Sydney Film Festival Interview: Sing Street‘s Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Mark McKenna talk working on John Carney’s latest

John Carney‘s latest effort, Sing Street, made its Australian debut through the Sydney Film Festival. In honor of the occasion we caught up to two of its stars, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Mark McKenna to talk about the film.

What drew you to the project? How did you get involved with Sing Street? 

Ferdia: I went to an open casting in Dublin after hearing about it through a friend and, you know, loving the idea of this movie cause it’s musical done by John Carney. I loved Once [so] I went to that and I queued up and, you know, queued up for like five hours, did the audition, got recalled a few times and yeah got cast in this movie – of picked out loads of people – it was a bit jammy.

It was great and I was really lucky and yeah, that was kind of my first that was my first time acting. I was always doing music so it was my first time ever acting on-screen and that was all kind of interesting – a big learning curve.

Mark: There’s this thing on Facebook about it and my friends would – a few of them were screen-shotting it and sending it to me and saying ‘you have to go for this’ and I was like ‘no’.

I didn’t think there’d be any chance of getting cast and then one of my friends was like, ‘if I give you a lift up to the audition, will you go for it?’ And I was like ‘yeah’, and then she gave me a lift up and she went to the open casting as well and we lined up for like two hours for like a five minute audition [so] I was like, ‘that was a complete waste of time’ [but] I got called back and I kept getting called back and I eventually got it and I was like, ‘eh’.

What was that audition like? Was it a specific scene from the film?

Mark: My first audition, I had to improvise and then I got a call back for Eamon straightaway. I was always going for Eamon.

Ferdia: For me it was really weird, I didn’t do any acting until the screen test, like to the very last step, you know. Which I always found really interesting but until then it was like they just asked me to in the first audition they just asked me to talk about my life on camera and they just asked me to talk about like what school I’m in and what I’m doing, and it was quite bizarre. I just never did that again and I played music for the audience and then it was acting in the screen test at the end.

The world has changed so much since the 1980s. How was immersing yourself in that time period and in that culture?

Ferdia: It was great when you get into it.

Mark: They change the atmosphere so much to make it look like the 80s, it actually genuinely feels like you’re in the 80s. Like they always closed off roads and got really old cars and they were like “don’t let any cars drive through the scene” so they kind of closed us off from modern society.

Ferdia: It was really fun immersing yourself in that kind of mad time of mad makeup and pop music.

As your background has been mostly music, did the script sort of give you room to work with the character and sort of learn what you could do as an actor?

Ferdia: Yeah. John is very inventive. He was very lucid with the script. I think it really helped cause he also wrote the script so he just kind of didn’t really care about the lines, you know, they were like a very rough blueprint. Sometimes we’d do a scene and John would be like ‘actually I hate this scene’ and he’d be like, ‘you know what just improvise’ and then he just completely changed everything about it.

How much of that improvisation made it into the final movie?

Mark: A lot of the scenes of us writing songs were mainly improv – completely.

Ferdia: It’s kind of cut between. Also you kind of throw around things where you try [to] say [lines] differently but in your own way, you know. You could sort of do this in this film because it was 80s but it wasn’t so different from now.

The characters feel very contemporary, it’s certainly 80s but it definitely doesn’t feel old.

Ferdia: Oh exactly.

Mark, your character has this quirky love of rabbits. What’s the deal with that?

Mark: Basically Eamon actually exist as a person. He’s someone John grew up with and apparently he just loved rabbits. I didn’t think too much when I read it at first. I read it and I was like ‘okay’, but it seems to be a big thing.

It’s such an out of left field moment

Mark: I get people tagging me in things on social media; just pictures of rabbit. I don’t actually love rabbits.

And you have a lot of scene with Lucy and it almost feels like over the course of the movie your character becomes a lot more mature and then she sort of becomes left aloof and feels closer in age to Cosmo. What was that like?

Ferdia: It was great. That was kinda my challenge in the film. Cause it is a coming of age film.

There was an age gap but I mean that didn’t really make a difference for us on set. I mean it was just kind of for me that was the challenge of not having been acting before. It was less about me just being really good in every single scene because it was more about the broad character and how he changes through the film.

If you look the first kind of scene where he walks into the school and he shows his kind of hunched over. [He’s] a little bit insecure and little bit not-sure of himself but at the end of the film he’s confident. It’s just about that change and how he finds that through music and through Raphina.

That was really fun and for Lucy as well, but it was sometimes a bit off-putting because jumping from different scenes and we’d be like ‘where is this from the script?’ John would be really getting that into your head and he’d be like ‘so this is what is happened, how are you feeling?’ It’s really interesting.

Do you have like a favorite song or musical moment from the movie ?

Mark: My top three would have to be “Drive It Like You Stole It”, “Up” and “Beautiful Sea”.

Ferdia: I’d have to throw “Girl” in there. I just love that song and I think it’s great and “Drive It Like You Stole It” is just a whopper tune. I think Gary did an incredible job on that one.

There’s so many different themes sort of rich coming of age sort of story this movie. What do you hope for people to feeling about when they leave the cinema?

Ferdia: Just feeling good. It’s a feelgood movie.

Mark: The message of being yourself and all that kind of cheesy crap. The film kind of proves that you’ll be happier just doing what you wanna do instead of thinking like “Oh I’m not gonna wear those clothes because someone might slag me”.

Ferdia: It’s just really entertaining for a movie and there is really just those things where John so good getting depth in every character but not going too far where it’s just you know, intense. 

The relationship between the brothers; that’s the most special part about the film for me and for John and for Jack as well. Jack’s an older brother in real life. I have two older brothers, you know, who I’m really close to and were they musicians full-time and they were always kind of handing me down records as well. It’s just that connection was really was what makes the film really special for us and for John and he was kind of guiding him.

Did you bring your own experience with your own family into the scenes?

Ferdia: I think I definitely did. There was a lot of that going on. At the time, I didn’t quite realise it. I was working with Jack and…just without even thinking about it just reminded me of my older brothers because he was around the same age and he had the long, greasy hair like my brother [chuckles]. You know just that kinda thing but there was definitely a lot of that.

Just that connection – it was really special and I think a lot of people take that away in film who have older siblings. I texted my brother walking out of the cinema.

Mark: Someone was saying they haven’t talked to my brother in five years then they saw Sing Street and they texted their brother after.

Mark, your character is introduced by demonstrating that he can play ‘any instrument.’ Are you as musically talented?

Mark: Yeah, I like playing a lot, except the flute and the bagpipes.

Was there anything cut from that sequence in the film or are the bagpipes as crazy as it got?

Mark: Yeah, there was one thing that was cut. Basically what we did was cello-tape shakers to my hands and shakers to my knees and shakers to my ankles and I had to like sit and shake. I couldn’t actually sit there and do random stuff I had to actually have a beat, which is very hard to do because say if I move this arm, your whole body shakes too and it kind of made a bit of a sound.

So I think they’ve taken that out because it was too hard to actually come up with kind clean sounding beat; it kind of just looks a bit ridiculous in the end. I hope it gets caught on the DVD in the extras.

It would be something funny to see. I haven’t even seen how it’s turned out really because John doesn’t like showing your scenes straight after in case you go ‘Oh I wanna do it it again.’

Sing Street screened during the Sydney Film Festival. The film releases in Australian cinemas on July 14th.

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