Watch Me: A Memoir (31 page)

I called out to Dolyn and saw that he was preoccupied with his own horse, which also appeared to be sinking rapidly. “Hold on,” he called to me, “I’m coming.”

Annick was panicking now. It seemed we didn’t have a chance. Suddenly, Dolyn, in a flash of brilliance, managed to pull his horse onto a bank of brackish earth; the animal was covered in gray silt and shaking from exertion. My mare was sinking, almost up to her shoulders now and groaning; the effort she was making to free herself had left her exhausted. Dolyn sprang up the tree and started kicking violently at the overhanging branch. Unbelievably, it broke loose, so that it was now possible to make a concerted effort to get the mare out, although the possibility of extracting her still seemed very remote. I was convinced that she would break her back. Every attempt she made was met with failure; she was tiring, her breathing deep and hollow.

Dolyn was behind her, trying desperately to lift her buttocks out of the mud with his own brute strength, and I was at her head, pulling her bridle for all I was worth. In desperation, I said a prayer: “Please, God, get us out of this.” Prayer is an extraordinarily powerful thing. I am not Catholic, and I
do not pray as a rule, but these words escaped my lips uncensored by thought. And as sure as a miracle, the horse reared out of the bog water as if she had wings. I don’t know how she circumvented me, either, as I was directly in her path. She had leaped sideways across me to stand shivering on the edge of the swamp, her knees half buckled from the effort, but she was alive and mercifully unscathed.

Dolyn moved on to rescuing the remaining two animals, laying a platform of twigs and branches, attempting to give them a foothold. Together we motivated the horses to make the effort to save themselves. It seemed like hours, but it could have happened in a matter of minutes. Eventually, all the horses were safe on dry land. There is no question in my mind that God was looking down on us that day.

We limped back to the stables on foot, leading the exhausted horses behind us. We had washed them down in the river on the way home, but their tack was full of mud, and we were a mess. What might have happened was so dire that we could barely speak of it afterward.

*  *  *

Bob had made arrangements to fly in from Los Angeles. It was essentially two days of travel, and I would be working on the afternoon of his arrival. I sent Cristen to the train station, but when Bob arrived in Périgueux, there was no one there to collect him. Cristen told me that she had ducked into a café for a croissant and missed meeting him. Two hours later, he arrived at the farmhouse, having come all the way in the back of a taxi in a dreadful mood. He broke a pane of glass in the front door to get into the house. He always resented Cristen after that.

The truth was that Bob had the instinct of a greyhound
when it came to lies or duplicity. He was no doubt aware that I had developed a set crush, but he didn’t mention it. I was not in a confessional state of mind, and the romance wasn’t going anywhere. Dolyn and I were married to other people, and he was the father of a little girl.

After several days Bob relaxed and fell under the spell of Sarlat, and we made some wonderful outings to castles and churches and to see the guarded treasures of the caves—paintings on the walls in vegetable dyes of ocher and black, of bison, antelope, and oryx, and the earliest depictions of man ever drawn, so fresh they had a childlike quality, yet you could tell they came from the hand of a master.

As the shooting drew to a close, Bob preceded me to Paris. I was sad that the idyll in the Dordogne had ended, and I shed tears on the needlepoint tapestry I had begun in the early days of shooting. When I said goodbye to Dolyn, he reminded me of a conversation we had shared about Ireland. “Maybe your work there is not finished,” he said.

I took the train to Paris to join Bob. We were staying in the Meurice Hotel in a room with dark red wallpaper, overlooking the rue de Rivoli. I remember taking a long bath and falling into a deep sleep. It was difficult to resume my real life after working on
Ever After.
I felt like a racehorse after a liberating run, returning with silent resignation to her stable. I was aware I had brought this upon myself.

CHAPTER 29

I
was on Long Island at the Hamptons Film Festival when I ran into Jim Sheridan, the brilliant director of
My Left Foot
. “What are you doing here?” he asked. I invited him to see a special screening of
Bastard Out of Carolina
that evening. Afterward, over a Guinness, he said in his Dublin accent, “I think we should find something to do together. I could produce, you could direct.”

This sounded like a great plan. Jim had an idea for a film based on a novel called
The Mammy
, written by another Irishman, the comic Brendan O’Carroll, about a widowed mother of seven children. A few weeks later, Brendan was in my office in Venice, dressed like Jimmy Cagney in a straw boater, with a tiny black mustache.

After much deliberation, I had decided to offer the lead role of Agnes Browne to Rosie O’Donnell. I wanted the quality that Lynn Redgrave had brought years before to her part in
Georgy Girl
, and I had no doubt that Rosie would provide it.

Three weeks before going into production, I got a call from Jim. “It looks like Rosie’s dropping out,” he said. “We’d better go see her.”

Soon after, Jim and his co-producer, Arthur Lappin, and I were driving from the airport to Snedens Landing, Rosie’s enclave across the Hudson from New York. A pretty girl
called Kelli answered the door; Rosie was playing with two small children in the kitchen. She greeted us affably but seemed at a remove. My instinct told me that it would be a fatal mistake to embark on this endeavor with a reluctant actress. Jim attempted to capture her attention, and I rather lamely tried to persuade her that she was making the wrong decision.

On the way back into New York, we agreed that I’d blown it. “I think if you went after her again, we might get her,” said Jim, who has a reputation for being a pit bull when it comes to getting what he needs for a film.

I was obviously a disappointment in this regard. “I think we should look elsewhere,” I said.

It was evident that we had no time. It came down to a question of postponing or calling off the production entirely. Later that week, Jim called from Dublin. “What will we do?” he asked. “We only have a few days left to cast the part.”

“
I’ll
do it,” I said.

I knew that this idea had the potential to backfire, in that I had directed only once before, and the character of Agnes Browne would be on-screen throughout the movie. I was excited but also apprehensive as Cristen and I packed for Ireland.

My first days in Dublin were spent in production meetings with Arthur Lappin, moving into our offices near the Quays, finding a place to live, and assembling a cast and crew. On the first read-through, I was struck by two actors in particular: Marion O’Dwyer, from the Abbey Theatre; and Roxanna Williams, the little girl reading the part of Cathy Browne. There were two sets of twins in the script and seven children total, of various ages. I was cross-eyed when I came out
of casting sessions. Arthur Lappin finally had to sacrifice his delightful, ruddy two-year-old, James, for the part of Trevor Browne, simply because he was the most delicious baby in Ireland—and that’s saying something.

We had sent the script out with an offer to Gérard Depardieu, who had subsequently fallen off his motorbike and broken a leg. He did not feel he could do the film.

Ultimately, our casting director found a lovely actor, Arno Chevrier, also a Frenchman, to play the part of Agnes’s love interest, Pierre, the baker on Moore Street, where she has an outdoor stall. Agnes’s other passion in the film is for the singer Tom Jones. This posed something of a dilemma. Since the story takes place in the sixties, the question came up as to whether we were going to attempt to find a younger version of Tom Jones. My belief was that Tom Jones was iconic and impossible to replicate, and that soul and authenticity were more important than small details like the age of a character—my rationale being that, in any case, it was a fairy story. So I cast him.

Once again, I chose Tony Richmond as my director of photography. I had learned a lot from Tony on
Bastard Out of Carolina
, and I knew how important it would be to have his support and input on
The Mammy.
I trusted Tony’s instinct and admired his professionalism and expertise. On occasion, I would be in the makeup chair and unable to divide my time to line up the shots, so although it was not optimum, in several instances Tony would have to make directorial decisions for me.

Éva Gárdos, who had worked with me on
Bastard
, came from Los Angeles to set up our editing rooms in Dublin. The action in the movie centers on Agnes’s workplace, and we
had taken over a street in Ringsend on the south side of town to double for the famous vegetable market on Moore Street. It was quite a rough neighborhood, with betting offices and smoky bars. From the first day on set, it was evident that my work was cut out for me. It is understood when you shoot in Ireland that it is bound to rain at some time of the day, so every morning in anticipation we had to wet down the streets for the camera.

Jim Sheridan had handed most of the day-to-day production decisions to Arthur Lappin and visited the set only sporadically. I think that this decision was a gesture of respect, in that he did not want to tread on my feet.

I asked Paddy Moloney of the Chieftans to score the film. The last time I had seen Paddy was during our visit to Dad’s set on
Sinful Davey
in 1968, when, at age sixteen, I had danced a jig in a riding habit for a busload of visiting Russians.

While we were working in Dublin, some friends and I went up to Belfast one weekend to see Van Morrison play on a double bill with Bob Dylan. Van, in all his brilliance, wailed on saxophone. It was my first time in the North since the seventies. We stayed at the Europa Hotel, in the center of town, opposite bombed vacant lots and burned-out buildings. A very different story from the West, or the Wicklow Mountains, where sometimes we would meet up for Sunday lunch to hang out with Paddy and the Chieftains, or with Garech Browne and John Hurt and Marianne Faithfull at the Roundwood Inn, singing from lunch until nightfall.

It felt great to be back in Ireland, although this was a different place in many ways from the one where I grew up. Apart from that one short visit to Belfast, which was like visiting another country, I was unable to take the time to relax
or drive through the landscape, or to visit my old home, St. Clerans, in County Galway. Everywhere there was evidence of construction, and gated communities had sprung up aggressively on the outskirts of Dublin. Already there were signs that the economic gains trumpeted by the Celtic Tiger might collapse.

It was definitely a challenge to both star in and direct the film. I felt hampered at both tasks, and sitting in hair-and-makeup was irritating when I wanted to be on set, answering questions and setting up shots. The best times I had on set were with the children. Occasionally, I felt thwarted by a lack of enthusiasm from some of the technicians in the crew. I don’t think they liked being told what to do by a female director. Once, after spending hours on the simplest of special effects for a scene, I almost cried in frustration. The days were long and chilly, and I often had to change clothes on the street in a pup tent that housed the monitors.

*  *  *

Bob was in California and had just been commissioned to create the Great Bronze Doors for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles. It was to become the new home of the archdiocese and the seat of its archbishop, replacing the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, which was damaged in the Northridge earthquake. Bob and I were speaking on the phone daily. He told me that he was coming to see me while I shot the last couple of weeks of the film. I asked him not to. I was in my own world and wanted to savor my independence and not have to consider his needs. I had seen Dolyn again and was relieved not to be tempted to revive our romantic moment in the Dordogne. But Bob insisted on coming; he was suspicious. I felt that he
was invading my space. This led to Bob’s deciding that he would move to the Shelbourne Hotel for a week, until after the wrap party, and then, if I was game, we’d fly to Italy to stay at Marlia, Earl and Camilla McGrath’s fifteenth-century villa in Tuscany, and decide what, if anything, we needed to do about the state of our relationship.

When we arrived at Marlia, Bob and I spent a good deal of time walking in the gardens and talking about what had occurred between us. I decided from that moment that whatever might happen, thick or thin, I would be honest with him and do my best to be more considerate of his feelings.

*  *  *

When we returned to L.A., Éva Gárdos and I went into our former suite at Soundbox to begin the final cut. I had to brace myself every day before I went into the editing room to watch the film. I have always had trouble looking at photographs of myself, and even though Tony Richmond had photographed me in gentle light, it was hard to confront my own image in practically every scene.

Shortly after we handed in the film, word came that Jim Sheridan and October Films, having made a cut of their own, had decided that some reshoots and additional scenes could improve the film. Although it is not usual for a producer to commandeer a cut without the permission of the director, I agreed that we needed a scene to deepen the impact of Agnes’s losing her best friend, Marion. However, if we were to accomplish the work in such a short time, I would need Jim’s help as a director.

Jim hired a local cinematographer whom I was assured was top-notch. Jim helped me get through the work, and in just a few days we shot half a dozen additional scenes. But
when I got back to L.A. and viewed the footage, it looked like a different movie. Tony Richmond’s careful lighting looked luscious and golden compared with the new scenes, which looked crude, with a documentary pallor. It was evident that Jim and I did not share the same vision for
The Mammy.
Although I admired his films enormously, Jim was making tough movies about socioeconomic problems and the political atmosphere in Ireland, and I was making a fairy tale, an ode to the country I grew up in at a more innocent time.