If you've been holding your breath since the news arrived in 2023 that Cillian Murphy was making author Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These for the big screen, and then really began counting down the days when it had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, well, you can now stop with the maths and exhale. The wait has been worth it, as you'll see from Friday. And the most relieved person of the lot is the star and producer who is bringing it all back home - in more ways than one.
For his first film since he won Oscar gold for Oppenheimer (and in a performance every bit as special), Murphy has set himself another huge challenge: to do justice to a 2021 novel that's already regarded as an Irish treasure for the ages and at the same time pay tribute to the many thousands of young women and the children who were taken from them in Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and mother and baby homes. All this while knowing that the finished film would have to measure up for the toughest audience of the lot: us. It does. And how.
"Every film is kind of nerve-wracking, you know?" says Murphy when asked if this is the most pressure he has felt on a set. "Like, it's the director's vision, but it takes so many different people to realise that vision. And I think for me there was an added responsibility with the book because the book is a masterpiece and the book has resonated so deeply with everybody that reads it, particularly in Ireland. But you can't go into it thinking like that. You have to try and just go, 'We'll do the best we can here and get the best team we can'. But there's definitely a weight of responsibility with this book."
A snow globe of a story on paper and now on screen, Small Things Like These takes us back to New Ross, Co Wexford, in December 1985. There, fuel merchant Bill Furlong (Murphy) tries to piece together the jigsaw of his own life after delivering coal to the local Magdalene Laundry. It's a regular run, but something has changed within him. And for Bill in 1985 and the viewer in 2024, a certain William Faulkner line carries the same weight - the one about how the past is never dead because it's not even past. Ultimately, the film, like Keegan's book, is part of a healing process - and Murphy reveals that he has heard Magdalene stories "everywhere" since he began working on Small Things Like These.
"It's kind of a collective trauma I think that we all went through in the country and that we're all still recovering from," he says. "It's a very simple book, right? It's a very simple story, but the message of the book and how complex it is... it runs deep. We did feel that."
"Every Irish person has some story," he continues. "It seems to me, if you're not directly [involved], it's someone they know or it's their mother or their aunt. It's someone that they didn't realise was sent away."
Crucially, in honouring these stories, Murphy has made sure he is among friends. The director of Small Things Like These is Peaky Blinders' Belgian helmer Tim Mielants; Murphy has enlisted Disco Pigs playwright Enda Walsh for the screenplay and has finally reunited with his Disco Pigs co-star Eileen Walsh after all these years; his Oppenheimer castmate Matt Damon is a producer on Small Things Like These alongside Ben Affleck.
"It was finding all the people that you know you can trust but are also the best at what they do," he explains. "Working with Eileen and working with Enda and Tim - that was amazing to be able to do that, call in all these favours. I think it was the correct decision to have a Belgian director on this film. Peter Mullan directed The Magdalene Sisters; when we did The Wind that Shakes the Barley, it was Ken Loach. I think sometimes an outsider's perspective on a very, very distinctly Irish story can be very useful."
Small Things Like These marks the first movie from Big Things Films, the production company Murphy has set up with another friend, Alan Moloney. It feels like the first of many - and after the experience of making Small Things Like These, Murphy is determined to tell plenty of distinctly Irish stories in the future.
"It'll be a case-by-case basis, but, like, myself and Alan Moloney, we're both Irish! I hadn't made a film in Ireland for a long time, so it was really nice to come back. It will be story-specific, but we'd definitely like to make more films in Ireland."
"I really want to," he smiles. "It's just easier to get home."
Small Things Like These is in cinemas from Friday 1 November.
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