- Title: Trojan Eddie
- Date: 21st December 1998
- Summary: Film 4
- Description:TROJAN EDDIE - SYNOPSIS Small-town Ireland in the present day. Trojan Eddie (REA) runs makeshift auctions for John Power (RICHARD HARRIS), leader of the local traveller community, with Power's nephew, Dermot (STUART TOWNSEND), as his assistant. Things start to go wrong when Power falls for and marries a young traveller girl, Kathleen (AISLIN McGUCKIN). On the night of the wedding, Kathleen runs off with Dermot, taking the £11,000 dowry money with her. Power is sure that Eddie knows where the young couple is. But it is Eddie's best friend, Raymie (SEAN McGINLEY), who has stumbled across their whereabouts and triggered a raid on their hideaway. Power's thuggish son, Ginger (BRENDAN CLEESON), comes looking for Eddie, but ends up killing Raymie. Going round to collect his friend's belongings, Eddie discovers the stolen dowry money. Small-town Ireland in the present day. John Power (RICHARD HARRIS), the charismatic and powerful leader of the local travellers, has settled into a comfortable lifestyle with a big house, a big car and a string of business interests. In one of these, he employs Trojan Eddie (STEPHEN REA), a dreamer to whom lie gave the job after a jail sentence resulting from a botched burglary that Eddie had attempted with his best friend, Raymie (SEAN McGINLEY). The proceeds were designed to raise capital so that Eddie could set himself up in his own business. As Usual, Eddie got caught. Eddie's marriage to Shirley (ANCELINE BALL) has long since fallen apart and, while Eddie struggles to look after their two children, Shirley does as she pleases. Eddie still adores her, however, and would take her back at any time. This effectively prevents him from committing to his current relationship with the devoted Betty (BRID BRENNAN) - the sort of relationship anyone else but Eddie would cherish. The one thing at which Eddie excels is selling. Put him in front of a crowd at a makeshift auction and he could sell hair-pieces to hippies. And selling out of the back of a Trojan van is what lie does, with John Power's nephew, Dermot (STUART TOWNSEND), as his assistant. It will never make him rich, but he still dreams of putting together enough capital to start a business of his own. John Power, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with a young traveller girl, Kathleen (AISLIN McGUCKIN), who is less than a third his age. Dermot is also seeing Kathleen without his uncle's knowledge. Kathleen accepts Power's marriage proposal. But, during the raucous celebration after the wedding, Dermot and Kathleen run off together, taking with them the £11,000 cash dowry the wedding guests have deposited in the traditional suitcase. Power is sure that Eddie knows where they have gone and asks him to tell Kathleen that he will take her back at any time. Eddie, meanwhile, returns to the auction business, with Raymie as his temporary assistant. Shortly afterwards, Dermot - whose affection for Kathleen is cooling - does indeed contact Eddie, offering to split the dowry money with him so that Eddie can set up a new business away from Power. On the basis of this offer, Eddie buys a lot of new stock and takes out a short-term lease on sonic run-down premises in Dublin which he has been eyeing for some time. Raymie, meanwhile, happens to answer Eddie's mobile phone and discovers where Dermot and Kathleen are hiding. He passes on the information to another traveller family, the McDonaghs. Dermot and Kathleen's hideaway is ransacked by the McDonaghs and the money disappears. John Power's thuggish son, Ginger (BRENDAN CLEESON), comes looking for Eddie in his new promises, but Eddie hides in a back room and watches while Ginger first threatens, then kills Raymie. At the funeral Eddie stands up to John Power for the first time. Dermot meanwhile, has abandoned Kathleen, who returns to her husband. Asked by Raymie's landlady to go round to his flat and pick tip his dead friend's belongings, Eddie comes across the suitcase full of money. And, when John takes his bride to the pictures in Dublin one evening, Eddie has a last surprise in store for him. PRODUCTION NOTES "That's the trouble with you, Eddie: you want to live too long. I mean, you have to end up with the money and the girl. Otherwise..." For Trojan Eddie, Scottish-born director Gillies Mackinnon returns to rural Ireland, the setting of his debut feature, The Playboys, to tell the contemporary story of a wheeler-dealer, market-stall salesman and general fixer called Eddie (Stephen Rea), who has the gift of the gab but very little else. His marriage to Shirley (Angeline Ball) fell apart some time ago and lie takes care of their two young children while Shirley does what she pleases with whom she pleases. It is typical of Eddie that he should he unable to return the love offered him by Betty (Brid Brennan) because lie is still obsessed with Shirley. Likewise, he has always dreamed of owning his own business, but the furthest he ever got was a bungled robbery attempt with his best friend, Raymie (Sean McGinley). The idea was to get some working capital, but all Eddie got was a jail sentence. Raymie escaped detection - a fact which Eddie tries, in moments of anger, to make sound more positive than it was. I did time for you!" he shouts at Raymie. "No, Eddie," replies Raymie, "you got caught. You always got caught." Since he got out of the nick, Eddie has been working for John Power (Richard Harris), the godfather of the local traveller community who has lots of money, the respect (or at any rate fear) of everyone, a big house and a smart Mercedes - all things which Eddie doesn't have. What is more, although Ireland's travellers are traditionally portrayed as outsiders, despised and often persecuted by the 'settled' community, here it is Power and his entourage who are settled and Eddie who is the outsider. To the travellers, he is a 'townie' who cannot even understand their language - Shelta, one of the secret languages of Ireland, occasionally spoken (with subtitles) in Trojan Eddie. "There's weddings and funerals and fistfights - lots of dramatic moments," says writer Billy Roche. I was interested in creating this strange, cinematic world that Trojan Eddie has just almost wandered into and can't get out of. Eddie is what the travellers call a tosser. Very often, travellers will have a settled guy working for them, who they'll send on menial tasks." Eddie's boss, John Power, is the heart of the traveller community. A widower who is on the verge of becoming a patriarch, Power sees and becomes obsessed with Kathleen (Aislin McGuckin), a young traveller girl who has also been noticed by Dermot (Stuart Townsend), his nephew and Eddie's assistant. Power woos Kathleen and eventually marries her in a colourful wedding scene. But it is soon clear he should have listened to the words of the song sung during the wedding dinner by Dolores. Keane (a song which was specially written for the film by Roche): You think that you're in heaven But you haven't got a clue Love can take you to the stars And love makes a fool of you. Even as the song is being sung, Dermot and Kathleen are preparing to run off together, taking with them the £11,000 in dowry money which the various guests have deposited in the traditional suitcase. Their elopement brings all the different strands of the story to a powerful and violent climax. Power, hesitating. between fear of ridicule and righteous fury, sends his henchmen - led by his vicious son, Ginger (Brendan Gleeson), who despises Eddie, in pursuit of the young couple. Inevitably, of course, Eddie gets drawn into the fray. And its Outcome leaves no one Untouched: not Power, not Kathleen, not Dermot, not Raymie - and least of all Eddie himself. For once, however, Eddie's survivor's Instincts help him land on his feet. He comes across the suitcase full of money and is finally able to set himself up on his own business and thumb his nose at his former boss - albiet from the safely anonymous distance of a commercial showing in a cinema to which Power takes the repentant Kathleen for an evening out. "What you want", mocks Eddies voice from one of those cheaply-made local ads that any cinemagoer will recognise, " got. And, if you can get it cheaper anywhere else, then I want to know about it". Producer Emma Burge first brought the script of Trojan Eddie to Mackinnon a couple of years ago. "But I was busy trying to raise the money for Small Faces," says the director, "and I wasn't mentally available to consider the film. The first time I read it, I was still saying to myself that I had to have my commercial career in America. So I did my film there [A Simple Twist of Fate, produced by and starring Steve Martin] and, in the end, I found people seemed to prefer the little film I'd made in Glasgow. I began thinking that maybe I should just be thinking about good material." Trojan Eddie certainly fitted the bill. "When I read it a second time," recalls Mackinnon, I realised this was a brilliant script. This guy Billy Roche was really onto something. He wasn't writing what he thought people wanted to buy or see: he was just doing what interested him. What I loved about the script was that it was happening in this everyday world, but there were these mad stories of deluded love. All the people in the film are looking for something they can't have. Ginger's married to Carol but he's looking at Shirley. Carol's looking at Raymie. And Eddie has this wonderful woman called Betty who loves him, but Betty can't have Eddie because he's still looking at Shirley. "John Power wants this young woman who is supposed to bring back his life-force and his youth, which he can never regain. She wants the social elevation and wealth which would otherwise be beyond her. And then she wants more: she wants the young guy, Dermot - and the money. So they run off on the wedding day. And why does Dermot want the girl? Because his uncle wants her! Everbody wants something they can't have, and I think Billy caught all that so wonderfully." I think the film is both realistic and magical," notes Roche. "Not magical in the sense of a fairytale, but in terms of the beauty and dilapidation. I want to see the audience, like Eddie, locked inside the story." The combination of a mythic story and a completely realistic background was likewise what attracted Richard Harris to the film - that, and the chance of working with an Irish cast on an Irish film. "I was offered six times the money to do another film," says the 64 year old actor, whose recent trio of roles - with Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven; opposite Robert Duvall in Wrestling Ernest Hemmingway; an with James Earl Jones in Cry, the Beloved Country - have confirmed his place at the peak of his profession, "but I chose to come here because it's a wonderful script and a marvellous cast. Also, if there is anything I can do to help the motion picture business here (in Ireland) and be part of what's happening, then I will." Harris was initially hesitant about taking on the role of a traveller, however, feeling he didn't have enough time to prepare - to learn about travellers' traditions and customs. "But Gillies flew to London and was very, very persuasive," chuckles the actor. "So I immersed myself in the traveller culture for two weeks. I went round the halting sites and met all the people. It's amazing that a country like Ireland, which has suffered so much prejudice over the years, should ostracise the travellers like that. They're amazing people - very superstitious and very religious." Mackinnon confirms the ostracisation of travellers in contemporary Ireland, recalling that the company had to get special permission from the manager of the local pub to invite the travellers who worked on the movie to the wrap party. But he insists that it was never his intention either to romanticise the travellers or to portray them as victims. The work he and adviser Michael Collins, a traveller himself, did in preparation had only one goal: to get the details of their life-style right. "The film doesn't show them in any PC way," he says. "But, in all the discussions I've had with them while making the film, they've been nothing but appreciative of the fact that we're dealing with their culture. Michael Collins said to me that, when this is over, they'll be able to have their voice heard, whereas nobody's interested in them now. I'm really glad we're doing it that way. 1 wouldn't have wanted to be making a soppy, soft-focus movie about travellers. Anyway, this film isn't about travellers: it's a story and travellers happen to be part of that story. For me, Billy Roche's story is the most important thing" "I was adamant that when I started writing this, it would be cinema, and that's what it is," says Roche of the finished film.."Cinema should be big and strong. There's no point in making a film about somebody going to the shops to buy half-a-dozen eggs. Cinema should be dramatic and, to me. This looks like fabulous stuff. While I was writing it, I imagined Stephen Rea playing Trojan Eddie. I imagined Richard Harris playing John Power. I imagined Brendan Gleeson playing Ginger..." "What I love about it is that it's not romanticised," concludes Mackinnon. "With Frank and Consolata, I got photographs and paintings and we flooded each other with images to try and find out what the film would look like. They were very true to that all the way through. We used landscape a lot. For example, the opening shot of the bare-knuckle fight uses this expansive landscape to convey the feeling of something raw that's been going on outdoors for hundreds of years." In the end, it was the degree to which he engaged with the material that made the film most rewarding for Mackinnon. "My way of thinking at the moment is that I felt so happy to be making Small Faces and Trojan Eddie, why would I make something that I didn't feel strongly about?" he asks. "So, until something comes along from the States that does that for me, I'm happy to be working on this side of the Atlantic. There are certain expectations from the people who are coughing up $10 million for a movie in America, and you have to understand those expectations, or you're going to be very unhappy. "With Trojan Eddie, I'm here to translate Billy's script. Channel 4 may make suggestions to me, but they don't get in the way: they want the best film creatively. It's a good feeling. You take the material and you try to translate it into the reality of the actors and the spoken word and the celluloid. That's a great feeling for a film-maker." GILLIES MACKINNON - DIRECTOR Born in Scotland, Gillies Mackinnon studied mural painting at the Glasgow school of Art, before moving to London where lie taught art, worked with disturbed teenagers and supported himself as a freelance cartoonist. He then studied at the National Film & Television School, where his graduation film, Passing Glory produced by his brother, Billy - won various prizes and was broadcast on Channel 4. Since then, Mackinnon has directed The Conquest of the South Pole, The Needle and the BBC-TV film, The Grass Arena, starring Mark Rylance, which won the Michael Powell Award for Best British feature at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1991, the Grand Prix at the Dinard Festival and a Special Jury Prize in San Francisco. In 1992, Mackinnon directed his first film in Ireland, The Playboys, starring Albert Finney, Aidan Quinn and Robin Wright, for the Samuel Goldwyn Company. US star Steve Martin then invited him to direct A Simple Twist of Fate, a reworking of George Eliot's Silas Marner. He also directed the Dublin 1916' episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Mackinnon's 1995 film, the very personal project Small Faces, again written with his brother Billy and set in Glasgow, won him his second Michael Powell Award in Edinburgh and prizes at Rotterdam and Charleroi. Since completing Trojan Eddie, Mackinnon has been raising finance for a film version of Pat Barker's novel, Regeneration, adapted for the screen by Allan Scott. BILLY ROCHE - WRITER Wexford-born writer Billy Roche was reared on cinema -"there was no theatre in our town," he says, "and we went to the cinema every third or fourth night" - but began writing for the stage with A Handful of Stars, performed by Dublin's Rough Magic Theatre Company and at the Bush Theatre in London in 1989. Subsequent plays include Poor Beast in the Rain (1989), Belfry (1991) Amphibians (performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992) and The Cavalcaders, performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1993 and at the royal court in London the following January. CAST Trojan Eddie STEPHEN REA John Power RICHARD HARRIS Dermot STUART TOWNSEND Kathleen AISLIN MCCUCKIN Ginger BRENDAN GLEESON Raymie SEAN MCCINLEY Shirley ANCELINE BALL Carol ANCELA O'DRISCOLL Betty BRID BRENNAN Patsy McDonagh JASON GILROY Rosy MARIA McDERMOTT ROE Gerry SEAN LAWLOR Lady Cash BRITTA SMITH Matt PAT LAFFAN Reg JIMMY KEOCH Eddie's Mother CLADYS SHEEHAN Arthur NOELDONOVAN Landlady AOIFE MacEOIN Traveller PECKER DUNNE Travelling Woman LINDA QUINN Red-haired Traveller DOLORES KEANE Young Woman ORLA CHARI-TON Man BILLY ROCHE Priest DES CAVE Second Traveller MICHAEL COLLINS Daughter No 1 (Jenny) AISLING O'FLANAGAN Daughter No 2 (Rebecca) ROISIN O'FLANAGAN Lady Cash's Son EUGENE O'BRIEN Farmer's Wife CHARLOTTE BRADLEY CREW Director GILLIES MACKINNON Producer EMMA BURGE Co-Producer SEAMUS BYRNE Writer BILLY ROCHE Executive Producer for Bord Scarman na hEireann ROD STONEMAN Executive Producer for Initial Films ALAN J WANDS Executive Producers for Irish Screen KEVIN MENTON NIGEL WARREN~GREEN Director of Photography JOHN de BORMAN Production Designer FRANK CONWAY Costume Designer CONSOLATA BOYLE Editor SCOTT THOMAS Music .................................................... JOHN KEANE Casting HUBBARD CASTING First Assistant Director MARTHA O'NEILL Script Supervisor JEAN BOURNE Production Accountant TERESA McGRANE Sound Recordist SIMON WILLIS Focus Puller ALAN BUTLER Production Co-ordinator BREDA WALSH 2nd Assistant Director SUZANNE NICELL 3rd Assistant Director ANDREW HEGARTY Location Manager DOUGAL COUSINS Assistant Location Manager MARIA O'CONNOR Location Assistant COLM NOLAN Assistant Co-ordinator MARIA COLLINS Production Assistant HILDA O'CONNOR Trainee Assistant Directors NELL WRIGHT GAVIN WARD DAVID MORRIS Assistant to Gillies MacKinnon CLODACH TIERNEY Assistant to Stephen Rea TARA CONAUGHTON
- Broadcaster:Channel 4
- Collection: Channel 4
- Producer:Endemol uk plc
- Transmission Date:21/12/1998
- Rights:Worldwide
- Decade: 1990s