ANAHEIM, Calif. — It’s two days after Colm Bairéad attended the 2023 Oscar nominees luncheon and the Irish writer-director of “The Quiet Girl” is still processing his first time at the star-studded annual event.
“Was that a dream? I’m not sure if that actually happened,” Bairéad says, laughing, when asked about his social media photos with such luminaries as Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro, as well as with a flock of his fellow Irish nominees from “The Banshees of Inisherin.”
“I’m glad there’s photos to prove that actually happened,” he says. “But yeah, what an experience, meeting all these sort of giants of cinema and just personal heroes of mine. It was an extraordinary, just a beautiful occasion.
“There’s a real sense of community, you know. You feel like you’re part of something.”
That Bairéad and “The Quiet Girl” joined the community of Academy Award hopefuls this year speaks to the powerful, moving beauty of the first-ever Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar; it’s a nominee for best international film.
It’s a small, delicate story, told through the eyes of 9-year-old Cáit, withdrawn and overlooked in her large, dysfunctional family. When another baby is due, she’s sent to live with distant relatives, a childless older couple with a painful secret in their own family, where over the summer she finds affection and happiness.
“The Quiet Girl,” or “An Cailín Ciúin” as it’s titled in Irish, is Bairéad’s feature film debut after working mostly in nonfiction filmmaking until now. There’s a documentarian’s eye for small, beautiful moments in this new film, and it’s a fellow documentary filmmaker, the Northern Irish director Mark Cousins, whose words inspired Bairéad to find the story in this subtle tale.
“He says, ‘Art shows us again and again that, if we look closely and openly at a small thing, we can see a great deal in it,’” Bairéad says. “So that was kind of like my mantra in the making of the film. It’s a kind of miniature, but if you give yourself to it, there’s actually a great deal in there, and there’s a real power to it.”
Through a child’s eyes
Five years ago, Bairéad happened upon an article in the Irish Times that listed the 10 best works of Irish literature by women authors this century, he says. On that list, he found a novella that in time he adapted for “The Quiet Girl.”
“‘Foster’ [by Claire Keegan] was on it and for whatever reason, I honed in on that one title and went out and [got] the book that day,” Bairéad says.
He and his wife, Cleona Ní Chrualaoi, producer of “The Quiet Girl,” had recently become parents and were expecting a second child when Bairéad read the book.
“We were very much in that parenting mode and having that very profound understanding of what it is that a child needs from you as a parent,” he says. “And then to encounter this fictional child who wasn’t receiving those things, it just sort of prompted this response in me that was one of compassion and sort of desire to shelter this child in some way.”
The smallness of the story both thrilled him with its intimacy and challenged him as a filmmaker.
“I loved the sort of modesty of it in a way,” Bairéad says. “And yet the fact that if you tune into the frequency of it, it’s almost as big as life itself at the same time. That strange contradiction.”
From the filmmaker’s perspective, though, Keegan’s “Foster,” which was published in an abridged version in the New Yorker magazine in 2010 and has since been published as a book here in the U.S., presented challenges in its choice to favor character over plot.
“I knew the answer was evident in the source material, which is like a story that’s told in the first person,” Bairéad says. “So I knew that the film had to emulate that and had to place the audience into the shoes of this young consciousness. It’s a gamble of sorts, but I did feel like an audience will remember what it feels like to be a child.
“We remember what it’s like to be in an unfamiliar place or to feel fear or feel confusion,” he says. “Or not quite understand the dynamics of particularly adult relationships in your life. And then to feel positive things. To feel joy and to feel safety and to yearn for certain things.”
Casting Cáit
With a film that sees its world through the eyes of its 9-year-old protagonist, finding the right child actress to play the lead was critical. In Catherine Clinch, now 13, Bairéad found his Cáit.
“It took a while, about seven months to find her,” he says. “Obviously, the first consideration was we needed someone who could speak the Irish language. So we focused very much on Irish-language communities, which are very small.”
Clinch, however, was discovered in Dublin in an Irish-immersion elementary school where all subjects are taught in the land’s native tongue, Bairéad says.
“Catherine’s mom sent us a video on her iPhone of Catherine performing some scenes in the film,” he says. “She was just incredible. In that first tape, we could really see that she just had this very deep understanding of the character.
“You could see how she was withholding so much in a beautiful way, and in a way that the camera loves to observe,” Bairéad says. “This was someone that’s almost afraid of exposing too much of themselves emotionally, and yet in a contradictory sense, she had this beautiful willingness to allow the camera to observe that, and see her in that kind of vulnerable though guarded state.”
As director, Bairéad says he didn’t really treat Clinch differently than the adults in the cast.
“I suppose with adult actors you might be able to discuss things on a slightly more intellectual level or with some greater degree of insight into the history of things or how Irish society was at the time,” he says. “And you wouldn’t go there with Catherine. You’re trying to keep her more in the present tense in the same way that the film is trying to adopt this present tense point of view.”
At the Irish Film and Television Academy Film & Drama Awards in March 2022, Clinch won best actress over four adult performers. Her work in “The Quiet Girl” contributed greatly to other awards the film won there, including best film and best director in a competition that included Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast.”
“Her ability to take directions is really extraordinary,” Bairéad says. “I would say of all the actors, she had the least amount of takes throughout the movie. Which is kind of extraordinary.”
Speaking Irish
In different hands, “Foster” might have been adapted as a film made in English, the language in which Keegan wrote it. But Bairéad, who was born in 1981, the same year in which “The Quiet Girl” is set, has a long history in Irish-language narrative shorts and documentaries.
When the Irish-language broadcaster TG4 joined with other Irish state broadcasters to develop Irish-language cinema, Bairéad says he started looking for material he could pitch for their funding.
“I have a very personal connection to the language in that I was raised bilingually in Dublin City and my father has never spoken English to me, he always speaks Irish,” he says. “I did all my schooling through the Irish language and a lot of my work life has been in the Irish language.
“So when I read ‘Foster,’ one part of my brain was always asking the question, ‘Can this story be told in an authentic setting whereby the Irish language can be incorporated?’” Bairéad says. “And the answer was, thankfully, yes, completely, because the Irish language is only spoken really in rural areas (such as the film’s setting) as the everyday language.”
The film’s international acclaim is both wonderful and unprecedented for an Irish-language film, Bairéad says. In addition to the Oscar nomination, “The Quiet Girl” won a pair of awards at the Berlin International Film Festival last year.
“But almost more importantly, it’s been embraced at home by Irish people,” says Bairéad of the box office success that made “The Quiet Girl” the highest-grossing Irish-language film ever. “Because most Irish people can’t really speak Irish and yet most Irish people will tell you that they would love to be able to speak it.
“There’s a great sense of enthusiasm at home and sort of national pride associated with the fact a film made in our own language is doing so well,” he says. “It was extraordinary how it sort of tapped into something kind of elemental in Irish society."
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