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British writer/director Rich Peppiatt was convinced that Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, the raucous stars of the Irish Oscar entry “Kneecap” (August 2, Sony Pictures Classics), could play themselves in his biopic, along with their bandmate, Belfast schoolteacher DJ Próvai. They could: but it took a while to get the laissez-faire band on board. The end results have been smashing, from winning the NEXT audience award at Sundance 2024 to seven British Independent Film Awards including Best British Independent Film.
About five years ago, soon after Peppiatt moved to Belfast, escaping from his crying newborn one night, he caught rappers Kneecap at a local pub. “I was blown away by their stage presence, their charisma,” said Peppiatt on a Zoom call. “And not just that, they were so overtly political, they were throwing baggies of rock white powder into the crowd. They were snorting things on stage. It was ‘OK, this is pretty out there,’ but people were loving them. Eight hundred or so young people in that crowd were rapping back every word they were saying in Irish. For me the language was something that was dead and was still spoken perhaps by a handful of farmers out in rural Ireland.”
The filmmaker recognized a story that had not been told. “It’s always nice to feel like you might be able to crack the door open,” he said. “If I didn’t know this, there must be many, many millions of people who also don’t know this. The ex-journalist in me is drawn to stories that are based on something real.”
Meeting the band led to “the longest interview, the longest and most drink-and-drug-fueled interview in the history of journalism,” said Peppiatt. “Hunter S. Thompson would have probably blushed at this one, because it lasted about six months and took about three decades off my lifespan.”
Peppiatt identified a bit with DJ, the relatively straight school teacher who joins the band and picks up their nasty habits. “I’m 39 and they’ve got a good decade on me,” said Peppiatt. “Maybe I felt like I needed a bit of excitement in my life. I was a family man, just bought my first house. There was more of a 2.4 children life staring ahead of me. They brought the party animal back out of me, which I thought had been retired. But the good thing was, I had the excuse when I staggered in the house at seven in the morning, I could be, ‘Honey, it’s work. I know it doesn’t seem like work, but I am gaining their trust. I’m getting them to open up to me.'”
Within a few years a script was delivered. “The majority of it is true,” Peppiatt said. The missing IRA dad played by Michael Fassbender was concocted. “The story was about them,” said Peppiott, “but it’s an amalgamation of stories from West Belfast. So you hear these stories, and it didn’t actually happen to them, but it happened to people who are friends of theirs in their group.”
There was no shortage of potential antagonists for the movie. “Every day, the police, the politicians complaining about their ‘disgusting’ premiere last night,” he said, “politicians writing letters of complaint to the BBC. It was grafting those into a coherent narrative. It was like sifting through the garbage tips that is their life to find the useful things.”
“Can the boys act?,” was a question Peppiatt kept being asked as he was pitching the movie for funding. “You pretty much say and promise anything to get someone to part with their money, right?” he said. “From an early stage, ‘We like the concept, we like the script, we like the treatment, but can the boys act?’ I had absolutely no idea. They’re great on stage. How big a leap can it be to be on screen? And that was a stupid naive thing on my part, because it is a huge leap. That became apparent about six months out of production, when we actually did start running the lines. And I was like, ‘Oh, shit, they can’t act.’ That was a panic station moment.”
Drugs weren’t helping. “They like to say they’re method actors,” said Peppiott. “Once it became apparent that work needed to be done, I got in a guy called Kieran Lagan, who was a lecturer in theater at Queen’s University in Belfast. He was the only show in town. They don’t have acting coaches in Belfast. He said, ‘Well, it’s a very unusual situation you’ve got yourself into.'”
Lagan agreed to sit down with the lads, who turned up up an hour and a half late. “They rock in, casual as anything, no apology,” said Peppiott. “They sit down. Thirty minutes later, they charmed him and he was like, ‘I’m on board, right?’ And that’s an ability they have, and Kieran was amazing. He put all four of us in acting class. It made a big difference to them: they saw that I was prepared to make a fool of myself. It also built trust between us. It was amazing, week by week, to watch some growth, and by the end of six months, they felt really strong.”
And Peppiott was shocked to see that while they were shooting they behaved themselves. “They spent two months not drinking before because they wanted to lose a bit of weight and get fit for being on screen,” said Peppiott. “And then the night before shooting, they went and got absolutely hammered at the hotel they were staying in, and turned up on set, steaming hungover. On day one, I thought ‘It’s going to be a long six weeks.’ But behind all the rashness and bravado, when it comes to the work they do, they did knuckle down and focus and took it seriously, because if this had gone badly, it would have affected their music career. To make a shit film that they were terrible in and it becomes a big joke, would have had a bad impact on their street cred.”
‘Kneecap’Sundance Film FestivalLanding Irish actor Michael Fassbender was a long shot. “Michael is revered in the north of Ireland,” said Peppiott, “due to his depiction of Bobby Sands in ‘Hunger,’ and so he was it for us.” He agreed to do it after a phone call.
Getting into Sundance was another long shot. “I was still sound-mixing the film in January of this year,” said Peppiott, “so it was one of these cliche situations of running up Main Street with the DCP. Sony came in and bought the film maybe an hour before the premiere. So I remember walking into a bar and a guy coming up to me and saying, ‘Congratulations.’ Somebody went, ‘He’s from Sony, they’ve just bought the film.’ I was a bit disappointed I wanted people shouting at each other in a foyer, and it was all very civilized. For a film like ‘Kneecap,’ everything should be uncivilized.”
Now Peppiott finds himself in another cliche situation: there’s interest in his next project and he doesn’t have time to work on it. “The circus does move on,” he said. “You’re hot shit one day, and then the next hot thing comes along. If I’m anxious about anything, it’s the anxiety of ‘you need to start making some movies.’ I feel at the moment like I’m living someone else’s life. I didn’t expect any of this. We just wanted to make a film for Irish speakers in West Belfast. And I would have been happy if we made it on an iPhone. It being so profane and so out there, it seems a very odd sort of film to go all the way. The sort of films that win Oscars aren’t quite as filthy dirty as ours. But you know what? Maybe things are changing.”
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