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Photo By Steve Ramos
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David Kelly and Ian Bannen
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The sun was shining on the Isle of Man, but David Kelly was anything but warm. It was 8:30 in the morning and Vicks was being rubbed onto the 69-year-old actor's scrawny chest. This was going to be a bare-all scene: a naked romp to the water's edge with his 70-year-old co-star Ian Bannen, then a bare-butt motorcycle ride on the country roads. For audiences of writer/director Kirk Jones' winning fantasy Waking Ned Devine, it would be the ingredients for a popular movie moment.
"We didn't have to actually hit the water," said Kelly, speaking with his stripping co-star at last year's Toronto Film Festival. Kelly listened with amusement as Jones instructed the crew to turn their backs and hid in nearby rocks for the geriatric strip-tease. "A closed set always makes me laugh, because nobody's to look and then it's shown all over the world."
Putting a naked old man on the motorcycle has proven to be box-office magic for Jones' whimsical comedy. Audiences are loving it. More importantly, Jones thinks his two veteran co-stars enjoyed the flash of attention.
"I didn't really think at the time about how whether it would be a problem for guys at this age to ride a motorbike naked," said Jones, speaking later. "They were fine about taking their clothes off. The only thing they were worried about, understandably, was the cold. I think they really enjoyed themselves and not only a starring role, but a starring role that is so adventurous."
President Bill Clinton might appear on the cover of Time magazine. But Kelly has the notoriety of having his naked self splashed across the magazine's inside pages.
It's hard to imagine two giddier old men than Bannen and Kelly. Sharing a couch in a Toronto hotel, theirs is an evident on-screen chemistry. So it's flabbergasting to hear Jones talk about initial pressure to cast Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in the film's leading roles. Time and box office has proven Jones' resolve correct. It's now impossible to imagine anyone else other than Bannen and Kelly as Ned Devine's playful codgers.
Ned Devine has cast these acting vets as born-again youngsters. One scene is proof that they're having the time of their lives. Their joint charisma is infectious. "It gives me such pleasure now when people come up to me after screenings and say it's so great to see old guys with charm, character, emotion, humor and just their presence on-screen," said Jones. "And the two lead performances, you could never get anything like that from two 20-year-olds or probably even 50-year-olds to be honest. You just stick those guys in front of the camera and they just ooze presence. Both of them are really movie stars."
With a plot that literally chases the proverbial Irish pot of gold, Ned Devine strikes universal appeal. It's a tale of the big score, a lottery jackpot familiar to anyone who ever walked into some bingo hall or played the Irish Sweepstakes.
Dubbed appropriately as this year's Full Monty, the movie earned 33-year-old Jones a $4 million jackpot when Fox Searchlight acquired the movie. Its story came to Jones from a newspaper clipping that caught his eye five years ago. Jones wanted a change from directing commercials. So he read the newspaper account of a postmistress in South Wales who won the lotto and didn't tell any of her neighbors or share the money. Plans for a 10-minute short slowly grew into a feature-length film.
Time went by and Jones kept working at the story. He honed its structure, jiggled the plot. The elements were there: the charm of a small community where everyone knows everyone else and the lure of big money. It was as if the story was telling itself. The charm of such a rural setting was clear to Kelly.
"Small-community people really are interdependent in every way, especially in Ireland," Kelly said. "Back in the bad old days, they did rely on each other even if it came to sharing. Unlike the cities where somebody dies in the house next door and was dead a month before anybody knew, you'd know within five minutes in a small town. The nosy neighbor is rather an endearing thing."
So Jones had his tale. Someone in the village of Tully More has won a fortune but no one has come forward to claim the prize. So two puckish retirees, Michael O'Sullivan (Kelly) and Jackie O'Shea (Bannen), eventually track the ticket to old Ned Devine. But the shock of winning proved to be too much for Devine. An untimely death is not about to stop O'Sullivan and O'Shea. The result is a comic impersonation scheme involving all 50-odd residents of Tully More.
Against a climate of Hollywood blockbusters such Godzilla and Armageddon, Ned Devine emerged as the "feel-good" hit of the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. A bidding war ensued and attention over the film steamrolled. Through it all, the parties, press interviews and initial reviews, Kelly's faith in the film's charms grew.
"The lovely part about our characters in Waking Ned is that the movie could so easily have been about avarice," said Kelly. "But in the end it's not about the money at all. It's about the great adventure of these two aged youngsters, a great adventure that they never had in their childhood. And this has to be the biggest adventure of all. It's wonderful. But it's not really about avarice or the money. It's about having fun and acting like kids and the friendship."
Ironically, Jones found his Irish hamlet on Britain's Isle of Man. The local government anted up one quarter of the film's $2 million budget. The island's inhabitants were wooed with wine, cheese and a pitch of the film's story. Years of planning took much of the pressure off of the film's brief six-week shoot. Bannen carried a microphone in his lapel, recording the speech at local pubs so he could work on his accent. It proved to be a hassle-free production, although Bannen almost fell off a cliff due to an out-of-control wind machine. But Jones says it was a stress-free week.
Watching Ned Devine, it's as if Bannen and Kelly grow younger with each passing minute. Being young at heart, it seems, comes with being an actor.
"You never think about giving the work up," says Bannen. "The thing is, we don't retire. We can just go on, which is a wonderful thing. I think one of the most depressing things about any old job is that when you reach the big six-o or 55 and people are thrown out on the scrap heap when we are starting to get on."
The film could have done much worse than supplying another dash of Celtic déjà vu with its Full Monty-esque fable. There is box-office gold to be found in this type of "twee" cinema from the United Kingdom, a worthy follow-up to Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bill Forsythe's Scottish comedies such as Gregory's Girl and Comfort and Joy. Ned Devine practices the most simple of movie theories: make people laugh.
"I think basically you're getting back to the word 'entertainment,' " said Kelly. "There is so much doom and gloom, and I think entertainment should have something to do with the word 'enjoyment.' "
Already there is talk about a sequel, although it's difficult to imagine how Kelly and Bannen could top their cinematic striptease. Jones says he didn't set out purposefully to make a "feel-good" film. Not that he's about to deconstruct Ned Devine's audience-friendly label. He's just happy with the way things turned out. Still, it's evident that Jones already knows something about comedy.
"I just set out to write a film which I really liked," said Jones. "I wrote the film for me and just hoped that other people would like it as well. So I never wrote it to a formula and thought, 'This is going to be a feel-good movie.' I can't even remember thinking, 'Oh I'm going to write a comedy.' I just sort of wrote it, and it just developed as a story. But now it's very obviously a comedy and it has emotion and people are saying it's a feel-good film. So it's a bit of a mystery to me." ©
