Jamie Thraves & Aidan Gillen on Treacle Jr.
<i>Treacle Jr.</i> reunites director <b>Jamie Thraves</b> with his leading man from <i>The Low Down</i>, <b>Aidan Gillen</b>. We talked to the pair back in February when they were in Glasgow for the Scottish premiere of <i>Treacle Jr.</i> at the Glasgow Film Festival
It’s half an hour before Jamie Thraves’ third feature film, Treacle Jr., is to make its Scottish debut at the 2011 Glasgow Film Festival and I steal the director and his film’s star, Aidan Gillen, away from the busy bar of a nearby hotel where the pair are enjoying a few drinks before introducing the film. I say enjoy, but for one of my interviewees this isn’t quite the right word. While Thraves is a flutter of excitement at showing his independently produced film – he remortgaged his house to finance it – Gillen cuts a far more demure figure; he’s clearly not a fan of speaking about himself or his work. In this respect he’s like the photonegative of his character in Treacle Jr. (also called Aidan), a wild-eyed extrovert with a thick Irish accent and even thicker Daffy Duck lisp.
Treacle Jr. opens with Tom (Tom Fisher), an average suburbanite with a loving young family and a comfortable home, setting off on his usual commute to London, only this time he inexplicably decides not to come home again and begins sleeping rough. After an incident with some gay-bashers and a tree, Tom is left concussed and is taken in by Gillen’s character Aidan, who he meets in A&E. At first Tom's Florence Nightingale seems certifiable, a looney-tune whose landscaping business involves going door-to-door brandishing a pair of scissors and telling unsuspecting housewives that their massive bushes need seeing to, but as Tom warms to Aidan’s good heart so too will the audience. It’s the sweetest, funniest, maddest role that Gillen has ever played on screen.
It's a character that Gillen has obvious affection for. “I’ve always been drawn to people who are kind of pushed to the side, or who are considered ‘borderline mental cases’, who nobody wants to know. I’ve always wanted to hang out with them,” the Dubliner tells me. Despite their diametrically opposed demeanors, Gillen reveals that his personality is not too far from his Treacle Jr. namesake. “It's weird, because this is a very eccentric, extreme kind of character, but it's amazing how much of myself I can see in him. It’s a bit fucking worrying actually.”
“Well, I've seen you in all kind of situations,” Traves interrupts with a knowing laugh. “I always knew Aidan had a propensity for comedy, but anyone who knows him, or thinks they know him, might be surprised with this role. Aidan can come across as quite quiet at times for those who don't know him, but, actually, he's this amazing raconteur and has a very funny sense of humour, and I've been itching to try to get a character like that from him on screen. We tried to do that with The Low Down [Thraves' excellent debut where he first worked with Gillen] but it kind of didn't quite work. Why was that again?”
“I think I was just depressed,” Gillen replies dryly, as if to prove Thraves point.
What gives Treacle Jr. its emotional, as well as comedic, kick is the relationship between the glum giant Tom and the irrepressibly upbeat Aidan. “Because we were making it with very little money I wanted to come up with something that was very simple – a real two-hander, in the vein of Midnight Cowboy or Withnail & I," Thraves explains.
Like Withnail & I, and indeed The Low Down, Treacle Jr. is also a great London movie; there’s a real veracity to its milieu. These are not the postcard settings of Richard Curtis or recent Woody Allen. “All the locations are very familiar to me,” says Thraves. “I shot where I lived, I shot around the corner, for cost reasons, but also because I'm in love with the environment as well."
Although Thraves admits there are things he would have changed if he had a bigger budget, chiefly he’d have shot it on film rather than digital, there’s a freewheeling verve to Treacle Jr. that's a result of him having total creative freedom. “I wanted to get back to that time when I was in college where it was me making sure the script was as good as it could be and we just went off and shot it very fast. There was just a great spirit and a great energy, and I think that sort of shows in the film.”
Treacle Jr. is distributed by Soda Pictures and is release in key cities 15 Jul
Visit Soda Pictures online here.
http://www.treaclejr.com