TIFF Interview: Brooklyn Director John Crowley on His Coming-of-Age Tearjerker
The new film Brooklyn has become one to watch for this awards season, not only for the outstanding performance by Saoirse Ronan as Irish immigrant Eilis (although she is pretty phenomenal in the role), but because the gentle period drama about a young woman coming of age is all around good filmmaking that dares audiences to stay dry-eyed.
Along with Ronan, the film stars Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters as it follows Ronan’s journey from being a girl sent away by her family to a woman who chooses where to make her home. During Toronto International Film Festival, we spoke with John Crowley about the crowd-pleasing film, which is currently playing a number of major international film festivals (including Calgary, Chicago, Mill Valley, New York, and London) before its November release. *There are some spoilers in the interview if you have not read the book.
Lesley Coffin (TMS): I know that you describe the story as representing the history of Irish immigration. Do you have a personal immigrant story in your own family like Eilis’s?
John Crowley: Well, I immigrated to England as a young man, but it wasn’t under the same circumstances as Eilis. I left Ireland when I was 27 to work in the London Theater, so London is now home. And I grew of a generation in Ireland, assuming that I would one day immigrate. But the truth is, what was so powerful about this story for me was that it got absolutely right the idea and emotion behind that idea that when you leave home and move to another country, you obviously aren’t from that country you now live in, but when you go home to the country you were born, that isn’t home either. And you become part of third race, which is in exile.
And the novel got that emotional truth right more than anything else I’d read before. And I was very struck by that myself, and the same thing happened to Saoirse years later when she read the script. I didn’t leave Ireland because of economic problems necessarily. I had a successful theatre career there. I moved to London because I was offered a wonderful opportunity to work in the National Theater. So I went over at 27, still a young age but professionally secure. But I was struck by how very, very homesick I was, which didn’t make any sense to me, because I was going over and back all the time. And there were no problems, but it was what I’m talking about. A split opens up inside you when you no longer live in your homeland.
TMS: The family obligation and pull back to them Eilis feels is large, but she has the security of having a sister that is home, taking care of their home and their mother. Did you have siblings who stayed home while you went to London?
Crowley: I had that experience, being the youngest in the family. But my father was still alive at the time that started directing plays and he made it very, very clear to me that I should go do whatever it was I wanted to do with my life. And he was very proud when I started directing theater. And that is partly informed by the fact that my older brother Bob had immigrated in the 70s, and he had gone to England to work in the theater.
But when he went, it really was a case of economic necessity. Ireland became a very different country during my generation for the youth, and it became a country that you could live in and make a living in the arts. For me it was a choice, which was why that emotional reaction was so confusing. But I was never made to feel the obligation to go back home and look after my parents. I had an older sister who was still back in Ireland, and still is back in Ireland. In the novel, and a little bit in the film, Eilis is sent away by her older sister because she can kind of see that there is nothing there for her. It isn’t Eilis looking at her options and making the choice.
And in a lot of ways, the story is about a young woman who isn’t in control of her own destiny at the start of the film who turns into a rather powerful and wonderful young woman who has a strong sense of what is right and wrong, and chooses what she wants in her life. And that is very different from how she started in the story, with the priest and her sister taking responsibility for her. Things were happening to her in this passive way. But by the end she’s like a diamond with all these interesting facets cut into her by life. But I hope that is the experience people have while watching, that it is a beautiful experience to see her emerging.
TMS: Ultimately, she has two options at the end of the film that she has to choose between. Because she spends less time in Ireland, were you concerned about how to make Ireland as likely and reasonable a choice as it would be to go back to America?
Crowley: Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head, because that was a central issue in how we would tell the story, and the casting, and finally the editing of the film. How to get that balance right? Because if one is clearly the more viable choice, then it simply won’t work. We were very lucky with Domhnall Gleeson agreeing to play Jim, because he’s such an interesting actor and gave Jim a dignity and stillness, but didn’t shy away from the character’s humor or being the butt of the jokes occasionally. And it is very particular and he looks fabulous in the role, and it was a very different character from anything he had done before.
So he really wanted to take that on, and he understand that his job, even though he had very few scenes to do it, was to shift the center of gravity towards him. Part of you should want her to stay with him, which is an odd thing to do as a storyteller. The first part of the film is creating an emotional stake for this character, which has to do with her isolation and loneliness, and then she seems to find a degree of happiness when she has begun to take on the world a bit more. So it isn’t just the guy that has made her happy, he was part of that upward swing.
So we think, it’s a love story, and then we sort of park that for a while and introduce this other guy. And how to keep that going without making her look like she’s two timing or being unfaithful was also a concern. How to bring an audience gradually into her dilemma. That was front and center the entire way through.
TMS: And the other issue is the idea that the guys have to be representative of the choice she’s making about her entire life; work, home, family. Because it would feel wrong if the primary concern had been just her choosing between two guys. It would have felt flat and kind of predictable. How did you ensure that it didn’t become a predictable love triangle.
Crowley: Part of that was about the ideas of America and home. In the Irish psyche, America looms very large as this kind of mythic place. There is an element of the Camelot myth that has to do with the Kennedys. Not in the 50s of course, but certainly in my generation. But the idea that you could go over on a famine boat and in a few generations, you could have child that would become the president of the United States. When she comes back from America, she almost has a bit of the Kennedy air about her. She reflects those myths back in Ireland.
When she comes home, of course she’s grief stricken by the loss of her sister. But she has battled through a lot in America, which is the otherness and the fact that the Irish community in Brooklyn doesn’t make her feel more at home. Its people playing an exaggerated version of Irishness, almost kitsch. And the idea of what home means, being around her mother, and friends, and back in her own room. All that is very seductive to her. It’s a bit like being in the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz. She gets a bit sleepy in Ireland, the security of the childhood memory lures her into thinking she can have this life while being in denial about the commitments she had made in America when she was opening herself up.
That is what stops it being just about what man she chooses. What she’s woken up from by Ms. Kelly, who does her a big favor in that scene, as a small-minded, nosy, shaming voice. Which she realizes is something very central to living here, and that is not what she has to deal with in America. So at that moment, the film tips its hat a bit for her to get out. Because I remember that when I was reading the book, more than any Thomas Harris thriller, in the last 60 or 70 pages, I was almost breathless about her choice. What will she do? And I wanted to capture that. And for me, it wasn’t that the men represented their respective places.
I thought if we could make each man as specific as possible and understand their circumstances, the film would be posited on a number of pairings. There is Jim in Ireland, in a lovely big family house. And there is Tony, in a new house on the Island. Every scene has an equal and opposite scene. It’s about doubleness or that mirror reflection that split in her soul as an immigrant. When something opens up, it can’t just be healed by going home. You can’t step in the same river twice, she isn’t the same person when she comes back. This is the story of her becoming an adult, and that is about making choices, and when you make one choice you aren’t making another choice, and it doesn’t always mean happily ever after. And it means a certain amount of cauterizing wounds that will never heal.
TMS: The mirror analogy is interesting, but I have to ask what the mirror reflection was of her family back in Ireland in America?
Crowley: It is what she’s offered by Tony’s family and by the fact that the importance of family is very strong in Catholic, Italian American, like the Irish. Tony knows there is a danger of losing her when she goes back home, because he understands that draw to go back home to her family. And he know it has nothing to do with her love for him, he just gets it. So that is why, when he takes her to Long Island, it is a very important scene in their relationship.
There is a wide vista, almost like a western, and he’s telling her, “This future is ours to make if you want it. My family is giving us the other plot.” So there is a support network for her in Tony’s family. And that can also be constraining, and she runs up against that in the dinner scene. The assumption that they will get married and have kids, and she has to say “hold on, I’m not ready for that.” And she has to find her space, which is what I find fascinating about her character, she is able to quite clearly, without lapsing into anger or being a victim, articulate her way through the world and say what is right for her emotionally or what is not right for her.
But what is being suggested is that she can start her own family in America and that will never replace her mother or her sister, but it is another. And it’s a choice, it’s a forward choice.
TMS: There is a lot of talk about work in the movie. Her jobs in stores and her desire to be a bookkeeper is front and center, and the film of course is set right after World War II, when a lot of women who had worked through the war and returned to working in the home to raise families. Did you have to consider what work would have meant for a girl like Eilis in this era?
Crowley: What was more on my mind was what was going on in Ireland in the 50s. And this was the second of three great waves of immigration, the first being post famine, the second being post war, and the third being the 80s. So she was just the generation above me, and in terms of the choices available to young people at the time, and this was something the novel handled very deftly, that Ireland was suffering under ruinous and catastrophic economic protection policy. And it would years before that was shaken off, but its chief export were young people, but this wasn’t much spoken about because immigration was regarded as a shaming fact. And there are probably very few families who haven’t been touched by immigration.
It was, in a lot of ways, the defining fact of life in Ireland and it could be mitigated if they came back from America with lots of money. But the vast majority did not. They went to America and they stayed, and worked for their entire lives, and maybe they raised children or maybe they didn’t. But at the start, all she has in Ireland is this part time job in this shop, and at some level, her older sister, who is the bright spark in the family, the one who got a job and has a life.
Interestingly, in the novel, she’s 30, and there are only the two daughters, but there are two brothers who have gone to America before Eilis, but haven’t married. We left them out of the film, and it’s almost as if Rose sacrifices herself to get Eilis out of Ireland. That she doesn’t choose to immigrate herself, but instead organizes with Father Flood she plays golf with to get Eilis out, as if she knows there is nothing here for Eilis.
TMS: Rose is only in the film for a brief time but her connection to Eilis looms large, because there really is no rivalry or jealousy between them regarding the opportunities one has over the other.
Crowley: Not at all, they just share a very deep, uncomplicated love. But what is so heartbreaking is the sense that in sending Eilis off, Rose knows this is the end, they will not see each other again, and there is the insinuation that she knew she was sick when she sent Eilis away. But in lots of ways, there is the sense that she is sacrificing herself for her sister, standing in the door saying “it’s fine, you can go, I will take care of mother here.” But she’s not quite telling the truth.
But also, whatever the story is as to why she’s still single, even though she’s 30 and commented on being beautiful, she seems to have chosen not to engage in that part of life, which is rather interesting. It’s almost as if, even if she can’t get out, she’s going to make sure the younger ones can get out and have a life of their own. And we learn that she was always very kind to new players at her golf club, and Eilis is like that as well. There is a natural kindness in them. She’s kind to Dolores, even though Dolores is a nightmare and even Eilis gets to the point where she can’t spend any more time with her. And we see that from Eilis in the last scene as well.
There are a handful of scenes in this movie of kinder, more experienced women speaking to younger, less experienced women and passing on mostly helpful hints, and only occasionally being mean. And there is a sense that we are looking at young women without the education or ideology of how to negotiate their way through this paternalistic society.
Lesley Coffin is a New York transplant from the midwest. She is the New York-based writer/podcast editor for Filmoria and film contributor at The Interrobang. When not doing that, she’s writing books on classic Hollywood, including Lew Ayres: Hollywood’s Conscientious Objector and her new book Hitchcock’s Stars: Alfred Hitchcock and the Hollywood Studio System.
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