Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon were in a bunker in the New Mexico desert at 4am, passing time on the set of Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer. Damon told the Irish actor about a new production company he’d set up with Ben Affleck. Murphy, in turn, told Damon about a company he’d founded with a friend in Ireland and his idea to turn Small Things Like These, a novel by the Irish author Claire Keegan, into a movie.
“I pitched Matt the idea in the desert during that night shoot and he loved it,” Murphy says . “Matt’s got such great taste because he’s a writer, a really good film-maker and he gets story, so he really understood it from the beginning.”
Murphy is out of the desert and talking to me in the more hospitable surroundings of a hotel room in London, where he’s holding court on the eve of the release of Small Things Like These. Beside him in the room is Tim Mielants, the film’s Belgian director, who was involved in the project long before Damon got wind of it — and long before Murphy won the Academy award for his performance as the father of the atomic bomb.
“This was set up before Oppenheimer came along,” Murphy explains. He had established Big Things Films with the producer Alan Moloney and was looking for their first project. “Tim and I worked together on Peaky Blinders. Tim came to visit me in Dublin and we were talking about what we might
do together. My wife suggested a story by Claire Keegan.” Another Keegan story, Foster, had been adapted into a movie, the Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl), and Murphy assumed the rights would be gone for Small Things Like These.
“But the rights were available — and then it just happened really quickly. Tim read the story and loved it. I gave it to [the scriptwriter] Enda Walsh. He loved it.” When Damon’s production company joined the team, “it happened really quickly”, Murphy continues. “It seemed to all of us that it could make
a perfect film. We always knew it would be a small, gentle, poetic film. But if we got it right, it could be special.”
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Small Things Like These is indeed special. It tells the story of a coalman, Bill Furlong, from New Ross in Co Wexford in the 1980s. Furlong is a stable family man who is troubled in his quiet moments by the death of his mother during his childhood. When Furlong encounters the horrors of a Magdalene laundry, the church’s institution for unwed mothers, he feels compelled to take action, even if this comes at great personal risk. Murphy is masterly as Furlong, amid Mielants’s gothic depiction of Ireland’s dark past.
“I felt a really personal connection with the story,” the director says. “I lost my brother when he was fairly young and when I was really young and it was a traumatic event. At the centre of this story is grief. Going through that grief process with an actor like Cillian was an amazing opportunity.”
Murphy: “We always knew it would be a small, gentle, poetic film”
ENDA BOWE/LIONSGATE
Small Things Like These was shot on location in New Ross in early 2023, seven months after Oppenheimer wrapped. “I hadn’t made a film in Ireland or an Irish story in a long time,” Murphy says. “To be in Ireland was wonderful.” J Robert Oppenheimer and Bill Furlong are very different, but both characters deal with torturous internal struggles. Murphy shrugs. “I’ve never drawn parallels but I’m always interested in characters grappling with big decisions. This is a tiny story but it’s so complex. There’s so much going on. It’s like the title says — it’s an accumulation of small things and small events that lead to a huge event.”
There was method in Murphy’s decision to ask a non-Irish director to help him tell a very Irish story. “I wasn’t carrying the heavy weight of Irish history on my shoulders all the time,” Mielants says. However, the director could relate to a nation under the thumb of the church. “I come from Flanders, where healthcare, education and the moral compass was dominated by the Catholic church. We are digging up our dirt in a very similar way.”
Mielants previously directed Wil (2023), a haunting wartime drama on Netflix about occupied Belgium during the Second World War. There are relatable parallels here too. Ireland — and Irish women in particular — were occupied by the church for decades. Murphy agrees. “I think Joyce said the Irish were colonised twice: once by the British and once by the church.” Both Wil and Small Things Like These explore questions of complicity. To what degree did the Irish population ignore what was happening in the Magdalene laundries? Was the complicity of silence necessary in order to survive? In the film Bill Furlong’s wife tells him: “If you want to get on in life, there are things you have to ignore.”
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Murphy relished exploring these themes. Small Things Like These also gave him an opportunity to work closely with old friends. “I’m obsessed with recollaboration,” he says. “I’ve worked with Chris [Christopher Nolan] six times.” He and Moloney first worked together on Intermission in 2003 and have done so many times since. Murphy also reunites with Enda Walsh and Eileen Walsh (who plays Furlong’s wife) for the film. All three had their break at the same time in 1996 via Disco Pigs, Walsh’s two-hander stage play.
Murphy in Oppenheimer
UNIVERSAL PICTURES/AP
“That play [first staged in the actor’s home city of Cork] totally changed the direction of my life,” Murphy says. “We didn’t know that Enda was going to be an incredibly important playwright. We were just kids. We were always hanging out and going to the pub. I’ve done four or five projects with Enda now. Me and Eileen have worked together, obviously. You’re going to get the richest results with people that you know and trust.”
I met Walsh a couple of days into the Small Things Like These shoot in early 2023 and the writer was effusive then about the project and his relationship with Murphy. “It’s an amazing book, one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, and it’s a real gift for all of us to tell the story and make it for film. Myself and Cillian have made a lot of work together. We’re good friends and I keep returning to working with him because he’s an extraordinary theatre actor — one of the best — an absolute animal. He’s funny and he likes to take a risk.”
Trust is clearly everything for Murphy, though. Why so? “I find it more difficult with people that I haven’t worked with before. Obviously I do it, but my ideal situation is to work with the same people that I love working with because then you feel safe.” Mielants is now a big part of Murphy’s collaborative circle. “We got on really well. I think we make each other laugh and we’re both failed musicians,” the actor says, laughing.
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Murphy and Mielants made another movie this year under the Big Things Films banner: Steve, a forthcoming adaptation of a Max Porter novel about a head teacher at a reform school. They are not working together on the Peaky Blinders film, which is currently in progress. “Tim’s not on that movie, no,” says Murphy. “I’ve already been there!” the director replies.
Have things changed for Murphy since winning the best actor Oscar for Oppenheimer this year? “Genuinely, honestly, no. But if it helps in any way [to produce more Big Things Films work], that’s great. If it can help getting the stories told, brilliant.” He would like to tell more Irish stories too. There’s certainly no shortage of literary work in Ireland to adapt for film, I suggest. “That’s true,” he says. “We are so lucky in Ireland. It’s extraordinary.”
Small Things Like These is in cinemas from Friday
This post was originally published on here
