Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151081
23 Q3 2019 / CINEMONTAGE THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY Sayles based his Roan Inish screenplay on Rosalie K. Fry's 1957 novella The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry, a favorite book from childhood of Maggie Renzi, his life's companion and frequent co-producer. The two met in college and have worked together on most of his movies. They acquired the rights to the book during the production of City of Hope (1991) and, while Sayles was editing Passion Fish (1992), Renzi and co-producer Sarah Green went to Ireland to start scouting locations for the film. Although faithful to the novella's main story in his script, the Irish-American filmmaker transferred its location from the Scottish coast to the northwest coast of Ireland. In the book Sayles on Sayles (1998), he tells interviewer Gavin Smith he did this "because one of the things I did get from…growing up was that sense of Ireland being this island that's obsessed with loss." Seeking a connection to home and nature is key to 10-year-old Fiona Coneelly's (Jeni Courtney) return in 1949 from a bleak factory town on the mainland, where her father works, to her grandparents' home in the small islands, where making a living from the sea has become more difficult. In the filmmaker's final revised shooting script (dated December 10, 1992), his written visualization already suggests how Fiona's growing perspective in the film is interwoven with the seals' and gulls' POVs as sentient natural beings who also inhabit the scattered small islands of her home. The nature of storytelling itself is explored as well. Sayles plays with ways of presenting oral storytelling, arranging voiceovers and cutting to the stories' narrators differently for each story Fiona hears about her family's ancestors (one of which married a Selkie in human form) and for the story of how her baby brother Jamie was carried out to sea in his cradle. A concrete sense of magic and fantasy is conveyed through the child's visualization of these stories. As Sayles tells CineMontage, "It's 1949 and Fiona imagines the events untouched by film or television…literally, without special effects." As Kirk Honeycutt wrote in The Hollywood Reporter in April 1993, to finance the project, "Sayles said he raised the money for the low-budget film through home video pre-sales, foreign money and by investing some of his own money." Personally putting up a third of the movie's projected $5 million budget to get production started, the filmmaker set up production offices above a pub in Rosbeg, a town in County Donegal close to all the shooting locations. Scheduled for an eight-week shoot, the film's production started April 30. Director of photography was Haskell Wexler, ASC, who had shot Sayles' Matewan (1987) and would later work with him on Limbo (1997) and Silver City (2004). In an interview with Douglas Bell for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences oral history project, the cinematographer offered, "The Secret of Roan Inish was a film I'm very proud of. I liked the attitude, I liked the sweetness, I liked the fantasy aspects of it." Unfortunately, the financing deal Sayles made with Denver-based Jones Intercable was not finalized until two weeks after the shoot began, and the cast and crew began work without knowing if there would be enough money to finish. Wexler relates that an Irish worker who had helped build the thatched cottages and had already been paid for his work "got really super drunk…and he burned down half the sets. The people of the village all pitched in and rebuilt it." A July 30, 1993 Los Angeles Times article reported that the fire caused $150,000 of damage and quoted Renzi saying, "Insurance covered us CONTINUED FROM PAGE 22 The Secret of Roan Inish. Samuel Goldwyn Company/ Photofest