Randal Plunkett is the writer and director of The Green Sea, the tale of American writer Simone (Katharine Isabelle) living in the Irish countryside. She has an accident involving a girl she just calls Kid (Hazel Doupe) – but is everything as it seems? Plunkett chatted with Paul Simpson about the movie’s genesis and production… NB There are some mild spoilers within.

Thank you for a very intriguing movie. What was the original inspiration for it?

It was a blend of a couple of things that were going through in my life, so it’s a little bit autobiographical. I look a bit like Simone in the sense that I dress a bit like that, I regularly get upset when my car breaks down and do all those kinds of things. So I took a lot of inspiration from the things that I do myself and then on top of that I got a taste for success after a short film came out and it seemed that my career was going to explode. I was going to jump into features and I was going to be the next hot thing. Or at least that was my delusion but it never actually happened. So I wanted to write a story about that, the disappointment after getting a bit of a taste.

That’s the idea of who the writer is but I also went through some difficult times and imagination saved me, if you like. It gave me a purpose, it gave me things to do so I wanted to write about somebody who was sick in spirit and is able to pull themselves out. I’m a big believer in self help. Rather than relying on any one person to help you, you help yourself and I suppose this is a take on that, except with imaginary characters and things like that.

You’ve got fantastic performances from both Katharine and Hazel. How much did the script alter once you had them cast and you were actually filming it?

We had a lot of problems on production, so a lot of the film had to be reshaped and edited out but I think both characters brought a lot of themselves to it. Particularly Katie: she had quite a behemoth of a job to do that role, and she really personalised it as well. Myself and Katie knew each other from before so a lot of the inspiration and the details of the character I modelled on her anyway.

Both actors brought a lot of their own into it and the way we worked generally was we had the source material, and a lot of the funny one liners were already in there, but they were just added to a lot, especially by the girls.

The same could be said for some of the other characters, like Dermot Ward’s character, the mechanic, he brought a lot of his own, and obviously [Michael Parle as] the Collector. We had him doing a lot more but we found that he had a lot more presence being the unspoken man, so we tried to make it more mysterious by taking away from him but at the same time making it even more Lynch-y by the end.

There’s definitely a feeling of less is more with that sort of character. You’re wondering what part of what he’s involved with. He presents a very striking image: was that influenced by anything particular?

Yes, he was a blend of a few things. The Cremator [Spalovač mrtvol] is one of my favourite films. It’s a Czech new wave black and white film from 1969 about a cremator who becomes obsessed [with his work]… He walks through this weird vortex of a world, with all these interactions he has with people. The Collector dresses a bit like this very nefarious character. I took a lot of inspiration from him and several pieces of art – the Collector’s glasses in fact were my glasses, kind of steampunk.

That’s what I found was very fun about this film: it was blending aspects of things I find interesting with a lot of influences and gentle nods to things I enjoy in art and in cinema as well. It was almost like a pastiche of different ideas moulded together.

That almost implies that you feel it’s not something of your own when you say it’s a pastiche…

No, let me rephrase what I mean by that. I mean I took a lot of inspiration from a lot of different sources and I arranged it.

There’s an old saying, ‘if you want to make something original, you copy and create,’ because an interpretation of a copy influenced by yourself becomes something different and that’s how I look at it. It’s definitely something that I felt I tried to do something different with, narratively speaking, even in terms of trying to have the lead character to be so unlikable, which is a risk. Anyone will tell you ‘Don’t’ – in fact, that’s what people did tell me. ‘She’s too unlikable, you won’t get away with it.’ Some people might be right, some people might be wrong, I’ll let the watchers make that decision. I tried to create something that was very much me. but my personality has been influenced by others so that’s what I mean by pastiche.

We’ve all seen the concept of the buddy movie. We’ve all seen the mysterious character who’s all knowing. These are all ideas that have been done. It’s just when they’re taken and put in such a way and in such a format, it gives them a little something fresh.

Obviously as a writer and director, were you writing the script knowing you were directing it? In other words with a certain amount of shorthand in the stage directions? Or were you writing what you wanted to write and leaving it to the ‘other you’ to direct it when that happened?

No, I’m unfortunately not skilled enough to be able to separate my writing from my directing. If you ever read one of my atrocious scripts you’ll definitely see a lot of directions. I’m very visual.

One of the things I do is try and do things very visually. When writers write, let’s say, a pitching script, it’s very minimalist. With me, I don’t think I tend to write too minimalist in that respect, it tends to have a lot of visuals put in.

I think because I knew I was directing this movie, I knew I was going to be heavily involved in the editing of the movie, it was just very much geared that way. There were a lot of things that changed with what you get by the end but I think that’s every movie. There’s the movie you write, the movie you make and then the movie you edit.

You mentioned production problems, I don’t know if you want to talk about that at all?

Yes, I’m very open.

We had a lot of problems with budget first. We were expecting to get some money from a source who pulled out at the last minute and I had to go and take some loans to cover the holes. Then we had weather issues: we had a snow storm in the middle of the production. I was trying to shoot one scene that had lovely beaches and the next day it was covered in snow so I couldn’t match those scenes together, as you can imagine.

We had massive issues with things like unions, equipment issues, then we had people getting sick…

We had every kind of issue you could have had and then on top of that, we didn’t finish on time. So we lost about seven or eight production days which was quite difficult and we had to pick up a few of them the following year. We had to shoot scenes around not having Katie with us. We ended up with, I think, five or six days less than we were supposed to have.

And then I had a lot of issues in post as well because I ended up with a three hour black and white movie! One does get crazy ideas and then one comes back down to Earth every so often (laughs). I was no Tarkovsky so I decided to lose the black and white and come back to the real world.

The real cut of the movie was about two hours, in fact we almost finished the movie because we had a just under two hour cut – there was a lot more stuff going on with The Collector and the relationship had a little more seasoning about it – but we felt that the problems with that cut was it was very good, there was a bit more background, it was a bit less surreal but unfortunately it had a problem with pace. It was long. That movie for me, even as it is [at 105 minutes], is at the limit. I think any longer I would start to lose people.

So it was very difficult. Indie films are difficult anyway to keep long. You really have to be someone like a Tarkovsky to make something very big because people these days don’t have the attention span. If it’s a very difficult subject matter, it needs to be short and punchy for people to hold onto it. Maybe they’ll only check their emails four times in the movie, instead of seven!

I think, for me, the scene where Simone and the Kid are on the railway platform is probably the best scene in the film between the two of them because it just feels like we actually see Simone then. The rest of the time there’s some sort of hiding, whether it’s physically with the hood or it’s emotionally hiding behind the verbal violence but just at that point she opens up.

I think you’re right and I think with someone like Simone, what makes her so interesting as a character, for me, is the fact that she’s very real. She’s that horrible woman who has so much negativity around her but deep down, behind all of that, there is an emotional spirit, afraid to come out and face the music. People walk around with mistakes and if you look at society, we’re very very ashamed of our mistakes, hence why we destroy fascist statues whenever we overturn a government.

We don’t like to remind ourselves that we’ve made mistakes and I think Simone is an embodiment of that. The way she dresses, the way she’s so abrasive to anyone, even the man who’s trying to be nice to her. He’s so honest with her and she’s so vile towards him when they interact. But there are those small snippets where humanity slips out and that’s one of the scenes where you start to see yes, that’s Simone. She actually is a person who has reasons for her difficulties and her emotional mess.

I’m assuming just because of the nature of production that you weren’t able to shoot it for Katharine in any form of chronological order.

Oh God no, no. It was a lot like Pulp Fiction. Everything was shot all over the place. We mostly shot all of Katie’s stuff in one block right before Christmas.

That’s the other thing: we were supposed to start earlier because we wanted an autumnal kind of feel to the movie which would have given us a lot of those reds and browns. Nature is a major part of my personality, it’s a major part of my work, all my films have that aspect to it. But we missed the window because of production issues so we were sandwiched right before Christmas. I think Katie went home three days before Christmas. So we had to push her to get everything done.

I think the first thing we shot was the beach scene at the end where they both walk away into the sunset. And the funny thing is, they literally met five minutes before that very very heavy scene where they’re sitting up on the sand dunes!

Did either of them have input into their characters in terms of ideas for them that maybe were things you hadn’t thought of?

Absolutely. One thing that really helps is great casting because both those actors are stunning. I talk a lot about Katie but I have to bring Hazel into this: Hazel had all these things that she did. One scene where she’s making the coffee was particularly funny because she kept pouring her coffee right up to the top, like where it was almost spilling over. Nobody who drinks coffee would do that but the thing is she kept doing it and I thought, ‘What the hell is she doing?’ and I realised she was trying to be, or rather she was achieving being somebody who doesn’t understand the world that we live in and coffee is just like any other beverage. It’s these micro things that they both did and she would pour that in because the Kid has no idea what coffee is.

We took a lot of time to think about the characters and we really pushed the envelope with the little tweaks. I’m a big fan of Japanese cinema. Kurosawa is one of my favourite directors and he’s got a great actor who worked with him a lot called Toshiro Mifune. One of the most iconic things of his character was all these little tics he would have. He would constantly shuffle his shoulders when he walks. It just built this personality around minimalist things like that and very much that’s what I wanted from each one of the actors, to have something that was them. The two girls brought a lot more than just one thing.

What was the biggest challenge that you feel that you really overcame with this?

As a director, especially as a first time director, you don’t know how good your material is, whether people are going to like it or whether they’re not going to like it. I think if you asked me honestly what the most difficult decision was, was to actually take a direction and go there, whether it was going to be good or bad. For me on that film it was pushing the surreal aspect, taking chances on the main character, taking chances on whether the narrative was going to make sense and if people were going to see it as ‘Oh well this is all bizarre and we don’t have to understand it’ or are they going to hate it because it doesn’t make any sense? That decision was probably the hardest.

It was the one that kept me up at night for months thinking, ‘Am I being an idiot here? Is everybody going to loathe this film and not understand it because it doesn’t make any sense?’ I think taking a chance on your own material is the hardest part.

The Green Sea is out now on digital platforms