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Arts & Culture

Once/Interviews with John Carney and Glen Hansard

John Carney and Glen Hansard used to play together in an Irish band known as The Frames. Hansard stayed with the band but Carney decided to try his hand at filmmaking. Now the two are working together again in a new film called

Once (opening May 26 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas). KPBS film critic Beth Accomando spoke with the two men as well as musician actress Marketa Irglova.

Glen Hansard, John Carney and Marketa Irglova on the set of Once

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When John Carney began working on the film Once , he was supposed to have a pair of stars in the lead roles, a healthy budget and music by his friend Glen Hansard. Then he had an idea. Rather than hiring actors who could pretend to sing, he decided to hire musicians who could act. But without stars his backers pulled out. So Carney went to the Irish Film Board for bare bones funding. Big budgets, he says, are overrated.

JOHN CARNEY: "Your'e more constrained when you're wealthy. Or when you're making a bigger film and people complain about no budgets but having a small amount of money to make a film means you're at your absolute freest to express yourself as an artist."

The lack of funds forced them to be creative says Glen Hansard.

GLEN HANSARD: "It basically gave the film a lot of constraints that were really good for the project. There was a sense of ownership, where no one was telling us what to do, that we hadn't covered our scenes we were basically in control of it. There was a sense that if this thing is a success in any way it would be ours and if it was a failure it would be ours."

Hansard, of the Irish band The Frames, had been composing the music for the film when Carney called on him to take the lead role. Hansard plays a man simply referred to as the Guy. This Guy works for his dad in a vacuum repair shop. He plays his music on street corners for petty cash. Then he meets a girl.

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Glen Hansard in Once

GIRL: [clapping] "This song you just played, you wrote it?

GUY: Working on it.

GIRL: Why don't you play during the day, I see you every day.

GUY: People during the day want to hear songs they know that they recognize otherwise I wouldn't make any money. I play these songs at night, They wouldn't listen.

GIRL: I listen."

The girl is an Eastern European immigrant who harbors musical aspirations of her own. Their chance meeting leads to a musical collaboration and a potentially brighter future for each. Filmmaker John Carney wanted to riff on the old Hollywood musicals that he loved. The result is something he calls a visual album.

JOHN CARNEY: "What it is really is a series of songs and a little dramatic story that knits them together. It's a kind of modern day musical but done in a way that's acceptable to a younger and newer audience. I think young people are missing out on those great films because of the amount of disbelief they have to suspend in order to get into them so the idea for me was to do something that you didn't have to suspend your disbelief in order to listen to the songs, the songs were part of the dialogue this was a film about musical people so it was natural for them to sing."

So there's one song played in a music shop as two try an impromptu collaboration. Another song plays on the girl's walkman as she tries to compose lyrics. Then the batteries die and the girl has to head out in the middle of the night for new ones. Marketa Irglova, who plays the girl, describes the scene.

MARKETA IRGLOVA: "She's buying batteries and she's walking up the street with the walkman in her ears listening to the tune and she's working out the lyrics for it."

Song If You Want Me begins to play.

John Carney's Once

MARKETA IRGLOVA: "So it was a day that we had a crane available and we wanted to get the most out of it so we used it in two scenes and one was me walking down the street. But it was great because it was the end of the day and it was January but for some reason it felt very warm, maybe it was because I was wearing three pairs of stockings and pajamas over it. It felt almost like shooting a video for a song and all I had to do was walk up the street and pretend I was listening to a song."

Hansard recalls how the local kids became a part of the scene as well.

GLEN HANSARD: "Yeah they looked great and the thing is its their neighborhood. So obviously you couldn't ask them to step out of shot because that's their shop and that's their street. It was lovely though, especially that moment when Mar walks away and the bass, the beat kicks in the and the girls just start skating from behind and it just looks really beautiful. For me, thats certainly my favorite scene where everything poetic just sort of came in."

It's a magical moment. It somehow manages to pay homage to the old Hollywood musicals as it reinvents them. It's a film that rooted in the real world yet also manages to transcend it.

GLEN HANSARD: "To me it sort of reminds me of a small French film that takes place, the kind of idea that a camera follows two characters around for a week and then they just disappear."

Catch Once before it disappears from theaters. It's a lovely slice of musical life.

Listen to Film Club of the Air Wednesday May 30 at 10 am when Once will be one of the new releases up for discussion.

Companion viewing: The Commitments, On the Edge