To say the least, commercial director Gary McKendry’s longer-form filmmaking career is off to a good start. His first such endeavor, Everything In This Country Must, has been nominated for an Academy Award this year in the short film [live action] category.
A native of Ireland, McKendry said the last thing he wanted to do was make a film about Ireland. Having left the country in 1985 when he was 18 and residing in New York for the past 12 years, he jokingly noted that there are so many people in Ireland doing films about Ireland, the last thing they need is a New Yorker doing it.
But, in his search for a story–after reading more than one thousand short stories according to his estimate–it was the tale in Everything In This Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories from author, and fellow Irishman, Colum McCann that resonated with the director.
The story is set in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s and centers on a man and his daughter trying to save their horse as it struggles in a river on a stormy night. At its core, it explores the human dynamics that exist when a nation is in a warlike state.
In McKendry’s view, many people from outside of Ireland write stories about the conflicts that have existed within and depict the situations as black and white. When you live there, he said, it’s shades of gray and nuances, where no one is really guilty and no one is really innocent. To him, this story captured that completely without assigning blame.
Ambitious Vision
The story McKendry tells of pitching this film to McCann offers evidence of the power of intention. Both lived in New York so they met for drinks. When McCann asked McKendry why he should be the one to helm it, McKendry recalled answering, ” ‘Cause I’m going to get it nominated for an Oscar.”
The two men partnered to write the script and then McKendry headed to the Emerald Isle for five-and-a-half days of shooting in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, just outside of Belfast. McKendry explained that he took the production there because the landscape is an important part of the story, and to fake it well in the States would have cost more than going abroad. However, shooting in Ireland in the summer meant that the nights would only be four hours long, though much of the film is set at night. This is where the visual effects house Ring of Fire, Hollywood, entered the picture.
“It’s not your typical visual effects job. If you look at the short film and see any visual effects in there, we’ve failed,” executive producer and partner of Ring of Fire John Myers said. “So, it was about using technique and approach to not limit Gary, but to give him a chance to tell the story freely.” For Myers, the biggest challenge was creating the progression from late in the day to nighttime when the scene was actually shot on a sunny day.
The team at Ring of Fire handled color correction in Inferno and compositing as well as wire removal. And, since McKendry wanted to shoot one of the scenes inside of a military tank and couldn’t do that while moving the vehicle, they used green screens to create the environment outside of its windows.
Without the luxury of multiple cameras and many takes, with a limited crew and McKendry’s personal savings funding the project, the edit was especially important. He couldn’t actually crash the tank that he had rented, and the actors couldn’t get too close to the revolving series of horses as they thrashed in the frigid river. (Unlike the actors, each horse could only stay in the water for 15 minutes before tiring, so there were three in rotation.) Paul Martinez of bicoastal Lost Planet edited the film and successfully helped create these illusions.
“When you have a shortage of film, and crashes, and horses drowning, and things like that, it really forces you as an editor to find new ways to cut it where it sucks you into it, but where you’re not seeing, ‘Oh, that horse really isn’t all the way in the water,’ ” Martinez said.
His suggestion for McKendry was to shoot as much of the horse as possible, especially close-ups, so he could weave it in with shots of the actors. “The biggest struggle was editing those scenes with the horse in the river,” Martinez noted.
Recognition
This is McKendry’s first Academy Award nomination and Martinez’s first as editor (he had assisted on Oscar nominated work in the past). Ring of Fire is also having its first dance with Oscar through this film; they also had a hand in Spider-Man 2, which is nominated this year in the visual effects category.
Regarding the nomination, the director said, “It’s great for the film because the danger with a short is that there are not many places to see it, so it means the film gets seen. And it’s great for the crew involved to have worked on something and be recognized for it.”
McKendry created a production company for this project, Six Mile Productions, named after the river in which they filmed. Sigurjon Sighvatsson executive produced with Larry Gold producing. James Whitaker was DP.
And another example of someone crossing over from commercials to film, and in this case, shifting over to composing, is Paul Kelly, an editor at 89 Editorial in New York, who created original music for the film.
McKendry has commercial representation with bicoastal/international Partizan and in Canada with Circle Productions, Toronto and Vancouver, B.C.
Additional credit at Ring of Fire goes to Jerry Spivack, digital effects supervisor; the aforementioned Myers, digital effects producer; Casey Conroy and Zenta Kronitis, producers; John Ciampa and Alicia Aguilera, compositors; and Gary Mortensen, rotoscope artist.