There are 80,000 native Irish speakers in Ireland. 6,000 live in Northern Ireland. Three of them became a rap group called Kneecap.
From up-and-coming British director Rich Peppiatt, Kneecap is the real-life story of how this anarchic Belfast trio became the unlikely figureheads of a civil rights movement to save their mother tongue. The film won the Audience Award at Sundance this year and was the first Irish-language film to do so. It is raucous, authentic and entertaining, inviting viewers to climb on-board for a wild ride of sex, drugs, and Irish politics.
The trio play heightened versions of themselves in the film, making their acting debuts beside Irish legends Michael Fassbender and Simone Kirby.
To coincide with the film’s release this week in Australian theatres, Peter Gray spoke with Rich about his first impression of the band, the importance of maintaining indigenous tongue, and the colourful language that didn’t play well with American audiences.
I understand it was 2019 when you first saw Kneecap perform. Obviously they left an impression on you. What do you remember the most about seeing them at that time?
I remember them throwing baggies of white powder into the crowd by the fistful (laughs). And, you know, everyone scrambling to grab them. I think it took a few people a while to work out that they were flour rather than anything else (laughs). They could barely afford their own drugs back then, let alone be giving them out to other people. I just thought they had great charisma and stage presence, and there was 800-or-so young people in the crowd rapping every word back to them.
The thing that amazed me was I didn’t realise that this many people understood Irish and be this engaged. I’d sort of discovered, I suppose, a grassroots community of Irish speakers, and I think, as a filmmaker, when you find a precinct that doesn’t feel like it’s had a camera shot on it, you maybe find a foundation of a story you can build. Could I build a story on top of this? So, that was my first impression. It then took a few months of e-mailing them, to no avail, to them finally agreeing to meet me for a pint and for me to pitch them the idea of wanting to do a film. They thought it would be a documentary, and I said it would be a narrative feature film and I wanted them to play themselves. It was a very out-there proposition, but luckily they’re out-there enough to say “Yes.”
With them playing themselves, how collaborative does that become then? Especially with the dialogue…
Very collaborative. I think from the first time that I met them, I was very keen to impress upon them that I didn’t want to just come in and take their story. I was very aware that that would be unfair to do that. I learned enough about Kneecap to know they were very good at telling their own story. They had told their story through music and the interviews they’d done, and I just felt like the project would only really feel authentic if they were very, very involved in every step of (the production).
I spent probably six months before I put pen to paper just hanging out with them. It was a really long interview (laughs) that was mainly spent in pubs, just chatting and becoming friends. And along the process of chatting, these stories just come out. This wasn’t anything formal, just a relaxed hangout, and people would tell stories and you’d think “That’s a cool story,” so I’d jot it down. And after about six months I had enough stories to start piecing together this jigsaw of a narrative.
I wrote the script entirely in English, and then I would go back to them and ask how they would say it? It was obviously a whole process of translating into Irish, and that was quite difficult because their Irish isn’t what you would call “book Irish.” They have a very unique way of speaking. Half the time they’re just making stuff up as they go (laughs). You know, every year in English we have these news articuales about new words that enter the dictionary. These boys were actually coming up with Irish words on a weekly basis, putting them in songs, and entering the lexicon of the language. It was very interesting to see these lads having such an impact on an entire language that is 2000 years old.
One of the statistics brought up on screen that was quite numbing was how an indigenous language is dying every 40 days. Was the erosion of language always a story aspect you wanted to tell?
I didn’t think about it straight out the gate. It was something that was in my head (though). It really was kind of (about) the Irish language. It was only really once we got deeper into the film that I started researching around the issue and realised there was a bigger story about the indigenous language and culture. When we first set out to make (Kneecap) we didn’t have any ambition beyond it being a small film that would be different from Irish language films that have come before. Which is to say, (those films) focused on things like famine. There hadn’t been an Irish language film that was kind of gritty and modern and darkly comedic.
If we could make something that feels authentic to this small community in Belfast today, then we’d be happy. And if we had to do that on an iPhone, then we’d do it on an iPhone and put it on YouTube. It was only once the project started getting a bit of momentum and money coming in that we were like, “Oh, hang on, We’ve got a proper movie here.” I then looked at (the film) on a bigger scale, and not just in terms of production, but in terms of the themes. How does this resonate? If this film is going to play outside of Ireland, how do we fit into a bigger story? And when you start looking, you realise that there is this really under-discussed issue of indigenous language dying.
I was shocked by the statistic that once a language dies, there’s no way of getting it back. And in moving towards this monolingual world, English is just so hegemonic that it’s not for the betterment of us as humanity if we find ourselves in a place where the main language spoken is just English. Language contains the history and the culture and the beliefs of the people who came before us, and it grounds us and connects us to who we are as human beings, and once that’s gone, I think we’re just a little bit out at sea.
In making the film, you’re learning the language and immersing yourself in that culture, but you’re still an outsider. Do you think having that outsider’s perspective helped make the film more honest?
Oh, absolutely. I think it would have been difficult for an Irish filmmaker to make this film. If you’re from Ireland, and particularly the North, it’s hard not to have a take on the issues. You’re on one side or the other. Very few people are in the middle. And with that comes a set of beliefs and prejudices. You have to have slightly less skin in the game to help find the comedy in the subject. I think an Irish filmmaker would have been seen as being anti-British or sectarian. But I think that it does make us quite Teflon from any accusations of the film being anti-British. I can just say “It can’t be anti-British. I’m British.”
With audiences having certain views or perhaps viewing the film in a certain way, has the reception surprised you? I mean, playing at Sundance to an American audience could’ve gone either way…
Yeah, it was obviously amazing to get into Sundance, but I really didn’t have any idea how the film was going to play there. (Kneecap) is a film that doesn’t pull any punches of making it colloquial. I think that unless you were born within a mile of where the lads are from, you probably wouldn’t get some of the jokes. They’re so specific. And that was deliberate in making it super specific sometimes. But you come out the other side and tell a more universal story.
And some of my favourite films, like Trainspotting, for example, it’s a very specific film about skagheads in Edinburgh, and it was a global hit, but it was a gamble. I was surprised at what people were laughing at. I mean when we showed it at SXSW in Texas, the line “Cowboys are c**ts” didn’t go down very well. But there’s always things that work better in different places. You know, there’s a whole Gerry Adams thing where there’s a hallucination where (he) pops up and in America no one really knows who he is. But that scene in Ireland, people are rolling down the aisles. It’s always interesting to see the different places and what people will enjoy from the same film.
I mean, you’ll probably have Australians immediately on board with the use of that word.
I think we might have some record for the most use of the word, but not on purpose. It just felt like adlibbing in the film, and in Ireland it feels more like a punctuation than a swear word. In America, particularly, it’s a very profane thing.
It’s usually a term of endearment here.
It’s more for people you like than those you don’t like. Sitting in the edit, I was like, “There’s a lot of c**ts in this (laughs), and that’s not just the band saying it.”
Kneecap is screening in Australian theatres from August 29th, 2024.
