Gabriel Byrne and director James Marsh talk about finding the man behind behind the legend who wrote such plays as “Waiting For Godot” and “Endgame.”
“I wrestled with the idea,” Byrne says on a recent video call from his home in Maine. “You know, screen biography is a very particular kind of genre, and for the most part people tend to imitate, walk, do wigs, all that kind of stuff.
Director James Marsh, center, on set during the shoot for “Dance First,” an unconventional biopic of the Irish-French writer Samuel Beckett. Gabriel Byrne as Samuel Beckett in “Dance First.” Robert Aramayo as Alfred Peron, left, and Fionn O’Shea as a younger Samuel Beckett in “Dance First.” Gabriel Byrne as Samuel Beckett and Sandrine Bonnaire as his wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, in “Dance First.
“I started reading it, and the first two or three pages were very conventional,” says Marsh on a video call from his home in Denmark. “You start with Beckett at the Nobel Prize ceremony where he’s getting the Nobel Prize for Literature . That, Marsh says, was the moment he decide he would not toss the screenplay on the reject pile, but read on and on until he was convinced he had to make the film.
“There was one I heard of some guy walking around Killiney Beach and meeting Beckett coming the opposite direction. It was a lovely, warm, sunny day. Beckett passed, and he said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Beckett.’ And Beckett said, ‘Well I wouldn’t go that far.’ “And ‘Waiting For Godot’ is written in 1948, I think, or very shortly after the war,” he says. “You kind of feel like these experiences during the war, and maybe that’s one of them, had a big influence on the portrait of the world that you see in that play.”
“You can kind of go, whoa, that’s interesting,” he says. “I kind of know where that might connect within his work.”Once Marsh decided to make the movie there was only ever one actor he considered for Beckett. Byrne is not the only actor who plays Beckett in the film. There are several child actors for his youngest days, and Irish actor Fionn O’Shea plays him from his college days through World War II. But Byrne is present even in those earlier parts of the movie thanks to the creative decision to have him reflecting back on the regrets of his life in conversation with himself.
“There’s Gabriel on one side of the frame – it’s all in-camera – with a tennis ball on a stick opposite him,” Marsh says, laughing. “He talks to the tennis ball and then we flip it around. It didn’t work very well, and Gabriel found the whole thing a little bit disconcerting.”
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