Brooklyn, with Saoirse Ronan, a miracle movie, says John Crowley

As Brooklyn stands tall among Oscar contenders, director John Crowley reveals it’s a miracle the movie was even made.

Director John Crowley and the star of Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan. Picture: Getty Images

Television, theatre and film director John Crowley is, as they say in sport, “in the zone”. The 46-year-old, who made his name as a Dublin theatre director at the esteemed Gate and Abbey theatres, last year directed two episodes of HBO’s crime series True Detective and moved to Australia for a stint directing The Present, starring Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh, for the Sydney Theatre Company.

And as he wrestled with Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s first play, Platonov, the film he shot back in 2014 — Brooklyn — was gathering critical and audience momentum. That momentum peaked last month when Nick Hornby’s adaptation of the Colm Toibin novel of the same name was nominated for three Academy Awards including in the key best-picture category, with its star Saoirse Ronan picking up a best-actress nomination.

While in Sydney rehearsing The Present last year, Crowley had a sense his film might attract special attention, particularly after its well-received premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

Yet he mused it was a “kind of a miracle” Brooklyn was even made. Crowley is well aware of the changing dynamics of the film and television industries, where novel-type TV series, such as True Detective, have become the home of the auteur while cinema resorts to bigger, costlier and blander spectacles.

MORE: Read David Stratton’s review of Brooklyn

“What is interesting is the long-form format is back [on TV] with really interesting character work,” he says. “One can do work that is darker and feels closer to the filmmaking spirit of the 70s than anything, certainly than anything you can get done in the film world right now.”

The middle ground in cinema has gone, Crowley adds, with the top end dominated by “these Marvel franchise movies”, including The Avengers and Iron Man.

“Brooklyn is a rare example of one of those things in the middle,” he says, attributing the film’s “miracle” status to the fact it is not cheap for an independent film, and that it is European film yet not art-house. “It’s an attempt at a ­European film of a certain scale that could play internationally. That was the ambition for it.”

Ambition accomplished. Brooklyn is an immigration story that has been told before but rarely so gracefully. Ronan stars as Eilis Lacey, a young Irishwoman who in 1952 leaves the suffocating insularity and limited opportunities of her small Irish town, Enniscorthy, for the promise of America, and ultimately the New York borough of Brooklyn.

She leaves behind a mother (Jane Brennan) and an older sister who organised her passage (Fiona Glascott), and meets in New York a benevolent priest (Jim Broadbent), a witty landlady (Julie Walters) and a helpful supervisor at her new job (Jessica Pare), who, in their differing ways, attempt to shepherd her through her blinding homesickness.

Both Crowley and Ronan could appreciate Eilis’s melancholy. Crowley moved to London 18 years ago to further his stage career (primarily at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal National Theatre, before taking productions to Broadway), while Ronan is, oddly enough, a New York-born Irishwoman. Her parents moved to the Big Apple in the 1980s, returning home when the actress was three years old.

Crowley doesn’t regard his move to London as an emigration, but at the same time, he says with a laugh, “it’s not Ireland”.

“That’s what was interesting about this book to me — and I think Saoirse found the same thing herself — is that we’re from generations of modern Ireland,” he says.

“We regard ourselves as not being immigrants weeping into our pints of Guinness on distant shores and singing Irish songs. We’re sort of more like international travellers; we’re not immigrants.”

Crowley believes one of Toibin’s achievements in his novel, and something he and screenwriter Nick Hornby fought hard to ­maintain in the film, was portraying the nature of exile.

It’s not just about geography, Crowley muses; rather, it is the experience you undergo “when you leave home and you’re no longer from that place, but you’re certainly not of the place you’re now living in”.

“It leaves you in a strangely rootless state,” he says. “And it’s not about whether you’re successful or not in the place you’re in, or whether you’re around Irish people or Jewish or Italian people, it’s this fundamental existential state when you leave your country to live in another.

“So the universality of that, it’s a condition he’s expressed brilliantly in her choice between two men, as it were.”

The novel sets up an ultimate choice for Eilis where there are two potential versions of her life. She could return home and settle with the charming local boy, Jim (played by Ex Machina and Unbroken star Domhnall Gleeson) or remain in New York with the charming local boy Tony (Emory Cohen, in a wonderful, young Brando-with-charm performance).

Crowley says the choice “was something that hit me like a smack when I read the novel, and also that was there in the screenplay and we tried to get that right”.

Crowley is not one to cling desperately to his Irish identity, but nor does he wish to discard it. He identifies with Eilis’s rejection of the heightened version of what’s at home that she encounters at a Brooklyn dance hall.

That almost kitsch version of home expats often experience — and Australians are not immune to it in London, Bali, Thailand or Japanese ski resorts, for instance — fulfils “a need to cling on and is one way of dealing with exile”.

Yet Eilis (and Ronan’s performance) is rather wonderful in the way she gets on with it while going through all the pain of separation.

Essentially, Crowley says, Brooklyn is “the story of a young girl turning into a wonderful young woman who is quite moral in the sense that she’s able to take control of her own ­choices in life and not have to rely on the church and the small town dragons, like the moral guardians, to shut her down and tell her how to behave”.

“She has a natural, unforced sense of right and wrong … and I think that’s what’s rather contemporary about this story,” he adds. “She doesn’t feel like what you’d expect of a mousy young girl from a small town in Ireland in the 50s. It’s actually a story about a woman coming into agency, her own power.”

The parallel with Ronan is obvious. This performance has led to the second Oscar nomination for the 21-year old, proving that the first — for her supporting role in Joe Wright’s adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel Atonement — was no fluke.

More significantly, it is the defining role that elevates the star of The Lovely Bones and Hanna well beyond the often troublesome tag of “child star”.

“I hope so,” Crowley says, smiling. His discussions about the film over a year coincided with Ronan’s growing up: she left home, moved to London and found a boyfriend.

“She was really struck by how homesick she was, and again, it’s the same thing, she’s got lots of opportunities,” he recalls.

“So it’s never about economics, it’s about being who you are and a feeling of disconnection and missing home, so she was able to bring a lot of that. She’s really special.”

Crowley’s latest film confirms he now has plenty of his own choices.

Raised in Cork, he was inspired to join the theatre after watching his older (by 17 years) brother Bob working in England as a stage ­designer.

And stage still has its attraction for Crowley, who admits initially films seemed too “exotic” to a young Irish boy.

While his production of The Present will be restaged by the STC on Broadway this year, and a TV adaptation of Brooklyn — focusing on Walters’s character at the Brooklyn boarding house — is in development, Crowley hopes to continue making films, although he adds: “I don’t know which one.”

“The thing I love doing is drama rather than genre, and any time I tipped towards genre it gets uncomfortable for me,” says the director of Intermission (2003), Boy A (2007), Is Anybody There? (2009) and ClosedCircuit (2013), a London-based thriller starring Eric Bana.

“What I love doing, and am able to bring my top game to, is emotionally complicated material that demands fine performances and which is tonally not straight down the line, which is a little unusual,” he says.

He describes his films — bar Closed Circuit — as sharing “odd tones”.

He previously developed Carol with Cate Blanchett before events conspired against it and Todd Haynes picked up the film.

Yet “it’s very hard to define” what he wants to make in cinema and “it’s the same with theatre”.

“Ultimately you have to go on an instinctive gut reaction to the piece of material you read, and if that’s not there, it won’t be in the finished product,” he says.

And that brought him to Sydney to direct Upton’s adaptation of an early play by a master, Chekhov, who had not yet defined his voice. Crowley is an international Irishman and he had to finally relent after seven years of cajoling by Blanchett and Upton.

He laughs. “When I started directing in Ireland, the one thing I never wanted to do is direct an Irish play because I felt, ‘What’s the point of that? There’s plenty of people doing that!’

“I just wanted to stretch myself and try and find the voice that was a little bit more international than something too specific.”

Brooklyn is open nationally.