When Cillian Murphy won the Oscar for Best Actor this past March for his work in “Oppenheimer,” it felt like the culmination of a long journey: he had gone from a respected character actor to an A-list star capable of anchoring a blockbuster movie. Any film lover had to wonder: what would Murphy’s next move be? How would such a respected performer follow up the role of a lifetime?
The answer is a powerfully gripping new drama called “Small Things Like These.” Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in small-town Ireland in 1985, who is deeply shaken by a visit to a local convent where young women are essentially being used as slave labor by the Catholic Church. (In fact, the convent is what in Ireland would be called a “Magdalene laundry,” an institution that took in unwed mothers for the ostensible purpose of helping them, but in reality exploited them for cheap labor.) Bill is appalled, but his desire to help the women brings him into conflict with a society still tightly controlled, in ways both explicit and implicit, by the Church.
For Murphy, the film wasn’t just a chance to explore a painful chapter of Ireland’s history, but an opportunity to work again with several of his most trusted collaborators. The movie was helmed by Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants, who had previously directed him in episodes of the series “Peaky Blinders.” His own wife, Yvonne McGuinness, suggested the novel by Claire Keegan as a good pick for their next project. And Murphy and Mielants chose to make the movie with Artists Equity, the production company of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, after Murphy befriended Damon on the set of “Oppenheimer.”
The result is a movie that earned rave reviews at its debut at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, and which Mielants is justifiably proud of. “Cillian Murphy starts acting and you get something like, what the fuck?” he says of his star. “Like, did we really get that?”
It’s a big step forward for Mielants, whose impressive resume includes directing episodes of such acclaimed TV series as “Tales From The Loop,” “Legion,” and “The Terror,” as well as an oddball comedy-drama called “Patrick” about a handyman searching for his missing hammer in a nudist colony. (“I thought it would be the end of my career,” Mielants says with a laugh. “And (Cillian) loves it.”)
Mielants spoke to Awards Focus about how heavily he storyboards his projects, the film’s minimalist soundtrack, and what Ireland’s acceptance of the Magdalene laundries says about the darker side of human nature.
Awards Focus: I love the creative mission and the vision of Artists Equity for tackling stories like this and “Air.” Can you talk about your early conversations with them and Mr. Murphy, and getting this greenlit?
Mielants: How this came about, it’s kind of a different way we approached it. So what happened is, of course, I know Cillian from “Peaky Blinders,” and then Cillian saw my first movie, “Patrick,” which is about a guy looking for his hammer in a nudist camp. I thought it would be the end of my career (laughs), and he loves it. And then he said, let’s do a movie together.
We’re looking for material, and it’s Cillian’s wife who came up with the book. She knows me very well, and she thought, “This is something for you, Tim, and you, Cillian.” So I read it, and I was resonating with its story of grief, which I always come back to in what I try to do.
And then I think Cillian was on set with Matt Damon on “Oppenheimer,” and Matt Damon says, I have a production company with Ben Affleck and this is the kind of movie we are looking to make. This is right up our alley.
And then I had like a couple of conversations with Ben, who wanted to know what I was after, and he was very supportive. And then during the editing process, Ben had some really, really smart notes that made the movie better. And Matt too, he was very supportive as well.
AF: I love the juxtaposition of the first time we see Bill washing his hands and the family’s gathered, and then the next time he’s revisiting the trauma and he’s just trying to scrub it away. It’s such a beautiful visual metaphor.
And there were so many stylistic choices that I loved. When he finds Sarah locked in the shed and she comes in and she gets cleaned, and then they’re in that office and you just hold on Cillian’s face while they’re having the dialogue with Emily Watson’s Sister Mary.
Can you talk about that choice to put the focus on Bill’s face in that scene? We’re seeing his internal conflict and the power of the church in this community.
Mielants: I think a lot comes together in that scene. First, I think the character of Bill Furlong is, you know, he’s a 45-year-old Irishman in 1985, you’re not allowed to talk about your emotions.
And then as a young boy, he lost his mother and has had trouble coping with it, and you get the scene with Michelle Fairley, where she says to him, like, okay, it’s been a week now. Tomorrow you go back to school. Forget about this.
So, there’s a big emotional wound, and he built like a concrete wall in front of him and he’s not able to share it. And there’s like a bursting volcano inside him all the time. So, that gave me the idea of the fire inside of him that finally starts to burst out. And he never dealt with this pain. Like, he never went in the convent. He never went to investigate what happened to his mother.
So entering this convent is kind of a metaphor for facing his traumas for the first time and being anxious about it. So it gave me some kind of creative license of making it slightly bigger than life.
Emily Watson walks this fine line between playing a very grounded person and still being slightly hyper-realistic, as if she’s part of his trauma, as if she’s inside of him. Of course, someone with her talent can pull that off.
AF: Were there any creative decisions during the shoot where you have a mental image of how it should look and then an idea from a cinematographer or someone with the lighting makes you think you should stage it a little differently? Was there a day on set where you found something you weren’t expecting and really ran with it?
Mielants: I think yes and no. I storyboarded it all, but I tried never to be a slave to it. But then all the time, Cillian Murphy starts acting and you get something like, what the fuck? Like, did we really get that? Check the gate, this is so incredibly good, it’s insane. So in one sense, yes, all the time. In terms of staging, no. So it’s yes and no.
AF: There’s a moment when Bill starts to break out of his shell and he wants to do what’s right and rebel against this injustice, and the way Emily Watson sort of senses that he’s on the verge of it, so she offers him that money. I think in the past, she could have just told him off, but she sensed there was that fire building, as you say. Is that a fair assessment?
Mielants: Yeah, yeah, well said. And she wants to get inside, because then she can give the money and then talk to the wife. Did you get the money? Oh, you don’t get the money? I think that’s what the Catholic Church always tried to do, get inside the family, be with them at the kitchen table without being there, but be present all the time.
AF: Do you feel like this might spark a larger conversation about how these injustices hide in plain sight, sort of the way the movie “Spotlight“ did?
Mielants: I think what the film communicates is this one thing, which is that when you’re silent, you are complicit. And I think that’s what you take away from it.
And I really believe it. If you’re silent, you are complicit. And that’s something really interesting to talk about or to think about these days.
AF: With a production schedule like this, how many pages are you shooting a day? Was it very energized on set?
Mielants: Oh man, I remember having huge arguments with the producer about that, telling him I don’t have enough time. And then after the movie, I just forget it. It’s like, it’s just erased. But I don’t know how many, I’d have to look it up.
AF: Can you talk about how you collaborate with your composer? Do you like to hear the cues early? Do you want to have some things written before you even shoot so you can set the mood on set?
Mielants: Yeah, I ask for music up front, before we start shooting. And I use it on set when we do like big camera movements. Or so that gives the guy who’s handling the dolly and the camera operator and me and the actor a certain kind of tempo, certainly when we do complicated shots.
But at the end, I almost never use that piece of music; it changes. I use that music in some kind of droning way because the intention was not to use music, but we felt like we needed something. And from the moment we put on strings or piano or whatever, it didn’t quite work because it was indulging the emotion too much.
A kind of electronic approach worked better. Therefore, because the movie feels so acoustic, it was two ideas on top of each other and not complementing or helping each other. So the soundtrack mostly comes from source sounds, like clocks or fire or whatever it is. And therefore the idea was, let’s make music that isn’t music.
AF: It’s more of a tapestry of the scene.
Mielants: Yeah, but it was very difficult because I did it with a mixer. It was very difficult because we want to be inside of it. And we didn’t want a sense of feeling the music and that the music seems like it has music on top of it. Then it feels like the music is trying to communicate something, and we were trying to avoid that.
AF: I wish you all the best with your Oscar campaign, because I love this film and really appreciate your work, Tim. Congratulations.
Mielants: Thank you, I appreciate it.