Keeping faith

That film, “Not I,” a brief monologue starring Julianne Moore, was part of an ambitious cycle of filmed versions of all of Samuel Beckett’s plays, the long ones as well as the briefer works.
Moloney, in conjunction with Michael Colgan, artistic director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, had produced all of the Beckett films, which had been directed by a wide range of directors and writers, including, in addition to Jordan, such artists as dramatist Conor McPherson and the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan.
Speaking in the rich, deep tones of the native Dubliner, Moloney sat over coffee in the courtyard of a New York hotel on the morning of the day when “Breakfast on Pluto” was to face its first public audience as part of the 43rd annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and recollected the germination of his movie.
“Breakfast on Pluto,” as it happens, opens in New York today, with its Los Angeles premiere scheduled for next week.
“When we were finishing ‘Not I,’ Neil brought me Mark O’Rowe’s script for ‘Intermission’, which he thought we could produce together,” the youthful-looking 38-year-old Moloney recalled.
The pair did — in collaboration with Stephen Wooley, Moloney’s co-producer on “Breakfast on Pluto” — produce “Intermission,” with a cast, that included Colm Meaney, Colin Farrell, Brian F. O’Byrne and Cillian Murphy, the star of Jordan and Moloney’s new film.
Jordan had, of course, made the film version of McCabe’s best-known book, “The Butcher Boy,” and he kept abreast of the work the writer had done in the interim.
“Stephen and Neil had developed a script for ‘Breakfast on Pluto’ at about that time, but it had gotten sort of put on the shelf,” Moloney said. “A couple of other things came along for Neil that had come together more quickly. He went off and did ‘The End of the Affair’ with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne, and then he did ‘The Good Thief’ with Nick Nolte.”
As a project, however, “Breakfast on Pluto” was never dead, nor was it in the near-death state American film people call “turnaround.” It just, as Moloney puts it, “needed a little more time, a little more distance.”
Moloney had read the script and loved it. “We were at the Telluride Film Festival with ‘Intermission’, and Neil and I started to talk about ‘Breakfast on Pluto’ again. It must have been about two years ago now,” he said.
A couple of years earlier, Jordan and Moloney had tested a few actors for the role of Kitten, the transvestite at the heart of McCabe’s story. One of those young actors was Cillian Murphy, who became the frontrunner for the role in the projected film version of the book.
“Just at the point when we were talking about it again, some film project that Neil had been attached to got pushed back, and a window of possibility emerged,” Moloney remembered. “Cillian was doing ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ in Dublin with director Garry Hines. Neil and I went to see the play together and we took Cillian out afterwards. The subject of that window of possibility for that year, which was last year, came up. At one point, Cillian said: ‘If you want me, you’d better do it soon, before I get too old for it.’ This all took place around about February 2004.”
“Breakfast on Pluto,” as things worked out, was shot for the eight weeks of September and October 2004.
At that session in Dublin, Moloney had made a sort of casual deal with Jordan and Murphy. “The film that Neil was involved with was off until at least the beginning of 2005 so we all agreed to sort of give it a try,” he said. “I asked Neil to give me until May to see if it was possible to get the financing together, which he agreed to, and Cillian agreed to keep himself available. So that’s what we began to piece it together.”
At about this point, Liam Neeson came into the picture. As an old colleague of Jordan’s, he had agreed to take a role in the film if and when it ever became a reality. The same thing applies to Stephen Rea and Brendan Gleeson two other performers whose names, like that of Neeson, are helpful when it comes to raising money for a film.
“So I took the project to the Irish Film Board, and to Pathe’, and got a favorable response from them,” Moloney said. “The financing structure was very complicated, involving the Irish Film Board, Pathe’ and, as it turned out, the Northern Ireland Film Commission, because we chose to shoot up North as well. It was all very belt-and-britches stuff.”
By “belt-and-britches,” Moloney meant, as he explained, the project was “hanging on for dear life. It was very delicate, the whole operation, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we were under pressure time wise.” Time, to be sure, wasn’t the only problem confronting “Breakfast on Pluto.”
“I think the reality is that material like this is just very hard to get made,” he concluded. “This was an expensive film for that was basically a small, independent venture. When Pathe’ went to Cannes to talk about the film, people were interested, but a lot of them were really scared.”
The aspect of the film that inspired fear at Cannes was, of course, that the core of the story was an Irish transvestite who was, to put it mildly, not at all a tragic figure, and whose exploits author McCabe had based, to a degree, on Voltaire’s “Candide,” with it’s naive, idealistic hero at loose in a complicated world.
“It was a territory that Neil knows,” Moloney said. “It had all those elements from his previous work kind of coming together in this film. “
By “elements,” the producer clearly meant that Neil Jordan had, in 1992, made one of the cinema’s classic “gender-benders,” “The Crying Game.” It was probably the film’s implied sexual content that caused the very idea of “Breakfast on Pluto” to be regarded with certain nervousness at the start, but any apprehension about the film vanished quickly.
“Everybody knew how good the script was, so there was an incredible amount of positive energy right from the start. I think everybody who was involved was aware of the potential the project had,” Moloney said.
In a sense, “Breakfast on Pluto” was born during the filming of “The Butcher Boy.”
“Pat [McCabe] brought Neil a copy of the manuscript for the book and I think he knew that Neil would somehow see a film in it,” the producer said.
His own faith in the project was intense, right from the start, and he admits that he paid for it out of his own pocket at the start, before the financing came together.
“It was a considerable amount of money, and I could very easily have lost it all,” Moloney conceded. “There were times when I wondered why I was doing it, but then I’d read the script again, and I’d be reminded of all the reasons I wanted it to come to fruition.”
Moloney is still aware of the difficulties that were involved in making it all come together.
“There are 206 scenes in the script, and we had just 45 days to shoot it in, plus it was a period piece. It was a lot of work, with budget constraints, time constraints, and a lot of other pressures.”
If the quality of the script was a constant, so was Neil Jordan’s energy and enthusiasm. “I’d never seen a director like that,” Moloney said. “Liam Neeson described him as being ‘on fire,’ and he really was. He was utterly and deeply focused. He knew exactly what he wanted in every aspect and at every moment.”
Moloney, the son of a Dublin banker, thought at first that he might become a lawyer or a banker himself.
“I did go to UCD, where I studied economics, politics and philosophy, but I dropped out after the first year, because, in that year, I realized that actually I didn’t want to be doing any of those things,” Moloney said. ” When I was just 19, I realized that I wanted to have something to do with film or television, but I didn’t know exactly what or how.”
Now, to put it mildly, he knows.