Irish writer and filmmaker John Carney is reflecting on his ’80s schooldays in the dirty Dublin of that run-down era. They were as grim as you might expect – but not as grim as they could have been. “Thankfully, I was never really bullied,” he says. “In some respects, I was pretty lucky, I guess.”

Hot Press is meeting the bearded, bespectacled, somewhat restless 44-year-old in an executive suite of the Merrion Hotel, the morning after the triumphant Audi Dublin Film Festival screening of his latest movie. Carney’s first cinematic offering since 2013’s Begin Again, Sing Street already had its world premiere, to largely ecstatic reviews, at Sundance in January. It looks as if he might just, deservedly, have a majot hit on his hands.

The title is a pun on Dublin’s Synge Street CBS. In 1984/85, Carney spent a year attending the thennotorious Christian Brothers secondary school, where much of his new movie is set. Still open today, it’s less than a mile away – but many worlds apart – from this fivestar, luxury hotel.

He may not have encountered any serious problems there, but he didn’t enjoy the experience either. “I was bullied occasionally, but I never got systematically bullied, thank god, because I don’t know what I would have done if I had been,” he admits. “I was mocked a little bit and ridiculed a little. I would wear long, flamboyant scarves, and I didn’t wash my hair, so I was kind of crazy-looking – but I somehow got away with it.

“I never got hit, whereas I saw other kids getting battered for wearing certain clothes, or being middleclass, or being different, or for being foreign. That was another thing. It was a horrible time in that sense.”

The violence of those schooldays is brilliantly captured in the film; so also, thankfully, is the feeling of joyful teenage exuberance that gives the movie its irresistible charm.

FALLING BETWEEN THE CRACKS
Alternating between gritty urban drama and smooth pop video, Sing Street is a musical with a wonderfully simple but compelling storyline. With his constantly warring parents – played by Aidan Gillen and Maria Doyle Kennedy – under serious financial strain, a Dublin teenager named Conor (played by the impressive newcomer and brand new Hot Press cover star, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) is forced to leave his posh fee-paying school and attend the far rougher Synge Street, where he’s immediately a magnet for bullies and predatory Christian Brothers alike.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Conor meets and is instantly besotted with aspiring model Raphina (Lucy Boynton), who lives in a sort of ‘Home for Wayward Girls’ opposite the school. Under the tutelage of his musically literate but underachieving older brother (an unrecognisable, grungy-looking Jack Reynor), Conor attempts to impress her by changing his name to ‘Cosmo’, forming a band – and convincing her to star in their music video.

Much like Carney’s most successful film to date, 2007’s immensely likeable Once (which won its stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova an Oscar for Best Original Song), it’s a relatively straightforward love story that's rooted powerfully in the music of the era. The Sing Street tagline says it all: “Boy meets girl. Girl unimpressed. Boy starts band.”

Carney was bassist with Dublin band, The Frames, for a couple of years (he also shot some of their videos), but the film is semi-autobiographical in a different way. “I suppose it really began in 1984, with me going into Synge Street from a posh primary school – so I did have that experience,” he observes.

Did he go there for the same reasons as Cosmo?

“I’m not sure why my father sent me there," he says, shaking his head ruefully. "I couldn’t get into the super-posh schools in my neighbourhood, because I wasn’t academically ready for them, so I was definitely going to go to a non-fee-paying school. My dad thought Synge Street had a great sort of oldfashioned reputation...”

Shifting in his seat, Carney sighs and smiles. “He was wrong about that at the time. It was the 1980s, and the place had sort of fallen in between the cracks. Nowadays, it’s a perfectly regular, progressive school. Back then it was hardcore. It really was.”

Sing Street is very much a coming-of-age movie, but its feel-good, hit-laden soundtrack of classic ’80s songs by the likes of The Cure, Duran Duran, The Police and Genesis lift it well above the realms of teenage angst and misery. Was it difficult getting rights to the music?

“There was stuff that was un-clearable, and certain bands said ‘no’,” he shrugs, “but the bands that are in the film responded to the fact the music was being used in what they thought was a respectful way. You know, this wasn’t some Hollywood producer, who was trying to build a soundtrack to promote their movie, but rather it was a script where the songs were genuinely integrated into the drama. So they were okay, actually, and we got them at a good price. There’s a soundtrack album coming out in April.”

U2 seem quite conspicuous by their absence from a movie about Dublin schoolboys forming a band in the 1980s. However, those four famous Northsiders weren’t even on Carney’s radar.

“For me, if you were forming a band in the ’80s, you stayed away from U2, because they’re a national treasure – but they’re also just so big that they kind of eat everything,” he laughs. “So when I was young, the cool bands I knew would go nowhere near being compared to U2. It was cool not to be like U2, because they were so famous.”

In fact, in a film that namechecks many more bands than actually feature on the soundtrack, Bono and co are not even mentioned.

“No, they’re not mentioned in the film. For that reason," he smiles. "U2 wouldn’t have really been on Cosmo’s radar. They’re looking towards Britain, isn’t that the idea? They’re looking to England for inspiration and U2 are a homegrown band, so I suppose that’s why they’re not there in it.”

As a former musician himself, does Carney still play?

“I play the piano every night for half an hour, with a cigarette,” he smiles. “Glass of whiskey, cigarette, sit at the piano and play. I think I’ve never missed an evening of doing that. It is kind of meditative. I don’t really play very well – it's just that half an hour with that instrument in your living room is a nice thing. I’m drawn in there every evening, I close the door. In fact, I make sure to keep the door closed so nobody else has to experience it (smiles).”

AND THEN THERE WAS ONCE...
Cosmo and Raphina are played by relatively unknown actors, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Lucy Boynton. Was that a conscious decision?

“It was probably a fait accompli in that, if you start looking for actors in Ireland, you just won’t find them,” he muses. “But it is also that thing of: if I do get young kid actors, and they’re like 14 or 15, they’ve learned so many bad habits from these ‘drama teachers’ – in inverted commas, these failed actors basically – that I’ll have to undo that, or unwind that, on set every day, as opposed to these kids – who are blank canvases of acting potential.” Excellently acted and superbly driven by pulsing pop music, Sing Street is light, fun and essentially good-humoured. However, Carney does touch on themes of sexual abuse, most notably in the scene where the headmaster (played by Don Wycherly) attempts to drag Cosmo into his office bathroom to scrub off his make-up.

“That scene was tricky to do, because I didn’t want to turn it into a big thing about abuse as such,” he reveals. “I didn’t want him to get revenge on anyone or any institution or anything like that. It was a good way of suggesting that a bully who is around boys all the time in an unmonitored environment, who has himself got some psychosexual difficulties, is not a good person to be around children.

“That was as far as I wanted to go. It’s not that he was abusing kids right, left and centre, but it was this strange thing that he would be obsessed by taking this kid's make-up off. And he’s wanting him to do it in his bathroom. That was a bit odd. Basically all I was saying is that you should never allow male priests to look after the entire education of a generation of people: it’s just not a good idea. Ultimately, though, this film is really a fantasy piece, an escapist piece, and I hope it comes across that way.”

Sing Street had a total budget of €8million. “It’s probably equal to Begin Again, around that mark," he says. "So I had money to make the film. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had money. The great thing that having the money meant was that I could take time with the kids to get things right and not be constantly working against the clock. The problem with filmmaking is that you’re always up against the clock. I’m sure Stephen Spielberg is too. It’s always like every director, no matter what the budget is, is constantly looking at his watch.”

Well, when you’ve got so many people on the payroll...

“Yeah, but you’d think the more money you have, the freer you’d be,” he sighs. “To me, money is time. I translate money not into crane shots or helicopter shots or explosions, because that’s not my bag. But I get a little bit more time. The way I think is: if I get 10 more minutes with this kid we can really nail this scene, as opposed to a production editor looking at his watch.”

Carney’s breakthrough movie, Once, had a truly miniscule budget in comparison with Sing Street. “The budget for that was €125,000," he smiles. "I deferred my fees and gave them to actors because I was so embarrassed to ask them to do it for three grand or whatever it was. But the biggest reward I got from Once was the permission to make more films – because that, to a film-maker, is vital. Each time you have to prove yourself, so if you have a bomb, or whatever, you have to get back up on the horse each time, and it can be quite troubling. Once has certainly allowed me to continue work as a filmmaker, and there’s no better gift than that.”

Glen Hansard once told Hot Press that the original plan was to sell DVD copies of it at Frames gigs. John smiles and shakes his head. “Maybe that was Glen’s plan for it. My plan was much more close to what actually happened, I have to say. I believed the film could do extremely well, and I think Glen thought it was something we could sell at Frames gigs. I don’t know why he thinks that way sometimes. I think he feels like – sometimes there’s that Irish thing of, ‘I can’t believe I’m this good’.

“I certainly believed in its potential, once the film got out there,” he continues. “The hard part is: how do you get it out there? But once you have a big machine like Fox Searchlight behind you, who did that film, I felt the film would connect with people. Because it was real and because it was what we wanted to see, and our taste isn’t too bad, which
should account for a certain number of people going to see the film. There should be a correlation between the two.”

SAYING 'NO' TO HOLLYWOOD

The Irish Film Board came up with some funding, but Sing Street was also co-produced by The Weinstein Company – which in film terms is a very big deal indeed. “Harvey [Weinstein] has done both my last films,” John enthuses. “He really is larger than life. He’s ferocious at his job, fierce. When he likes a film, and wants to sell a film or buy a film, he will get his way, you know? And that’s worked to our advantage with Begin Again: he wanted that film to work. And hopefully, with Sing Street, we’ll do the same."

The initial international reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The feelgood aspect of it really seems to have struck a chord.

“You know, it’s a real puzzle," he adds, "to have a film coming from Ireland with no big movie stars in it, a lot of dialogue that’s incoherent to Americans, and songs written by people that aren’t superfamous. To make that work is a really interesting challenge. I think Harvey liked the idea of rising to that challenge, and I think he will, frankly. I think he has the gun-power to really push this movie out there.”

While not every project he touches turns to gold (his Once follow-up, Zonad, didn't exactly set the box office on fire in 2009), Carney is clearly finding it easier to get funding for his films nowadays.

“Yeah, I’ve got a career now as opposed to a kind of passion,” he observes. “It’s a job now, which is great! I can actually pay my rent and that’s saying something in Ireland. It's a bit like a musician or an actor. There's a real feeling of achievement in getting to that stage – but you really need the support of others to do that in Ireland. You can’t go it alone, you need your Film Boards and your Arts Councils.”

He’s thrilled at the current successes of Irish films such as Room and Brooklyn. However, he’s also far from complacent. “Guys like Lenny [Abrahamson], it’s great that they’re doing so well in America, and they’re being nominated for Oscars and stuff," he reflects, "but it’s their own internal ambition that’s created that as opposed to a plan back home. I think we can only really say the industry here is doing well when actors are employed, which is not the case at the moment. I feel my responsibility, now more than ever, is to employ Irish actors. That’s important to me. The image is that we’re doing incredibly well in cinema at the moment, but actually so many of my actor friends are unemployed and are having to get other jobs and are not able to make a living out of it. When that’s fixed, I’ll say the Irish film industry is in great shape.”

Would Carney ever consider pursuing a Hollywood career?

“I have been offered a Hollywood career and I didn’t take it,” he says emphatically. “These last few years of relative success happened at a stage in my life where I’m grown up enough for other things to be important to me – such as my family and friends. You know, going to Hollywood to make a film – it’s a year of your life, so it'd better be something you love and you believe in. I can talk to you now, two years after shooting Sing Street, and not be bored – or not be boring you or boring the people that are reading this.

“So to me Sing Street is the perfect film for me – because I get to make something that’s really personal, but it’s also light and fun. I've enough money to make it properly. It’s a subject matter that interests me. So I can’t imagine the idea of going off and doing these big Hollywood movies that I haven’t written and produced and been involved in deciding the music for. I can’t understand how directors do that. I’d be very bored.”

Sing Street was released March 17