JOE interviewed director Mark O’Connor and actor Luke McQuillan about their gritty new crime thriller.
Mark O’Connor has established himself as one of Ireland’s best filmmakers. This is because of his thriller dramas about people on the fringes of society who try to navigate their surroundings but find themselves pulled into a criminal underworld.
Having helmed the excellent Cardboard Gangsters, King of the Travellers and Stalker (which gave a young Barry Keoghan his first major role), the writer-director is back in cinemas now with Amongst the Wolves – which he co-wrote with the movie’s star Luke McQuillan.
McQuillan plays Danny, a former soldier with PTSD who has separated from his wife, Gill (Jade Jordan), after a distressing domestic incident and is now living on Dublin’s streets.
Embroiled in a custody battle for his son and struggling to find safe refuge at night, he meets and forms a connection with Will (Daniel Fee, the YouTube star making his film debut), a homeless teenager on the run from a vicious criminal gang led by the quietly sinister Power (Kin and Love/Hate’s Aidan Gillen).
As Danny seeks to protect Will, he finds himself on a collision course with Power and his many henchmen (including a scene-stealing Dane Whyte O’Hara).
Amongst the Wolves begins as an authentic, almost social realist portrait of the difficulties homeless people face and how tough it is once you fall into homelessness to escape the situation.
As it progresses, however, the movie evolves into a truly hard-hitting crime thriller. This is as Danny’s soldier skills wind up being brutally deployed in a desperate bid to protect his family, Will and Will’s family from Power and his goons.
JOE had Amongst the Wolves’ director and co-writer Mark O’Connor and its lead actor and co-writer Luke McQuillan into our studio to discuss the Irish indie crime thriller drama.
The pair spoke about how the movie came to be, with McQuillan having previously been part of the cast of O’Connor’s Virgin Media TV series Darklands.
McQuillan was seeking to collaborate with O’Connor on another project, with the latter telling JOE: “Luke, just came with this idea, which was to look at the homeless crisis in Ireland. I felt very connected to that because I know some people in that.
“Slowly, it just evolved, very naturally, and I came on board as a writer. We started doing a lot of research, and then we brought in the idea that Danny was a soldier.”
McQuillan explained that the soldier plot line was inspired in part by a friend of his.
“My friend actually served in the Royal Irish Regiment. He’s been to war,” the co-writer and actor said.
“He was telling me that some people actually will be at checkpoints, and these cars are coming and there are IEDS underneath them and they think they are going to lose their lives every day going to work.
“So that was a part of Danny’s character with the PTSD. He’s seen some things that no one should ever get to see, what war does to people.”
On top of this, McQuillan and O’Connor spent a lot of time talking to homeless people about their experiences and going to parts of Dublin where people sleep rough.
McQuillan said: “We spoke to a lot of people. We were out on the street, going into a part of Dublin that people don’t really like going into, just researching, talking to people.
“We spoke to real people who are actually living this, real homeless people. They shared their stories. They were bringing us out to where they live, telling us all the dangers, what goes on.
“Then it was just marrying those two [elements] into this story.”
Locations the pair visited when researching Amongst the Wolves included Ballymun, Clondalkin and Finglas.
Another place that particularly stuck with O’Connor was the Usher’s in Swords, a woodland where the co-writer and director says there are “a lot of homeless people staying”.
He added:
“With our research meeting homeless people, they brought us to the woods and showed us how they were living, how they put away their tents and how they had to hide their tents.
“Also, you’d have people arriving in the nighttime and so they’d put little markers on the ground or put wire or booby traps up so they can hear people arriving. That all kind of organically worked its way into the film.”
O’Connor collaborated several times with the likes of Barry Keoghan, John Connors and Peter Coonan early in their careers. That said, he has never directed someone with as big an already established profile as Golden Globe-nominee Aidan Gillen.
As such, JOE asked how the Kin and Love/Hate star joined Amongst the Wolves.
“I’ve known Aidan Gillen for a few years,” O’Connor noted. “I just reached out to him and said: ‘Do you want to be involved in this. It’s a low-budget film but I think you’re a great actor.’
“He was very kind with his time when he came on board. He was brilliant.”
McQuillan’s character, Danny, has some very tense showdowns with Gillen’s Power in the crime thriller.
On this, the co-writer and actor said: “When [Aidan] walks onto the set, he’s on. Obviously, he’s this big star as well, but that was all put to the side. We all just got to work and wanted to make this as best as it could be.
“I think we achieved that,” he stated, before jokingly adding:
“And then you’re big villain, Power, Aidan Gillen. He’s probably one of the best [actors at playing] villains in Ireland. So, getting to do a number on him was good.”
Amongst the Wolves also has several major Irish actors in cameo parts, including Love/Hate’s Peter Coonan.
Praising his recurring collaborator Coonan as “great”, O’Connor told us: “The idea of having a couple of bigger names in smaller roles, I thought that that would be very interesting on this. So Helen Behan is in there as well, from The Virtues. She’s an incredible actress.”
O’Connor was also quick to compliment Amongst the Wolves’ teenage star Daniel Fee, who plays the young Will whom McQuillan’s character Danny tries to protect.
Already known in movie circles for his brilliant YouTube channel where he seeks out and interviews some of the most fascinating figures in cinema, Fee was initially just hired to shoot some behind-the-scenes footage for O’Connor.
This was before the director got the idea to cast him.
“Daniel Fee is a young guy. 16, I think. He’s great. The casting process was rigorous. We saw a lot of tapes,” O’Connor explained.
“Daniel was kind of a chance meeting. He was videoing us going around with a camera. And we were shooting some kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. And I started to think he could potentially play Will.
“He was following us around, and [Luke and I] were discussing the script in detail, but he was very in tune with what we were doing. He was very good at listening.
“He’s quite a structured actor in how he approaches scenes. He likes to know the dialogue. It was a learning process for Daniel, but he was brilliant in his first role. It was great working with him.
“There’s some great new up-and-coming Irish actors [in Amongst the Wolves]. So, I feel like this is a new wave of Irish talent. You’ve also got [rapper] Sello in there. Casper Walsh [also a rapper], he’s very good.
“Dane Whyte O’Hara is amazing, and he’s just been signed to a big agent in America. It’s exciting to have a new breed of Irish actors coming through.”
Given that Cardboard Gangsters was the most popular Irish film of 2017 at the box office, JOE would have thought financiers would be rushing to work with O’Connor again.
Raising this to the director, he spoke about his reasons for going down the independent route with Amongst the Wolves
“Sometimes you get stuck in development on projects, and you could be in there for three years, and it just gets frustrating,” O’Connor told us.
“When Luke came to me with this story, we said: ‘Why don’t we go ahead and just do it, outside of that?’ So, we made it independently.
“It’s a low budget, but we wanted to make something that was a low budget, but looked like it was a high budget through the cinematography and through the cast that we brought on.”
Having achieved this, the filmmaker was still complimentary to Irish funding bodies, noting: “I think there might be a reluctance sometimes to fund certain types of movies, dark movies or ones that don’t paint Ireland in a certain light.
“But I do think that the funding bodies are doing their best, and they’re funding good movies. Kneecap, I thought, was very good. We just went a different route with getting this film made.”
Summing up, the appeal of Amongst the Wolves, McQuillan tells JOE: “You don’t really see that many Irish crime revenge films like this one. It plays out on the streets of Dublin, which is so cinematic – the streets are dirty, the rain.”
O’Connor also added: “We just wanted to make something that was very authentic but for an audience as well.” Mission accomplished.
Amongst the Wolves is out in cinemas now.
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