Chloe Seager talks to Niall Heery, director of Gold…
Gold is a film that inserts itself like a 360-degree rotating microscope into a family home that is quaking under its less than stable structure. Maybe this is why it seems so fitting that the screenplay was written by a pair of brothers, Niall and Brendan Heery; though Niall assured me it wasn’t based on real-life experience. ‘I’m very glad it’s not autobiographical!’ he exclaimed thankfully. Perhaps the Heery family was not disrupted by an estranged father returning after twelve long years of absence, but the influence of the siblings’ shared experiences is clear in the writing. Niall described his father as ‘a keen athlete,’ much like James Nesbitt’s character Frank; ‘he used to wake us up and get us out of bed at 6am to go running of the beach – neither of us were interested!’ he joked. Niall also emphasized the advantages of such a high level of familiarity with a co-writer. ‘I enjoyed writing with someone,’ he said, ‘particularly my brother as we have similar tastes and can be totally insulting to one another without offending each other.’
Niall went on that this definitely made script development less isolating; ‘Writing is a lonely process compared to directing. Sitting around by yourself isn’t always much fun,’ he continued. His career actually began in writing, when he worked in script development and editing, but he made the cross over to directing with some short films in the early 2000’s. His first feature film (Small Engine Repair) was released in 2006. Niall expressed how helpful it is, in the transition from page to screen, to be directing the piece oneself; ‘As you go along in the writing process you’re constantly asking yourself questions like “what’s the objective of this scene?” and “how’s it going to look?”’ But no transition from page to screen can be completely smooth, he explained, highlighting ‘the scene with the river – that was very hard to source, seeing as we don’t have any white water rapids…!’ But more than that, ‘the prep was the most chaotic bit – finalising casting in particular.’
Niall knew from the start that casting the role of Abbie (Maisie Williams) was going to be the most difficult, as young actors and actresses have so much less experience. But as a Game of Thrones viewer he ‘was always impressed by Maisie, and how she could take control of a scene even at fourteen years old.’ When she came in to audition, she clearly didn’t disappoint; ‘We’d seen lots of other kids, but Maisie’s reading and her personality were both very strong, especially for someone so young,’ Niall praised. Having had Maisie in mind, casting the other lead role of Ray (David Wilmot) was a different story; ‘he wasn’t a preconceived decision at all. He’d never played a lead role before, but when he read, he connected with the character in a very truthful way.’
Ray’s character actually shares a lot of similarities with Doug (Iain Glen), the lead in Small Engine Repair. Niall’s interest in ‘people whom society might have written off, people who are alienated, but have a voice inside them and are trying to find their way’ is evident, and, with the huge emotional journey that Ray makes across the film, I was surprised to learn the scenes weren’t shot in chronological order. ‘It would be great to shoot the scenes in order,’ Niall said, ‘but it’s a luxury that can rarely be afforded. We shoot all over the place because you’ve got your actors flying in and out, and you have to work around it.’ In light of the movie’s focus on Abbie and Ray’s relationship, and with Williams and Wilmot’s on screen rapport, I was also interested to discover that the actors were cast individually; ‘we first met up and talked together a couple of weeks before shooting,’ Niall said. And so the years of thorny history unveiled between the actors in this intimate family portrait are actually built in a matter of weeks.
Gold is out now on DVD.
Chloe Seager
Originally published October 20, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
