Night Train (1998)

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Night Train (1998)

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Night Train

The Production

Night Train is a feature film from first-time feature team of director John Lynch, writer Aodhan Madden and producer Tristan Lynch. Shot on location in Dublin and Venice as well as at Yorkshire TV studios in Leeds and at Ardmore Studios, in Ireland, the film stars Oscar nominees John Hurt and Brenda Blethyn in a well-crafted romantic thriller.

Middle-class suburban Ireland may not seem the place where many secrets and dreams are hidden and shrouded, but the story of two lonely, loveless individuals who slowly and carefully find their way into each others' hearts through a full and beautiful relationship is at the core of Night Train. The film has been a long-gestating project for both John Lynch and Aodhan Madden. From an early stage in the writing of the script they were assured of the participation of two-time Oscar nominee John Hurt on the project. "I read it and thought it was very suitable for film as a story", says John, who played the co-leading role of Poole. "I like films that offer the privilege to the audience to see what they would not normally see: the secret sides of peoples' lives."

Producer Tristan Lynch and co-producer Derek Ryan were enthusiastic about Aodhan's strong script which took an unconventional angle on what is essentially and simply a love story. "This film is a serious drama about two very normal people who end up sharing a very special relationship together", says Tristan. "It's a straightforward drama and the way it's executed is of an extremely high standard." Aodhan had sourced the germ of his story from his days as a theatre and film critic with The Irish Press, where he knew a colleague who had a similar lifestyle and obsession with model trains as the Poole character.

The story was also born out of Aodhan's desire to show a side of Irish life that gets ignored on screen and in print: the middle class. "On one extreme you have the urban experience -- Roddy Doyle and Barrytown -- and then you have the rural world of John B. Keane. No Irish writer since Joyce has written about the in-between and what are the problems of the contemporary middle class, which is the majority of people in this country." Aodhan was delighted that John Lynch agreed to direct his script. Their personal and professional friendship goes back to their time together in the Society of Irish Playwrights. "He very much has a writer's sensibility for everything he does and that's great for this particular film and for me", Aodhan continues. Brenda Blethyn also found elements in John which were important to her as an actress: "He invites spontaneity, which is very healthy."

The original story, entitled Night Train to Subotica, was set solely in Ireland and didn't feature any of the more exotic foreign locations or scenes on the Orient Express that have appeared in the final film version. It was producer Tristan Lynch who made the decision to expand the scope of the story, make it more cinematic and take the action out of Ireland. "It had to go to another level in terms of the relationship and fantasy element" says Derek. "And because the trains and the whole model railway thing were a central part of it, the logical move was that Poole and Alice would go on the real Orient Express."

As the down-on-his luck ex-con who's trying to put his past behind him, Poole has layers which are revealed both to the audience and to Alice as each seemingly innocuous course of events takes an unexpected turn. "What I liked most about him was that he's a very interesting mixture of things to play", says John Hurt. "He's tremendously naive on the one hand and on the other he's a conman but he's attempting not be one. He's a prisoner of his own background, his own childhood, while at the same time I doubt he's ever actually fallen in love with anyone before. It's a love story which has a parochial setting, but not in the sense that it would not be understandable. And the fact that it's parochial, in the sense that it is so, is merely that colour of the film - it's not the actual premise." John plays the jaded Poole character as an outsider in a familiar setting. "I'm not playing an Irishman because I feel he is outside of the underworld, the terraced houses, bedsitland or whatever. So I'm playing him North Country English, who has obviously lived here for a long time, has been through many a scam and knows how it works but isn't part of it."

The love affair that draws Poole out of himself is with Alice Mooney (Brenda Blethyn), the middle-aged daughter of the curmudgeonly Mrs. Mooney, played by Pauline Flanagan. Mrs Mooney is certainly disappointed in Alice, her only child, whom she feels can do better with her life and her law degree than working as a clerk at a law firm. "She thinks she could have been a solicitor", says Pauline, "and probably she could have been, so they're constantly spatting. Living together is hard for them both because she keeps feeling that her daughter should be making more money, should be more comfortable, and that's one of the reasons why I'm sure she insists on getting a lodger. She's the force behind it."

The lodger arrives in the shape of Poole, who's on the run from a ruthless boss to whom he owes money. Poole strikes up an immediate rapport with Alice and it doesn't take us long to see why: both are lonely, middle-aged has-beens and maybe believe that their time for finding a partner in life has passed them by. "Most romances that you read or see involve young people, whereas romance can come to everybody, It's not often you see it for middleaged people, and that's what I like about it: these are just ordinary people" says Brenda, nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award in 1996 for her poignant role as Cynthia in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. "There's a reason the mother is the way she is but there's no blame you can attach to anybody for the circumstances in this. You can't blame Alice for going off and leaving her and for all the things that happen to the mother while she's away. People have needs and they have to satisfy those needs."

The relationship that develops between Poole and Alice grows very tentatively and naturally - this is no steamy bodice-ripper. There's no urgent haste to their exploration of the relationship and what unfolds is like the gentle blooming of a flower. This is a film where each scene that depicts the unfurling of the Alice and Poole in each others' company will strike chords with anyone who's ever taken those tentative early steps with a loved one.

But Poole and Alice also share one other unifying trait: obsession. Alice's obsession is to become transported from her dreary, home-bound existence into the realm of fiction and poetry - time alone with a book is the one world in which she finds true happiness. And Poole's obsession is hinted at early on until, in one of the film's most magical sequences, we discover what he has been hammering at since he arrived - a train set which follows the course of the entire Orient Express.

The fairyland-like train set was designed and built by Frankie Morgan and Teddy Geber of Castlewellan, Co. Down-based WEIRD Design. "We constructed it in six weeks", says Morgan, who'd previously worked with Production Designer Alan Farquharson, "and incorporated basically the complete route of the Orient Express: London, Ostend, Paris, Prague, Vienna, Subotica, Belgrade, Istanbul, Venice, Innsbruck and Zurich." The result is a wonderland of winking lights, whirring trains zipping from city to city, expanses of ocean and mountains and, rising above it all, models of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Prague's majestic buildings and Istanbul's exotic minarets. Alice realises when Poole shows her his train set that he's exposed to her a piece of his heart which she handles with kid gloves, and this allows her to open up more to him. "Poole finds something very special in Alice" says Aodhan, "something very peaceful, tranquil and precious. It's love and it develops into a love story, a real love story, with real, ordinary people." The four lines from W.H. Auden's poem "Night Train" take on a hypnotic rhythm when Alice recites them to Poole early in the film. From then, we feel, it's only a matter of time before they travel on the real thing.

But Alice, says Brenda, is in a prison that's as much of her own making as it is of her mother's. "Alice's father left when she was young and so the mother would have felt threatened when Alice got to an age where she was going out with boys, and wouldn't have approved." Apart from a brief dalliance in Paris in her youth that came to nothing, Alice has led a solitary life. In Poole she finds a kindred spirit and someone who can reignite her wanderlust.

This coming to terms with oneself could almost be termed the sub-theme of the film, since it impacts on so many of the characters. As the pathetic underwear thief, Walter (Peter Caffrey) is forced to confess his indiscretions to the police, having witnessed Blake brutally beating Mrs Mooney. Now his nosy and holier-than-thou wife Winnie (Rynagh O'Grady) must face the fact that she has suppressed for so long: her husband is a transvestite. Recuperating in a nursing home, Mrs Mooney is now prepared to let Alice live her own life. Even crime lord Billy is forced to reassess himself in his confrontation with Poole in Venice. "Things do change" says John Lynch. "Rather than having people disown each other or go away when they have revealed themselves to each other, they're not rejected. That's a good, hopeful, human element of mature relationships."

And all the while, snapping at the heels of Poole and Alice are these dark elements of Poole's past in the shape of Billy and his biddable henchman Blake. As Billy, Lorcan Cranitch exudes a sense of quiet menace that keeps us guessing about Poole's fate right up to the penultimate scene in Venice. Billy is the uncultured, polar opposite to Poole and Alice, living a thuggish life in gaudy, vulgar surroundings with his girlfriend Liz (Cathy White) who is equally fiendish and tasteless. And the brutal and unpredictable Blake (Paul Roe) meets his comeuppance in Europe.

The film was shot at a number of locations in Dublin including Ranelagh (the Mooney's house), Sach's Hotel (Billy, Blake and Liz at the nightclub, and Billy and Liz's garish pad) as well as at Ardmore studios in February and March of 1997. March also saw the production move to Yorkshire Television Studios in Leeds, for the Orient Express interior scenes and on to Venice, the present-day terminus of the once-great train route.

John Lynch feels totally vindicated in the production's decision to shoot for a full week in Venice, although a number of the film's backers had advised against it -- at one stage Clifden in Connemara was suggested. He visited the city in July of 1997 and decided upon the Pasani Moretti palace as the main location for the showdown between Poole and Billy. "The visual elements in Venice translate as the wish fulfilments of the story", the director says, "and it adds much more production value and another dimension to the film." The production made good use of locations, shooting Poole on the Rialto Bridge, by the canals, at the market and in a gondola. John Lynch again: "For a film on such a small budget, it's going to look very expensive." Yet the realistic evocation of the Venetian settings in the script were all of Aodhan Madden's imagination, as the screenwriter had never visited the city prior to the shoot. "I did a bit of research, but the rest was just looking at photos. And I think it's important that I wasn't there, just as it's important that I wasn't on the Orient Express, because it has to be an imagination." His visualisation and idealisation of Venice and the Orient Express were closer to what he imagined Alice's would have been, with images gleaned from travel novels such as Graham Greene's "Stamboul Train" and Agatha Christie's famous "Murder on the Orient Express".

The production was effectively an eight-week shoot compressed into six weeks. "Coming from television, I had knowledge of production and of television drama -- I'm used to working economically", says John. "I had a very good, efficient team" he continues, singling out Director of Photography Seamus Deasy's contribution as particularly important. "The mood of the entire shoot was non-confrontational -- there wasn't time to have a row on it."

The visual tone of the film is explained by John Lynch. "We're using very muted colours generally for Poole and Alice. Desperation is the mood really -- here's two people clinging onto life, who are very lonely, who have a need for something. We hope to do a final print in E&R" (a film developing technique whereby the silver isn't removed in processing, as was done in The Unforgiven and Evita) "so that the skin tones are real without being depressing. The mood on the Orient Express brightens up a bit, but the Orient Express is a bit of a con anyway -- it's like people in a theme park. They will think it's going to be fantastic but when they get there it's going to be like Reader's Digest -- it is what it is."

"This is the mail, crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and postal order.
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the comer and the girl next door."
-W.H. Auden