Brendan Canty on directing Christy & slipping into Alison Oliver’s DMs
Brendan Canty brings us Christy, a touching Irish social realist drama that follows our titular 17-year-old (Danny Power) after he’s kicked out of his foster home and taken in by his estranged brother Shane (Diarmuid Noyes) on a temporary basis.
I assumed that this would be a dark and gritty drama the whole way through but there is so much heart, positivity and humour throughout, particularly as Christy finds his feet, his purpose as a hairdresser and his place in the community in Cork.
I had the absolute pleasure of chatting to Brendan about his wonderful film over Zoom. We talked about how he reached out to Alison Oliver about her role, the thought process behind that awesome music video in the credits and his future plans for Jamie Forde‘s scene-stealing character Robot.
Christy began as a short in 2019, and the synopsis is quite a bit different to the feature. How did you go about expanding the story? And what made you pivot in that direction?
The short was, I guess, all about the lack of confidence in young people… He was living with his brother; there were no parents on the scene, so the foster thing was a really loose backstory, which we found really interesting. Then, when we were making the short, we met kids in the care system, they helped on set, they were involved in The Kabin (Studio), where we cast a lot of these kids from. We just were really inspired by some of their stories, but also, Alan (O’Gorman), the writer, has experience working with kids from that background; his mum’s a social worker. When we knew we wanted to do something more with these people, that seemed like kind of an obvious way to go.
And a lot of the cast from the short came back for the feature. How did you come across Danny Power the first time around? And did he know he’d be coming back for a feature at the time?
He didn’t know he’d be coming back for a feature at the time. We came across them all through The Kabin. Someone recommended, when we were casting the short, that we look at the kids up The Kabin – Kabin Studios, they just teach kids how to make hip-hop up there. They were just sending us videos of all of these rappers and these young kids who were rapping, and it was just amazing kid after amazing kid. And Danny would have been one of the older generation, one of the first kids to come through there.
Funnily enough, we didn’t cast him as Christy first; there was someone else we cast as Christy, and that fella had to pull out. Danny was always our second choice, but when we gave him the part… giving him the part empowered him, and he just transformed; his confidence came out. Since then, he’s just been this phenomenal actor. We were always planning on doing a feature, but we had kind of parked it. Once we did the short film, it was people like Danny and these kids that inspired us to go make a feature. He wouldn’t have known straight away. We didn’t know. We had ideas to make a feature, but it was never a guarantee at all. He probably knew after the short that we were trying.
My favourite was Jamie as Robot. He’s hilarious; he cracked me up so much. Was he given more of the comedic stuff because that’s what he’s like in real life?
He’s definitely like that in real life. He’s just larger than life; he’s hilarious. You’ll give him a line and he’ll smash it. Him and the rest of those kids definitely gave the film its lightness and its comedic moments. But he can also be so tender as well. You know, when he says to Christy, ‘You have my number if you ever need to talk,’ and stuff like that. If anything, I wanted to explore more of that side of him, but we didn’t have space. Hopefully, in the future we will. We’re looking to do a TV show based on Robot now.
Oh amazing!
Yeah, yeah, ’cause he has such range and he’s just an amazing character to explore. Everybody loves him. He’s everyone’s favourite, and rightly so.
Like you were saying, I did love the comedic bits, but he seems so mature and grown-up.
Oh, he’s like a 60-year-old man, like (laughs). He is. He’s so funny, man, he’s so funny. Sixty-year-old man in a teenager’s body. He’s one-of-a-kind.
I cannot tell you how much I loved the music video at the end. It brought me so much joy to watch. I love their rapping; it’s so great. I imagine your music video background came into play, but I’d just love to know more about making that and why you chose to include it in the credits.
I miss films which had bloopers in the end credits and stuff like that, even just end credits that do something a little bit special. I always wanted the film to be hopeful, and it does have a hopeful ending. The ending is quite sentimental and the audience sits with that for a while, but I definitely wanted people leaving the (cinema) being joyous about this film. And also to just hammer home the amount of first-time actors and crew who are involved in this and just try and hammer home the vibe on set and stuff like that, because it was really important. That’s kind of what we wanted to do.
I came from a music video background, so music’s such a big part of it, but I actually didn’t make that music video. It was a young man called Sean Downey, who is a foster kid himself. I can say that because he’s over 18 now and he’s proud of that fact. He shadow-directed me throughout the film; he’d make all the videos for The Kabin and stuff like that, so we got him to direct that. It’s just cool now. He gets to see his music video in cinemas all across the world.
The only actor I personally recognised was Alison Oliver. How did she get involved with the project as her character only has a few scenes?
She’s from Cork, and she was a fan of the short film, I remember. When the character of a homeless young woman came up… it was quite late in the day, originally it was actually a homeless young man, but we flipped it. And I was like, who can we get to play that person? I just thought of Alison. I was like, ‘Ah, there’s probably no way she’ll do it, she’s such a rising star now.’ But I reached out to her. I slipped into her DMs and sent her about 10 voice messages, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s mental,’ so I deleted all of them and just sent her a message being like, ‘Can I chat to you about a role in Christy?’ And the next morning, I woke up to 10 voice messages from her. I was like, ‘She’s my type.’ We’re very similar.
She loved the short, and she loved the whole vibe, the whole ethos of it, and she was so happy to play second fiddle to these kids. She just wanted to be part of what we were doing in this community film and stuff like that. And she gave so much to it – not just to her part but also in support of some of the other actors and stuff like that. She’s so generous and such a supporter of the project.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Christy is now showing in UK and Irish cinemas. Read my review here.
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