"I played bass guitar, but I really wasn't very good at all," Carney candidly conceded. Despite his acknowledged lack of skill as a performer, his love of music remained extant, and Carney resolved to make what he termed, "An art house musical."
"'Once' is a sort of modern day musical. I love the classic Hollywood musicals of the forties and fifties. I wanted to attempt to make a contemporary story in which the lead characters sung more than they spoke," Carney explained. "I was tired of writing 90-page scripts, trying to express myself with dialogue and plot twists. I opted for a mood piece, which would be a kind of visual album, a film which you could watch over and over again, just to hear the songs."
Carney described his unusual approach, saying, "Basically, I had an outline about a street musician and a girl. I wanted to have several songs in the film and wanted to include them in their entirety."
He turned to Glen Hansard, his erstwhile bandmate with The Frames. Carney told the musician, "I'm going to start writing the script, but what I really want to do is to work in tandem with you because I want you to write all the songs for it," said Carney. "The idea would be that he would give me a song and that would maybe inspire a scene or maybe he'd fashion a song or an idea for a song that he had around a character idea. We bounced back and forth with ideas, writing the screenplay."
Carney had originally planned to cast a professional actor in the lead role. That soon changed.
"It became very clear that it just wasn't going to work because the songs are so emotional," he explained. "If you've written a song, then you just sing it. You remember why you wrote it."
The solution became clear. Although Carney had originally contacted Hansard strictly to compose songs, he decided to cast him as the protagonist. Hansard, in turn, introduced Carney to Marketa Irglova, a Czech singer and pianist. The two had previously recorded the album, "The Swell Season." Having tapped Hansard for the male lead, Carney decided that Irglova would be the ideal person to play opposite him.
Financed by the Irish Film Board, "Once" was made on a miniscule budget of $150,000 and shot on a seventeen-day schedule. As a consequence of budgetary constraints, Carney had to resort to guerilla filmmaking techniques. He chuckled as he recalled, "We didn't even have film permits. I lied to the cast and crew and assured them that we did, but actually we didn't."
This subterfuge led to one memorable incident. The opening scene of the film depicts a purse snatching. Lacking a film permit, they had to shoot the vignette with a long lens without sequestering the set from sidewalk pedestrians. One well-intentioned Good Samaritan, not realizing that the theft was staged as part of a movie, intervened by applying his knee to the groin of the fleeing miscreant.
"Once" had its U.S. debut at the Sundance Film Festival, where it garnered the World Audience Award. In the aftermath of this enthusiastic response, Fox Searchlight purchased the distribution rights.
"It's amazing to me," said Carney. "I really did think when we made this film that we had made a film that very few people would want to see or maybe only people who are interested in music would want to see. It turns out to be something quite different, which is great."
Nathan Lerner can be reached at culturevulture1@aol.com.