Once

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: May 16th, 2007 (limited)

Starring: Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, Hugh Walsh, Gerry Hendrick, Alastair Foley 

Directed by: John Carney 

Premise: A modern-day musical about a busker and an immigrant and their eventful week, as they write, rehearse and record songs that tell their love story.

[Ghostboy]

I saw this a while back, and it's pretty good, and if you like Damien Rice/David Grey/random-Irish-folk-balladeer, it's really good.

[polkablues]

Dammit, it played at SIFF this weekend, and I was out of town.  I really wanted to see this movie.

[Pubrick]

I really wanted to see this movie.

SEE it? you LIVE it!

[MacGuffin]

In 'Once,' a song says so much
The relationship between two musicians in the Irish indie film wells up into melodies. Audiences are responding -- big time.
Source: Los Angeles Times

"Songs have an amazing way of predicting the future. You can write a song and then six months later you're living it. It's the strangest thing." So says singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who stars as a singer-songwriter in "Once," the tiny indie film that has quickly gone from critics' darling to audience favorite with the kind of per-screen box office numbers that make studio executives' hearts beat faster.

On this day, he's unshaven and a bit weary, wearing a dark jacket and jeans, and he has the same guitar case that is slung over his shoulder for much of the film strapped to his back. He stumbles a bit comically, emphasizing his fatigue. It's a "Purple Rose of Cairo" moment. The character has escaped from the silver screen and is somehow here in the flesh, in real life. It's precisely why "Once" seems so genuine, because in many respects, it is real.

Like "The Guy," the film's central character, Hansard once busked the streets of Dublin for cash, taking out a bank loan to make a demo before eventually scraping his way to success with his band the Frames. "The Girl" is portrayed by costar Marketa Irglova, a 19-year-old Czech musician who collaborated with Hansard (on his 2006 solo album, "The Swell Season") after meeting in Prague as virtual strangers. The story of "Once" is much like their own.

After toying with the idea of using Hansard's songs in a film with professional actors, writer-director John Carney (a former bandmate of Hansard's) opted to take a chance on Irglova, who had never acted before, and Hansard, who had only appeared in a small role in "The Commitments."

Filmed for a little more than 130,000 euros on a digital camera — often without the proper permits required for public spaces — "Once" shrugs off all previous notions of the movie musical as hyper-bright fantasy spectacle.

The music in the film is less about performance and more about watching two people work at revealing themselves to each other. The dialogue is the bumbling type of tentative romance, while the songs lend a more confident voice to their deeper feelings. All of which comes together to make "Once" either an anti-musical or the first genuine musical, depending on your perspective.

"It actually bypasses your own logic, 'cause a song kind of comes from an ethereal place more often than not," Hansard says about how music can sometimes say more than actual conversation.

"It's very hard to describe," adds Irglova. "You know the famous phrase of being kissed by a muse? It's exactly that. It's [as if] somebody kissed you on the cheek and suddenly you have this idea, this thought comes out of your mouth that you didn't even know you had."

Songs have a way of idealizing moments in time, putting a tune to a memory, like how couples designate "our song" and go misty-eyed whenever the radio dial stumbles upon it. It's why musicals are almost exclusively stories about love.

Romance is a delicate thing that could benefit greatly from a world where songs crop up in the most conventional situations.

It's maybe why these two untrained actors handle the romantic aspect of their roles with such apparent ease (especially Irglova), because the leap out of the unreality of music isn't such a big one. Their understanding of these characters is shaped by their music. For them, the interaction between songs and life is perfectly natural.

"I don't think there's the fairy-tale idea of there being just that one prince for you, that you need to find him, and without finding him you're lost," says Irglova. "Sometimes people come into your life with a mission, where they maybe push you in the right direction, say the right thing, inspire you in the right way. I think we might mistake that sometimes for it being more than it really is. Some people might just be messengers. Who is the right person to stay throughout your life and who is the right person to let go? I can't judge that. It's very personal."

Hansard agrees, offering, "I believe that if joy exists between two people, let it happen. If it stops existing, split up. It's the bottom line: Wherever magic exists, follow it. I think if you're open to that kind of thing in your life, your life will be filled with magic. If you're about commitment and if you're about logic, then your life will be filled with commitment and logic."

In art as it is in love, logic can be an unwelcome guest, serving to unravel our best intentions. But when Hansard and Irglova talk about how songs can just appear to them, like magic, and you see these things unfold during the course of the film, it is logic that seems more delicate than art.

"Once" shows by example how art can bridge the gaps between people. It has that ability to make you feel connected to something larger than yourself.

It's a film that wins its own argument by doing itself what it tries to show through the relationship between these two people.

There is no imitating here, because life is art. And like any proper idealist, Hansard sees no risk in putting "Once" out into a world that might be too cynical (or too full of logic) to open itself up to something so visibly pure.

"If this film has any success at all, it's our success," he says. "If it fails, it's our failure. There's a great ownership in that."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oscar prospects for 'Once's' songs already studied
Source: Los Angeles Times

Will "Once," the recently released Irish film, turn into this summer's indie hit? It's showing early promise.

Starring Glen Hansard, the lead singer of Dublin's the Frames rock band, as an Irish street singer and his sometime musical collaborator, Marketa Irglova, as a classically trained pianist who sells roses on the street, the film opened May 18 on just two screens, both in L.A., to an abnormally high $30,000-per-screen average. An unvarnished ode to musical discovery, "Once" expanded to 20 screens in 13 cities over the Memorial Day weekend, averaging $21,626 per screen.

Then there's the music.

The "Once" soundtrack, featuring Hansard and his songs, was released last Tuesday. Within hours it charted on the top 100 soundtracks sales on iTunes, and by Friday it had climbed to No. 3 in soundtrack sales. The album is doing equally well on Amazon.com (as high as No. 3), at Barnesandnoble.com (No. 6), and the soundtrack's MySpace page is rapidly picking up friends.

"Once" landed in theaters with a lot of street cred, having won the Sundance World Cinema Audience Award for best dramatic film. It has since earned critical raves. In a classic limited theatrical release pattern often used to nurture the prospects of smaller films, it is slowly being rolled out to 150 screens in major U.S. cities through mid-June. The hope is that it will build enough word-of-mouth and box office returns to play through the summer against the big blockbusters, according to Nancy Utley, head of marketing for Fox Searchlight, "Once's" distributor.

Now the soundtrack and its singer-songwriter team are starting to be prepped for an Oscar run. In an unusual twist, the soundtrack was discovered, at least in this country, before the movie. When Glen Brunman, a Sony Soundtrax music exec, bought the music rights in mid-January, he hadn't seen "Once." The film hadn't won any festival prizes, nor did it have a distribution deal. He stumbled across it while poring over indie music and movie blogs.

"Bloggers and film critics were writing love letters to this movie," he recalled. "What was unusual, from my perspective, is that they were focusing on the songs and the music."

He fired off a blind e-mail about the soundtrack rights to the movie's production company in Ireland. A brief e-mail reply included the cellphone number for the film's executive producer, who was at Sundance. "Once I tracked the filmmakers down, I just grabbed on and never let go," Brunman said.

Not long after, Fox Searchlight picked up the film's North American distribution rights for the bargain-basement price of $500,000, according to an executive involved with the acquisition. (The film cost about 130,000 euros).

"When Fox came in, that gave me added confirmation that I wasn't hallucinating," said Brunman, who was in a similar situation a couple of years ago when Sony Music Soundtrax and Fox Searchlight collaborated on Zach Braff's "Garden State," which made $36 million worldwide against a $2.5 million production budget. Perhaps even more than the film, the soundtrack became a pop culture touchstone, with 1.3 million copies sold.

By way of comparison, the most albums "Once's" bootstrapped star, Hansard, has ever sold is around 40,000. And the soundtrack from Fox Searchlight's surprise hit from last summer, "Little Miss Sunshine," sold roughly 30,000 CDs, although music plays a much less vital role in that family comedy. As word of mouth continues to build through the summer, Brunman hopes that radio begins to play "Once's" songs and that late-night and daytime television bookers will ask Hansard and Irglova to perform.

Sony and Fox Searchlight have equally high hopes for the film, its original music, the filmmakers and cast, but just a week or two into release, nobody is quite sure how far it can go. Utley said that seeing what turns up at prestigious film festivals, like Toronto and Telluride, this fall will help the studio determine "Once's" Oscar chances.

"It's impossible to predict what word of mouth produces," Brunman said. "None of us wants to force anything. The movie and music are so powerful, we think it will find its audience and they will determine its fate."

In the meantime, before leaving for a long Memorial Day weekend, Utley and her group at Fox Searchlight convened for a small listening party to determine which songs they might submit to the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Oscar consideration. To be eligible, a song must consist of words and music, both of which are original and written specifically for the film.

Each of "Once's" 13 songs was written solely for the movie, according to a Fox Searchlight spokesperson. However, four of the songs first appeared on "The Swell Season," an album Hansard and Irglova released last August. It was eight months after the film wrapped production, following a 18-day shoot in January 2006. Two songs also appear on the Frames' current album, "The Cost."

In a parallel album-released-before-movie conundrum, Kathleen "Bird" York's Oscar-nominated song "In the Deep," written for Paul Haggis' 2005 indie "Crash," was originally released on her 2003 album, "The Velvet Hour." Despite competitors' suggestions to the Oscar music branch that York should be disqualified for writing the song for the album and not the film, Haggis assured the academy that York had written the song for "Crash" but because of production delays on his film, she released her album and the song before the film made it to theaters.

That year Three Six Mafia won the original song Oscar for "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" from "Hustle & Flow." The sight of Three Six Mafia members in baseball caps, T-shirts and jeans clutching their Oscar onstage before startled academy members, is indelible.

Should the music from "Once" win over the hearts of the academy, the former Irish street busker with his ramshackle guitar standing onstage at the Kodak Theatre alongside his shy, teen-age Czech companion would look perfectly out of place too.

[Pubrick]

I really wanted to see this movie.

SEE it? you LIVE it!

You can write a song and then six months later you're living it. 

or you can make a joke and 3 hours later someone else is making it.

this thread is freaking me out.

[imawombat]

I saw it this weekend and really enjoyed it.  It is definitely a plus if you're a Damien Rice fan (I kept thinking about him during my viewing) but it was also just a nice, fairly simple love story. 

Anyone else see it yet?

[polkablues]

I really wanted to see this movie.

SEE it? you LIVE it!

You can write a song and then six months later you're living it. 

or you can make a joke and 3 hours later someone else is making it.

this thread is freaking me out.

I'm simultaneously living the movie, the song, this thread, and the joke you just made.  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

[pete]

I was in boston and saw it.  I saw the first 10 minutes of it, enjoyed it so much that I actually had to walk out.  I called this pretty girl to talk her into getting off work early, so we could watch it together.  and we did.  except she had motion sickness from the handheld.  seriously, it was pretty bad "naturalistic" dv camerawork.

[squints]

you mean your naturalistic beauty didn't distract her enough from the camera work to say...maybe...find something in the popcorn? you failed pete...you failed

[pete]

yeah and she puked on her present.

[MacGuffin]

`Once' Spins Gritty Boy-Meets-Girl Tale

Irish filmmaker John Carney wanted to do a modern twist on the musical romance, but he wanted to keep it real, no sweeping numbers where characters abruptly burst into song.

Carney wanted to keep it honest, reflecting the uneasy attraction between people who have just met. And he had to do it cheaply, having a next-to-nothing budget to produce his film.

So he took his story to the streets of Dublin, where amateur musicians abound, the perfect setting for a brief encounter between potential soul mates who bond over music and spend a week falling in love and creating songs together.

The result is the quiet charmer "Once," which won the audience-favorite award for world cinema at last January's Sundance Film Festival and has played to packed crowds since opening in a handful of theaters May 16. "Once" expands to wider release Friday.

"It was an attempt to make a film that was naturalistic and on the streets, quite gritty and low-key, yet would have all these songs in their entirety in it," Carney said in an interview alongside his stars, musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.

"How do you do that? You set up a world where people are singing to each other and moving through a musical landscape together. So I came up with the idea of a street busker and an immigrant, with things like her playing in a piano shop because she can't afford a piano, writing lyrics, rehearsing together because they're recording a demo."

Hansard, 37, lead singer of the Irish band the Frames, and Irglova, 19, a Czech friend he met years ago in Prague, play two characters without names, cited in the credits simply as "Guy" and "Girl."

"Once" opens with Hansard blasting away on a beat-up guitar and wailing a Van Morrison song on a Dublin sidewalk. By day, his character plays cover tunes for the crowds, but at night, when no one's around, he musters courage to do his own songs.

While doing one of those originals, the camera slowly zooms in on Hansard, then zooms back out to reveal Irglova, who has crept up to form an audience of one.

Newly arrived from the Czech Republic, Irglova's character sells flowers on the street. She tells Hansard she likes his music, they talk awhile, he tells her he works in his father's vacuum-cleaner repair shop, she tells him she has a broken vacuum that needs fixing.

Over the next few days, the two move through an endearing get-acquainted phase that's so genuine, watching the film feels like eavesdropping. They play an impromptu duet in a music shop, he asks her to write lyrics for a tune he wrote, they recruit a street band as backup and finagle money to rent studio time to record an album.

Carney, the bass player in the Frames in the early 1990s before leaving to make films, had asked former band mate Hansard to write songs for "Once" and later decided to cast him as the male lead.

"I realized I didn't want to work with actors on this," Carney said. "Rather than getting good actors that could half-sing, we'd get good singers that could half-act, and that authenticity would carry the film through."

Hansard previously had a brief taste of the acting life as the guitar player in 1991's "The Commitments," the tale of a working-class Irish soul band.

A Morrison and Bob Dylan devotee who dropped out of school at 13 to busk on the Dublin streets, Hansard had been reluctant to act in the film. Given its low budget, about $160,000, and low expectations, Hansard ultimately decided to take the chance.

"My first reaction was, like, fear," Hansard said. "I didn't want to be in a romantic comedy. I didn't want to be in a film that basically showed all my songs and then wasn't that good of a film. There was just that risk. But because I knew John, because I knew Mar, I knew it would be an intimate project.

"There were a bunch of things that made me feel more secure about it. We were going to make it for nothing. We were going to make it really fast. It wasn't going to take up anybody's time. Plus, I think we all agreed if it was rubbish, we'd just shelve it. It's not a problem. If it's rubbish, of course it's not coming out."

Carney already had written the female lead as an immigrant before Hansard introduced him to Irglova, who had begun playing piano at age 7 and grew up singing in a school choir, listening to Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush and watching musicals on TV such as "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar."

Irglova and Hansard, who collaborated on the album "The Swell Season," released last year, already had a strong musical bond that carried over into their acting. Their characters, both encumbered by previous relationships, take awkward but passionate steps toward love, the film headed toward an uncertain outcome that, unlike Hollywood endings, leaves their fate open to discussion.

Carney has thought about resurrecting the characters for another film years from now, the way director Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy did with their 1995 romantic drama "Before Sunrise" and its 2004 follow up "Before Sunset."

Hansard and Irglova are wary about a sequel to "Once."

"If you get it wrong, it's like pointing a gun 10 years into the past and shooting your first film," Hansard said.

"I ultimately think that sequels don't work," Irglova said. "It's the same with music. If you go on stage and give the audience less of what they want, it's better than giving them more of what they wanted. ...

"It's almost like, by not making a sequel, it always stays in people's minds as something they really like, and they wish they knew how it continued, but it never did. But if it was 10 years from now, I'd definitely think about it, but it would all depend on the story."

Hansard and Irglova's real lives have imitated their characters' lives. Just friends before and during filming, they became romantically involved while traveling on a tour bus across America this spring to promote "Once" and perform songs at advance screenings.

"We've been just friends for a long time, and it's always been really lovely," Hansard said. "But on this trip, it's sort of turned into something else."

"It's a bit like this film," Irglova said. "It was never like, let's be boyfriend-girlfriend. "It's just like ..."

"... We'll see what happens," Hansard said.

[polkablues]

Carney has thought about resurrecting the characters for another film years from now, the way director Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy did with their 1995 romantic drama "Before Sunrise" and its 2004 follow up "Before Sunset."

Hansard and Irglova are wary about a sequel to "Once."

"Twice"?

[pete]

fee times

[polkablues]

Once 2: Oncer