Office Mojo: Why did you stop producing and start directing movies?
Dan Ireland: I went from co-founding the Seattle Film Festival to a job as head of acquisitions for Vestron Pictures, which was an opportunity to explore being a producer. I had the ability to buy a movie and make sure it came in on time, and was cast correctly. It was great. It was amazing. It brought out the movie buff in me as a businessman—how a movie is made. Some of the pictures I was enormously proud of and others I did because it was my job. One of the films that led me to directing was [Ken Russell's] Whore, because it started off to be this great project that was set in London with one actress in front of a brick wall talking about her life, and it was one of the most powerful pieces of writing. I found the money, and, then, bit by bit, the integrity started to fall away and at some point Ken [Russell] lost interest in it. It was a tough experience. Fast forward two years later and the actor who played the pimp in the film said he wanted to show me this material about his schoolteacher. That was Whole Wide World. So Whore led me to Whole Wide World. I just decided [at that point] that, if I was going to take it on the chin any longer for any film I did, it was going to be one that I made.
Box Office Mojo: You co-owned Seattle's Egyptian Theatre. Did running a movie theater help you understand the business?
Dan Ireland: Yes—it was the greatest feeling in the world. We sold our business to Landmark Theatres because [my partner] wanted to concentrate on the [film] festival. It's a pretty big gig running one screen. You can't fall back on eight other screens—you have to guess right every single time. Otherwise, you're going to lose a lot of money. Owning a theater is a nice perspective to have as a filmmaker, to be an audience first.
Box Office Mojo: What was your worst experience as a producer?
Dan Ireland: The really bad horror movies that I had to be on were like The Unholy, where I literally had to fix the entire movie, and blood and gore is just not my sensibility. Look, I was very fortunate to be a movie freak—I was weaned on really good films.
Box Office Mojo: Such as?
Dan Ireland: Rio Lobo, which I love, The Searchers, 7 Women, The Yellow Rolls-Royce—the thing that always stayed with me about that picture was Ingrid Bergman's final scene with Omar Sharif. That car did nothing but bring bad things, from Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau's marriage and then Shirley MacLaine and that whole thing in the end—it was so romantic. Two for the Road is one of my all-time favorite romantic movies. My favorite movies are Chinatown, Psycho, The Trip to Bountiful, The Whisperers, Body Heat—I'm very eclectic.
Box Office Mojo: Do your favorite pictures have anything in common?
Dan Ireland: Great characters, wonderful stories—about humans—with a beautiful, intoxicating romanticism, where a filmmaker can take you out of who you are for two hours and transport you to a place that isn't always pleasant but it stays with you. Movies that live with you, that you can't shake, even if you don't like them when you first see them.
Box Office Mojo: What's your greatest reward in making Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont?
Dan Ireland: Being able to show it to my mom, as a gift, on her birthday, because it was her, it was my movie for her—and she was the one who turned me on to movies. It was always in my brain, to give her something back.
Box Office Mojo: What is your credo?
Dan Ireland: Be dedicated, passionate, obsessive and don't settle—don't ever settle. Settle is not a word that belongs in [an artist's] vocabulary—or, if it is, you're in the wrong business. You can never take no for an answer if you're really passionate about something. I had a lot of doors close on my face for Whole Wide World and I was rejected by everyone. The greatest compliment I ever had was from someone who said, 'oh my God, you made what you said you were going to make.' And I thought: Isn't that's how it's supposed to be?
RELATED ARTICLES
• Review - Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
RELATED LINKS
• Mrs. Palfrey Playdates and Official Web Site
• Book: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
As Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, starring veteran actress Joan Plowright, rolls out across the country, Ireland, who co-founded a movie festival in Seattle, where he also owned an old theater, sat down with Box Office Mojo and talked at length about his pictures, his productions and his philosophy.
Box Office Mojo: Did you see movies frequently as a child?
Dan Ireland: My mother was a movie freak. She would take me to see movies like [Billy Wilder's] The Apartment and Separate Tables. She took me to see I Want to Live! when I was five years old. By the end [when Susan Hayward's character is executed in the gas chamber], I was crying and sitting forward in my seat. With my father, if it was a gangster or war film, we were there. We were dragged to The Longest Day like five times. We saw Dunkirk and Sink the Bismarck! My father served in the Canadian Armed Forces during World War 2. He was at Normandy. He saw his best friend get his brains blown out. I couldn't watch Saving Private Ryan because the [Allied beach invasion depicted in the] first 30 minutes [happened to] my dad—I had to go back later and watch it all the way through. But my mother had us watching I Want to Live! and Separate Tables.
Box Office Mojo: How did Terence Rattigan's stage play Separate Tables influence Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont?
Dan Ireland: I was completely inspired by that Rattigan world—keeping the characters individual and unique and caught up in their own eccentricities, like the David Niven character in Separate Tables. It's absolutely about class structure and formality—a dying thing in London—and it is still inherent in London. It had to be at the Claremont.
Box Office Mojo: How did you approach casting?
Dan Ireland: I don't offer a role to an actor unless I get to meet them. It's so important. A lot of times, it's all about the name—and that's sometimes how you end up with actors who are not right for the role. You have to be in love with actors. You have to treat them well and be objective and be like a stern parent with them—and watch them. I know it sounds funny, like: parenting Joan Plowright? But you do have to do that.
Box Office Mojo: How many actors auditioned for the role of Ludo, played by Rupert Friend?
Dan Ireland: 65 talented young actors. They were all good—the preparation that British actors do before they come to an audition is unbelievable—but Rupert was amazing. When that character, Ludo, walks through that dining room with Mrs. Palfrey on his arm, when heads are turning and the room comes to life, he had to be right. Rupert came in and he was the only one out of every actor who brought a guitar—there's that scene where the character plays "For All We Know"—and that was it. I knew it was him.
Box Office Mojo: Will Rupert Friend appear in your future movies?
Dan Ireland: Hopefully. He may be doing a part in Dillinger as one of [Chicago gangster John] Dillinger's right hand men, John Hamilton, a womanizer and, hopefully, he is going to play a role in The Beauty of Jane, which is about a younger guy and an older woman in 1912 in England, right before World War 1.
Box Office Mojo: Was Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont developed with Joan Plowright in mind?
Dan Ireland: Finding an actor that you want to be with for two hours is a big challenge, so there was never any doubt after I read the script that Mrs. Palfrey was Joan—completely Joan.
Box Office Mojo: How does the movie differ from British writer Elizabeth Taylor's novel?
Dan Ireland: The original source material was bleak. All the characters have ulterior motives—I mean, Ludo settles [for less] in the novel and I didn't want him to settle [in the movie version]. Elizabeth Taylor was dying of cancer when she wrote the book and she died two years after she wrote it—it's her last novel. I knew because of dealing with the elderly that I was going to have a real struggle getting an audience. Yet, I saw this universal story in the base of it, the soul of it, with a humanity that I wanted to examine and dissect more than the book did.
Box Office Mojo: How do you regard the criticisms of your movie?
Dan Ireland: If you have a problem with emotion, and a lot of people do, you're going to think it's maudlin. I never looked at Mrs. P that way. Under the surface, there's something stronger, something to be said about how we treat the elderly, how we ignore them, what we can learn from them—and what they can learn from us.
Box Office Mojo: What challenges did you face?
Dan Ireland: I made it for $750,000—in the U.K., circumventing the unions, shooting in high definition, though I would have preferred to use film. I'm really happy with it now but it was the toughest act to get this to look the way I wanted it to look in the time allowed. Instead of color-timing it originally with a projection, it was timed on a 30-inch television monitor. You can work on a monitor and get it right and, the moment it's projected, it's completely different. So when I saw it projected, I freaked out. It was completely wrong. We probably could have done it on film and it would have cost the same. But maybe not.
Box Office Mojo: Any favorite production stories?
Dan Ireland: My producer bought us all coach tickets for the train. Joan had no idea that we didn't have permits—we had no permits, nothing—and we went to first class on the train, shot the coverage on Joan, got off the train and on the way back shot more coverage and then, the conductor comes up—just as Joan's stepping off the train. Those scenes in the park? We didn't have permits. But, look, it's a love letter to London, as much as I could get in for 28 days. We did have a permit for shooting in Beaulieu Castle, and we were the first film to shoot there since The Lion in Winter.
Box Office Mojo: Did you like working in London?
Dan Ireland: Loved it. Most of my friends or their parents are British and, growing up in [British Columbia,] Canada, I had a real British upbringing. Also, my heritage is Irish from my father's side so there is an affinity to this material. I love London—the people are frank, direct and they'll tell you exactly what they think. I'm dying to do another movie there.
Box Office Mojo: How did you cast Renee Zellweger for The Whole Wide World?
Dan Ireland: Renee came in and I was just blown away—her intellect, her charm, she was right there. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Renee within five minutes; she'll have you wrapped around her finger.
Box Office Mojo: And then she was cast in Jerry Maguire due to her performance in The Whole Wide World?
Dan Ireland: For sure. I'd heard from [composer] Hans Zimmer that [producer] Jim Brooks was looking for a girl to play opposite Tom Cruise. Jim came down and I showed him the film. Hans Zimmer phoned me back and said he'd loved it—and that he loved my film. Then, [director] Cameron Crowe came down to look at it, and Renee was asked to read for it. I had a call that Tom Cruise wanted to see it, and he went in and met Renee. She got the part.
Box Office Mojo: How do you elicit a good performance?
Dan Ireland: If I had to dissect it, I'd say I'm like a professional audience. I know what to look for. My whole background, from when I was a kid, is as a moviegoer. From the time I was running the Seattle Film Festival, seeing 300 films a year, I was able to be a spectator. You have to be. If you can't be, you're doing a disservice to your story, your actors and your audience. It's so important to take that on board—or else you wind up like one of these directors who has contempt for the audience. I still love being lost in a movie.
Box Office Mojo: How did you come up with the idea to use the classic romance Brief Encounter in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont?
Dan Ireland: It is one of the things that every young romantic in the U.K. gravitates towards—it's David Lean's purest movie, written by Noel Coward. It's about unrequited love and having that moment in a complacent relationship when something spontaneous happens in your life—with Rachmaninoff playing in the background. It's bittersweet, not tragic.
Box Office Mojo: Why did you stop producing and start directing movies?
Dan Ireland: I went from co-founding the Seattle Film Festival to a job as head of acquisitions for Vestron Pictures, which was an opportunity to explore being a producer. I had the ability to buy a movie and make sure it came in on time, and was cast correctly. It was great. It was amazing. It brought out the movie buff in me as a businessman—how a movie is made. Some of the pictures I was enormously proud of and others I did because it was my job. One of the films that led me to directing was [Ken Russell's] Whore, because it started off to be this great project that was set in London with one actress in front of a brick wall talking about her life, and it was one of the most powerful pieces of writing. I found the money, and, then, bit by bit, the integrity started to fall away and at some point Ken [Russell] lost interest in it. It was a tough experience. Fast forward two years later and the actor who played the pimp in the film said he wanted to show me this material about his schoolteacher. That was Whole Wide World. So Whore led me to Whole Wide World. I just decided [at that point] that, if I was going to take it on the chin any longer for any film I did, it was going to be one that I made.
Box Office Mojo: You co-owned Seattle's Egyptian Theatre. Did running a movie theater help you understand the business?
Dan Ireland: Yes—it was the greatest feeling in the world. We sold our business to Landmark Theatres because [my partner] wanted to concentrate on the [film] festival. It's a pretty big gig running one screen. You can't fall back on eight other screens—you have to guess right every single time. Otherwise, you're going to lose a lot of money. Owning a theater is a nice perspective to have as a filmmaker, to be an audience first.
Box Office Mojo: What was your worst experience as a producer?
Dan Ireland: The really bad horror movies that I had to be on were like The Unholy, where I literally had to fix the entire movie, and blood and gore is just not my sensibility. Look, I was very fortunate to be a movie freak—I was weaned on really good films.
Box Office Mojo: Such as?
Dan Ireland: Rio Lobo, which I love, The Searchers, 7 Women, The Yellow Rolls-Royce—the thing that always stayed with me about that picture was Ingrid Bergman's final scene with Omar Sharif. That car did nothing but bring bad things, from Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau's marriage and then Shirley MacLaine and that whole thing in the end—it was so romantic. Two for the Road is one of my all-time favorite romantic movies. My favorite movies are Chinatown, Psycho, The Trip to Bountiful, The Whisperers, Body Heat—I'm very eclectic.
Box Office Mojo: Do your favorite pictures have anything in common?
Dan Ireland: Great characters, wonderful stories—about humans—with a beautiful, intoxicating romanticism, where a filmmaker can take you out of who you are for two hours and transport you to a place that isn't always pleasant but it stays with you. Movies that live with you, that you can't shake, even if you don't like them when you first see them.
Box Office Mojo: What's your greatest reward in making Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont?
Dan Ireland: Being able to show it to my mom, as a gift, on her birthday, because it was her, it was my movie for her—and she was the one who turned me on to movies. It was always in my brain, to give her something back.
Box Office Mojo: What is your credo?
Dan Ireland: Be dedicated, passionate, obsessive and don't settle—don't ever settle. Settle is not a word that belongs in [an artist's] vocabulary—or, if it is, you're in the wrong business. You can never take no for an answer if you're really passionate about something. I had a lot of doors close on my face for Whole Wide World and I was rejected by everyone. The greatest compliment I ever had was from someone who said, 'oh my God, you made what you said you were going to make.' And I thought: Isn't that's how it's supposed to be?
RELATED ARTICLES
• Review - Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
RELATED LINKS
• Mrs. Palfrey Playdates and Official Web Site
• Book: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
