"Once" stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová with director John Carney

Hansard formed The Frames in 1990, as part of Dublin's expanding rock scene. Merging folk with rock, the band maintains a balance between energetic and pacific through Hansard's crisp songwriting, authentic vocal delivery and the simple yet somehow original song structures.

"Once" is a very matter-of-fact tale of a street musician who meets a girl, a Czech immigrant played by Markéta Irglová, near Dublin's city center where she inspires him both with love and with music. But as the film merges two love stories--one about his love of music and the other his love for a woman--it becomes neither a concert film or strictly a love story. There are performances and touching sequences but they never become too melodramatic or predictable. And since Glen Hansard's music is so great, this makes for a fine debut.

Q: So, John, your attempts at being a folk-rock singer failed; is this where your film career emerged from?

John Carney: So I always played music. Then I met Glen when I left school and I joined his band and we played together in The Frames for a few years. But basically I got bitten by the whole film thing and I went off to try and seek my fortune as a film director in Ireland which is kind of an odd thing to do at the time because it was pre-Irish Film Board. There was no money and it wasn't state subsidized and it had just Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan; they were the two lads and they had their houses up in Dalkey overlooking the hills...so it was a funny time.

But it never happened and there was never anything to do together so I came up with this idea simply of a busker and an immigrant, in what is kind of a musical, because I wanted to try and do something that would get this musical thing out of my system. I love music and I'd stop writing scripts and go off and write at the piano and stuff for like three hours. I'd waste three hours or four hours a day just playing Billy Joel songs at the piano and I would be like "what the hell, I just wasted hours doing that. I got to put this into something," so I wrote a musical film.

Q: How did you get started, Glen?

GH: Well I have this uncle in my family who was a very charismatic character. My mother comes from a family of 13 kids and he was one of the younger of the 13. He was like this amazing guy and it was a very working class family and he had this character, he did a bit of acting and was a musician and all the girls loved him. He was very good looking. He had the kind of, he had gray hair, all the family loved him, the women loved him you know. He was kind of a hero to all of us as young boys.

His nice guitar got left in our house, and his car, which is a four door amazing Ford Explorer, had been left in our garden and I was kind of wondering where he was. My mother kept stopping me from taking the guitar because I would just take it out and have it on the floor and be like [strum noise] and I just really enjoyed the sound of it, [but] she kept on putting it back.

Q: How old were you at the time?

GH: But it was completely anti-climatic because he took me into his band and I played music with him. Then at the same time my school teacher advised me to leave school at the age of 13, which was a couple of years later, and take on the goal basically of being a street musician. He said the best place to start your career would be the streets because it's the bottom rung. It would teach you everything you need to know. I learned to play a couple of chords from my uncle, and being a street musician is where I got my education.

Well, being a director, I originally thought I would get Cillian Murphy to do the role because I know him and he can sing, he's quite a good singer. I thought you would do the usual thing--get a good actor who could half-sing and maybe train his voice, which is one way of going. [But] it certainly became clear to everyone involved in the film that we should do it the other way around: we should get someone who can really sing and half-act and I'll trust that I could do something magical with that, and I really didn't have to do much.

Q: Glen, what gave you that confidence?

JC: I was terrified for a few reasons. I didn't want to suck for his sake and I didn't want to suck for mine. I'm a really comfortable person behind a guitar but in front of the camera it's a whole different ball game and I didn't know if I could do it. So I really needed him to tell me the truth.

I was thinking that if John had really wanted me to play this role me would have asked me at the beginning and maybe I'm the rebound [choice], but at the same time it made a lot of sense. This would be something where I was dealing with my mates. And it was a big deal with loads of people telling me this and that. It was a very obscure scenario which I never felt attached to at all. Whereas John was like "Look, let's just do it and if it's shit we'll just shelve it; if it's brilliant we'll sell a few DVDs to make the money back." That was the logic so we basically had to look at it with an open mind.

Q: You describe this as a visual album. How hard was it to translate that? You might have it in your head but music is such an interpretive thing--how hard is it to get that on the screen?

JC: I'm not a great fan of musicals. There are only certain ones I like. So I wanted to make a modern day musical. I wanted to try and figure out how do you take a younger audience that don't like those films , which can't accept people breaking into songs, sitting back and watching a film and leave the cinema after watching eight or nine songs in their entirety. So it quickly became clear to me these would be the tools. I would film it on tape. I would film it with un-actors. Make a really small little story. The story was really secondary to the visual album-ness of the project.

Q: Can you guys talk about the relationship between the songs and how they evolved?

JC: Most of the time the songs were given to you and you wrote a story around song. But I like being able to go to Glen and say, what do you think of this for a scene or idea for a character, and he would take it and come back with a lyric or a title or a song and give me a song that he had written ages ago. So there's kind of a scene and a song here where we bounced off ideas. The skeleton of the story was in place: guy meets girl--she's this, he's this. He becomes broken-hearted. They come together. Didn't we Glen?

GH: We were acting during the day and we were going back to the flat and basically picking up the guitar and going "we need this and this and this" and we still hadn't finished this song. It was a very creative moment. We'd finish in the evening and basically go back, pick up the instrument and start to work on the next song. So it was very intensive.

That's the beauty of it. It's actually the same. Some of the songs that are in this film are actually on The Frames record. It was one of those things where I just wrote a bunch of songs because that's just what I do and then for the film John wanted specific other songs which me and Markéta went off and tackled. For the most part that's just what I do. John made a point last night that if anyone doesn't like the film, it's because they probably don't like the songs. John's like, "that's cool because that gets me off the hook." These songs suck so I don't like the movie.

Q: Will you let John shoot your music video now?

GH: When all the rest goes away that's what is most important. It's funny that we're doing promo now--I have to say it's boring, this whole idea of sitting in front of an audience and singing our songs because we don't do this in our lives. It not something we do at all. This is very, very new and strange and quite enjoyable actually.

Q: John, you said that shooting on video is kind of a risk in a way. Did you think about going back and using film?

JC: There are certain stories that need certain approaches and this was definitely one where I thought I don't need to use film because it was a very intimate project. For me it was very autobiographical. It has that feel where you shouldn't be watching what you're watching in a way; that was part of the project. This is a bit too intimate. We were saying at the screening last night about the scene with the woman that Glenn is watching on the laptop. That was my girlfriend and that's actually footage that I filmed of her from seven years ago with all the rudeness cut out.

Yeah, the rudeness has to go. Even though the audience does know, they feel like this is someone's home. You know when you see those movies and it's faked and recorded and everyone is doing this when you are faking.

Plus the fact that me and Markéta aren't actors, there was a lot of footage that needed to be shot [repeatedly] to get us right. So if you were shooting us in film you would have spent a lot of money. I really wanted to do a black and white 16mm. John was basically like... No!
JC: