“My father was a cop in New York City and he’s Irish — and I grew up in a home where that sort of Irish heritage had weight to it,” the Long Island native told the Irish Echo in a recent phone interview. “My mother was Italian, but for some reason [it was] the Irish part I identified with, [that] was a bigger part of my life. My dad became a cop and I was surrounded by that world. A lot of his friends were police officers and . . . I grew up listening to a lot of stories and witnessing a lot of things that happen in the world of police.”
O’Connor directed his latest film based on a screenplay he co-wrote with “Smokin’ Aces” and “Narc” scribe Joe Carnahan and based on a story O’Connor and his twin brother Greg hammered out with Robert Hopes. Greg O’Connor also served as a producer on the movie.
Although his knowledge of the world he was trying to recreate on screen gave him a sense of confidence, O’Connor said that he also felt a real sense of responsibility to his subjects to get everything right.
“Accountability is a word that I would use,” he said. “I never felt pressured. I think I would feel more pressure if I was trying to put something up on the screen I couldn’t relate to or that didn’t feel personal to me. This was something that was very much inside me and I was comfortable with it.
“But in regard to the accountability, I had a specific story to tell,” the director continued. “[Cops] are the litmus test. They are the stamp of approval on a film like this, and it was important to me that we get it right, that we capture the world, the language, [and] the behavior correctly. That was something we were all going for, and I surrounded myself with cops on this film because the authenticity was crucial.”
O’Connor, whose previous films include “Tumbleweeds” and “Miracle,” said he screened “Pride and Glory” for a group of cops in New York shortly after he finished the movie.
“They were all very pleased,” he recalled. “It felt good.”
In the movie, Jon Voight’s character, chief of Manhattan Detectives Francis Tierney, asks his detective son Ray, played by Edward Norton, to investigate an ambush that killed four city cops. The dead officers had served under Ray’s brother Francis Jr. (played by Noah Emmerich) and alongside his brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (played by Dublin-born Colin Farrell). As Ray digs deeper into the case, he learns more than he wants to — and finds his loyalty to both the department and his family greatly tested.
“There were a lot of things going on in the world vis-a-vis institutional corruption, the corporate malfeasance that has gone on in the last several years, Abu Ghraib and the (U.S.) administration,” O’Connor explained. “I started thinking about how I always heard, ‘Cops bleed blue,’ and ‘The blue wall of silence.’ These are things you grew up hearing, being the son of a cop, and then I thought, what an interesting institution to explore this story I had in my head. The idea that cops bleed blue and the families of cops bleed red: what would happen when those two entities collide? And that was the genesis of it all.”
Helping O’Connor achieve the cinema verite-style look he wanted for the film was renowned Irish-American director of photography Declan Quinn. The brother of actor Aidan Quinn has worked on dozens of movies, including Irish offerings like “Breakfast on Pluto,” “In America” and “This is My Father.”
“Declan’s an artist,” O’Connor said. “A lot of cinematographers, have to be technicians, of course, and craftsmen, but what Declan brought was an artistry that I really wanted for this movie. I had a very specific visual design I wanted to realize, and I had a lot of conversations with Declan just about how I wanted the audience to feel when they saw the film. Declan was amazing at taking a lot of how I described things and visualizing them. . . . He had amazing ideas about how to bring this movie to life.”
“Pride and Glory,” which features two songs by jig-punk sensation The Prodigals, opens nationwide Oct. 24. The film’s Web site is www.prideandglorymovie.com.