FILMMAKER Darren Thornton admits his latest production, a film about Irish mothers, was unexpectedly hard to cast.
Following the huge success of their first feature film A Date for Mad Mary in 2016, brothers Darren and Colin Thornton have now written a new comedy-drama which was inspired, in parts, by their own experiences.
Four Mothers, which has received rave reviews at previews, is set for release in cinemas across Britain and Ireland this month.
Featuring Fionnuala Flanagan and James McArdle in lead roles, it tells the hilarious story of aspiring writer Edward (McArdle) who is forced to juggle four very different mothers, including his own, Alma (Flanagan), a stroke survivor who communicates via an iPad, over one chaotic weekend.
As funny as the film is, which is true to form for the Thornton brothers, it is also poignant, tender and has been a very personal project for the siblings.
The pair, who both live in Drogheda, Co. Louth, began writing it after the death of their mother, following a battle with motor neurone disease.
Four Mothers is based on the relationship between a gay man and his motherIn 2017 they had both returned to the family home in Drogheda to help care for her while she was unwell.
It was around this time that a producer contacted them about a film he wanted to remake.
That film was Gianni Di Gregorio’s 2008 Mid-August Lunch, which tells the story of a relationship between a man and his mother set against the backdrop of the group of women who are in his mother’s life.
“We watched the film and we loved it,” Darren Thornton told the Irish Post this week.
“We felt that it resonated with the moment that we were living in, spending all this time with our mum while there was lots of other family members and neighbours and friends, and other women, you know, of a certain age, who were hanging around our house too.
Fionnuala Flanagan and James McArdle star in Four Mothers“So, we would have spent a lot of time listening to the conversations in our house at the time, and that sort of found its way into what we wanted to do with the reimagining of the original Italian film.”
It was not until their mother had passed that the Thornton brothers set about writing a version of the film that they felt would work.
“The original film is beautiful and when we talked about what we wanted to do, we decided there is no point trying to replicate something that already works,” Thornton explains.
“So, we thought we would take it in a different direction, do a more scripted version of the film and bring our own biographical detail into it.
“In the way that the original film was very much about Di Gregorio’s relationship with his mother, we wanted our film to be very much about our relationship with our mother.
“So, when we started writing the script, the protagonist in our script became a middle-aged gay man.
“Our film was really about the very specific experience between a gay man and his mother, and gay men and their mothers in general.”
Gaetan Garcia as Raf and James McArdle as Edward in the filmOnce written the film needed to be cast, a task Thornton thought would be easier than it proved to be.
“It was really hard to cast the film,” he admits.
“That is one of the things that was sort of surprising about the film because when we wrote the women, we thought they would be easy to cast,” he explains.
“But a lot of people, actors that we put it out to, sent really nice letters back saying ‘look we really like the script but we don’t want to take this role because if we take a role where our capacity is diminished or we are in a wheelchair or we are a stroke victim all we will get after that is roles like that’.
“Now that is very interesting and makes a lot of sense when you think about it,” he says.
“So, there was a lot of that initially and then we realised sometimes the thing that you want is right in front of you.
“I had been watching something which starred Fionnuala Flanagan and we have the same agent so I made contact.
“We met and had a really nice meeting and everything started to work out from there.”
James McArdle, who has starred in the likes of Mary Queen of Scots, Mare of Easttown and Ammonite, was also signed up.
“James worked out similarly to Fionnuala really,” Thornton explains.
Four Mothers is part inspired by the Thornton brothers own experiences with their mother“One of the producers had seen him in Angels in America and mentioned him to me, so I had a look at things he had been in and loved him immediately.
“I had a great meeting with him,” Thornton admits.
“Chatting with him I got a sense that there were a lot of things that he was managing in his own life that were quite similar to where Edward our character was at.
“You tend to look for that a lot of times when you are casting.
“You try to find people who are very good actors but if you are lucky, you also get those who are just at a point in their life where emotionally something they are wrestling with is similar to what the character in the story is wrestling with.
“James really felt that in terms of his career and lots of different things that were going on for him.
“So that was great, and the rest of the roles fell into place quite quickly after that.”
Louth native Darren Thornton co-wrote Four Mothers with brother Colin ThorntonSo how much of what we see in Four Mothers is actually what the writers experienced?
“There are a lot of elements of our mum in Fionnuala’s character,” Thornton confirms.
“Although our mum did not have a stroke, our mum had motor neurone disease, which was quite different for us.
“Her being unwell, and then when we lost her in a compacted timeframe, over the course of a year, was a very painful and difficult time for us.
“The main thing that we took from the time that we spent with mum was the use of an iPad to communicate due to her loss of voice.
“That was quite profound for our mum at the time and that was the starting out point for us in terms of writing the film.
“We wanted to focus on what it meant for her to not have a voice for Edward and how each of them navigated that.
“So a lot of the comedy in the film from the iPad, that sort of absurdity in the midst of just pain and tragedy, all of this absurdity and comedy was what we wanted.
“Particularly with the iPad, that little device had represented so much pain for us with our mother, so in a way it was nice to get some revenge by being able to use this device as the primer for comedy in our film.”
Thornton admits writing the film has helped process the loss of their mother.
“It’s been very much a cathartic process for us,” he says.
“We didn’t start work on the script until we had lost mam.
“After that we were working on other projects but as we wrote we found we were writing lots of things that related to our mum in the scripts we were working on,
“That was not necessarily right for those scripts, so, we stopped what we were doing and said we obviously need to process this and write this.
“So we just threw ourselves into Four Mothers and it was very cathartic.”
It has been an emotional journey for the brothers as they relived some of their real-life moments on set.
“It was weird at times, you turned up on set and you recreated these moments which we had kind of lived, and all the detail was very very similar to what we had seen,”Thornton explains.
“You are there on set with 20 people looking at this moment and you are kind of transported back to the actual moment that inspired it.
“So yeah, that was an interesting time but it never got too much.
“I did wonder would that happen, but it didn’t.
“I think because the reality of filmmaking is that you are so under pressure to get it done that you can’t really disappear in that way.
“It never became too overwhelming.”
Four Mothers will be released in cinemas across Britain and Ireland on April 4.
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