THE MIRACLE CLUB: An Interview With Director Thaddeus O’Sullivan

Introduction

Set in 1967, The Miracle Club follows the story of three generations of close friends, Lily (Maggie Smith), Eileen (Kathy Bates), and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) of Ballygar, a hard-knocks community in Dublin, who have one tantalizing dream: to win a pilgrimage to the sacred French town of Lourdes, that place of miracles that draws millions of visitors each year.

When the chance to win presents itself, the women seize it. However, just before their trip, their old friend Chrissie (Laura Linney) arrives in Ballygar for her mother’s funeral, dampening their good mood and well-laid plans. The women set out on the journey that they hope will change their lives, with Chrissie, a skeptical traveler, joining in place of her mother. The glamour and sophistication of Chrissie, who has just returned from a nearly 40-year exile in the United States, are not her only distancing traits. Old wounds are reopened along the way, forcing the women to confront their pasts even as they travel in search of a miracle.

Directed by award-winning Irish filmmaker Thaddeus O’Sullivan, The Miracle Club is based on a story by Jimmy Smallhorne, with a screenplay by Smallhorne, Timothy Prager, and Joshua D. Maurer. The film’s extraordinary ensemble includes Laura Linney (You Can Count on Me, The Squid and the Whale, HBO’s John Adams), Kathy Bates (Misery, Fried Green Tomatoes, About Schmidt), Stephen Rea (The Crying Game, Michael Collins, V for Vendetta), Agnes O’Casey (BBC One’s Ridley Road), and the legendary Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, California Suite).

Cinema Scholars’ Glen Dower recently sat down with the director of The Miracle Club, Thaddeus O’Sullivan. They spoke about revisiting the streets of Dublin in the late 1960s, the importance of costumes when making a period piece, and working with the legendary Maggie Smith, among other topics.

Interview

Glen Dower:

Mr. Thaddeus O’Sullivan, how are you, Sir?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

Hello, Glen, good thanks. How are you?

Glen Dower:

It is nice to meet a fellow Irishman for Cinema Scholars. I am from Belfast originally, and you are from Dublin yourself?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

Yes, I haven’t lived there for many years, but yes, originally from there.

Glen Dower:

The Miracle Club, your new film is set in Dublin in 1967, was it nice to revisit that time, and imagine yourself, in your twenties walking those streets again?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

Yes. It was nice to set it in that period because it’s when I remember, I think it was suitable for the story of course, but give or take a year, it is something. It’s an area I remember very well and it was great to revisit it as it was for my production department, particularly costume, and design, they were delighted to poke around and dig up all this detail, which adds an immense amount if you get that kind of thing. And we were quite glad to show a bit of color as well when we started to research. It was surprising how much color I hadn’t really remembered was around, life was a bit black and white for me then I think probably. But there was a lot of color around and we had some fun with that.

Glen Dower:

I’d like to talk about the three female powerhouse-lead performances if I may. Kathy Bates first. Now, I knew she was going to be in the film, but I saw the trailer first and I said, ‘Where is Kathy Bates? I haven’t seen Kathy Bates in the whole trailer.’ Then it took me a few moments to recognize her when I started watching the film. She has just disappeared into the role. She’s amazing, and has perfected the accent, again, I thought for a moment she had been dubbed! I mean, I have grown up with her films Misery, Deep Fried Tomatoes, About Schmidt, etc. She is the consummate character actress, what was she like to work with?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

Well, as you can imagine, I mean you’ve sort of said it really, they all immersed themselves in the character, but there was something incredibly intense about her at every level. The way she occupied this character. We gave her a voice coach very early on, a dialect coach. And she worked with him on Zoom first and then when she came over, she worked, he was on the set every day. She worked very closely with him and dedicated herself a lot to it. She was very concerned about the sets and the clothes. I mean they all are, but there was something with the way in which she would come on a set and poke around and feel the things, and really look at all the detail, really appreciate the detail, and that gave her a layer of understanding of this character, which is where actors come from. That’s their thing.

And we might not be able to appreciate it quite so much, but that’s what makes them different. They can imbibe all that stuff and it gives them a real sense of the character, and clothes of course as well. She doesn’t get to wear glamorous clothes and she just loved all the textures and the heaviness of that coat and her handbag and the scarf and all of that. so, she was all weighed down with the characters. She loved it, loved it, loved it. And then of course, yes, she’s just the consummate actress. She worked so hard. She was great, but she was open to suggestions because there were things she didn’t know.

Glen Dower:

Speaking about color and costumes. When Laura Linney’s character is introduced the color palette certainly changes. She is just wonderful in everything. I was preparing for an interview with Lance Henriksen, and Laura played his daughter in the film, Falling. Henriksen commented he found it so hard acting alongside her as he is incredibly cruel to her, as in real life she is so warm, effervescent, and luminous. Couple that with the bright yellow coat, she glows off the screen. But her character has been through a lot before we meet her.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

The costume was us all remembering the returning ‘Yanks’ coming back to Ireland from America. They always made a splash and it was always the clothes that were always a big feature. And so we wanted something special for her so that she could basically say, ‘I’m here!’ and she’s definitely making a gesture. The Yellow Coat basically was saying, ‘I have had a life, despite the fact that you banished me all those years ago’, she wanted to give off a positive look. But also, I felt that when the Yanks do come back, you spot them a mile away because of the way they dress. Especially in that period, not so much now, but then, when there wasn’t much money around in Ireland, it really stood out and they really wanted to say ‘I’ve been a success abroad. I can afford a decent suit’ and all the rest of it. But her dedication to the role was total, she had every beat in the script marked out in her mind’s eye very clearly, where she was in each scene.

She would always do something and then she would say, how is that? Do you want me to change it? Do you want me to do something different? Or she would just say to me, I’m going to do something different anyway. So I could never quite figure her out, she’d clearly had a very clear idea of the journey the character was making. But I guess within that she felt that this is where she can be flexible. She always wants to give the filmmaker options, and that was amazing. And she was very collaborative and very supportive whenever there was a problem on the set, she’d be in there trying to help. And very supportive, very sympathetic, very, very sympathetic person, and that probably just comes across in her performance. She’s a lovely person.

Glen Dower:

And last but not least, Dame Maggie Smith.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

She was very clear-cut in that she wanted to just come on the set and do the job. She was 87, I guess she’s 88 now or so, and we had three days a week to work with her and two days could be consecutive and to save her energy. But my God, those three days she really worked. She put in really long, full days. And even if we added scenes at the end of the day maybe, that we need a scene that we need, we needed to do a scene another day, which she couldn’t be in because it wasn’t one of her days. We’d do her shot for that. So we’d really pile it on. And she never complained about the sheer physical effort that was required. She was just amazing.

And she again understood the character very well. She said to me one day, ‘Who do I ask about the Rosary? And I said, me just, we don’t need an advisor, you ask me! So she said, ‘Oh yeah, okay’. And so we talk about the rituals and what you would and wouldn’t do and everything, but she’s done a lot of Irish characters over the years. She had instincts for a lot of it and didn’t need much instruction from me or anybody else, but that’s not as if she couldn’t take it. She could take a direction, no problem – she was not aloof in that sense. Her reputation could proceed her that was, but we got over that in a day or two and it was quite relaxed really.

Glen Dower:

I noticed from your filmography Mr. O’Sullivan, you have directed some episodes of, well one of my mother’s favorite TV shows in the UK, Call The Midwife. Did that give you some preparation for directing the film, in that you are surrounded by an incredible array of female character actors?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

Absolutely. All those help. I mean, they’re not movies, but they’ve got some great characters, these stories. And the thing for me has always been just to keep working when I wasn’t necessarily doing movies or what I wanted to do necessarily. Once you got on the set and you’re working with interesting women, interesting actors, it doesn’t really matter what it is. And I love doing those things because they were just great characters and they were brilliant stories. And the same with everything. You just talk to most actors pretty much the same way. They’re all different of course, but I can’t be different. So you know, have to have a reasonably generalized approach. But after working with an actor for a while, you kind of figure out what they need, what they don’t want. And you do tailor yourself as you go. Providing you can get what you want ultimately. And actors know that. They know that you’ve got to get what you want. And a lot of them will turn around and say, ‘Do I do the job for you? Have you got it?’ And yeah, they’ll do that a lot.

Glen Dower:

The idea of religious faith in the film, obviously, it’s a story about these women going to Lourdes and trying to engineer their own individual miracles, how important was the concept of faith and Catholicism in the film for you?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan:

Their faith was important, to feel that they believed. We all did growing up, everybody was the same. We all just believed. People grew out of it in one way or another or stayed in it, and so it’s a massive part of it. And going to Lourdes and believing in Lourdes was important. And not everybody goes to Lourdes believing in it. Some do not believe in it at all, and find the experience of being there does give them something which is a little indefinable. And so faith to them is very important. But I think they’re also humorous about it. They can spike it without being too pious. And then that was something that I felt very strongly about growing up. We were surrounded by it, but people could still laugh at it in some ways as well, the absurdity sometimes of some of the rituals and some priestly behavior, but that didn’t shake their faith.

But everybody’s faith is very different and comes through when they’re in Lourdes as well. Laura’s character, when she left Ireland, I think she left it all behind. I think her separation from the culture was also a separation from the belief as well. And she may never engage with that again. At the end of our story and in her future life, she’ll go back to America. She’ll have her life and she’ll have made peace with these women. But she will be able to tell that story probably that she could never tell before, but she, she’d never get her faith back.