First time Irish director Vivienne De Courcy says she hopes her feelgood debut film, Dare To Be Wild, bucks the trend for gritty social realism in Irish cinema.
The film tells the true story of Mary Reynolds, a maverick Wexford garden designer who, at the age 27, became the youngest ever winner of a gold medal at the Chelsea Garden Show in 2002 with her Celtic sanctuary and back to nature design.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, De Courcy said: “Dare To Be Wild is not for people who like dark, edgy movies which is the kind of film which is made these days. This is for people who like beautiful and inspirational films. This is unashamedly romantic.
“We’re now making anti-establishment movies! Hahaha. It’s quite subversive really. It’s very hard to make a movie that isn’t dark and edgy these days. Sure, I don’t even have a single alcoholic in the story!”
She first met Reynolds (played in the movie by Emma Greenwell) in 2004 when De Courcy asked her to design a garden for her and that was when she first heard the remarkable David vs Goliath battle to see her garden compete at Chelsea.
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Writer/director De Courcy spent 12 years trying to make the movie and managed to raise the cash at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival and later received funding from the Irish Film Board and RTÉ. It was struggle that chimes with Mary Reynold’s own battle to get to the Chelsea Flower Show.
“Yes, there were definitely parallels except as I always say to Mary, yours only took a year; mine took ten! It was pretty tough,” De Courcy says. “We started the process in 2005 of writing the script and then the garden grew.”
Read our review of Dare To Be Wild here.
A life behind the lens directing feelgood eco rom-coms is a far cry from De Courcy’s previous life as a lawyer in Chicago. She also worked on Hillary Clinton’s first run at the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency in 2008.
De Courcy, who has a total of 15 scripts in various stages of completion, says her passion for film dates back to visits to the Ritz cinema in Athlone with her parents, where she developed a precocious appreciation of directors such as Fellini and Zeffirelli at a very early age.
“I always loved storytelling and the medium. My mother was a local theatre director and I spent an awful lot of time with her when I was a child and my father was an amateur artist,” she says.
Love blooms: Tom Hughes and Emma Greenwell in Dare To Be Wild
”That’s what I loved but being from an Irish family I had to do something respectable I suppose but I was never that respectable! I’m interested in the duality of life and the thing that really interests me are stories.”
Heavy with symbolism and flower power, Dare To Be Wild is an extremely lovely looking film packed with saturated colours and shamrock-tinted views of Ireland. “I wanted to make a film that was in one way pioneering compared to what I’ve seen in Irish cinema,” De Courcy says.
“I suppose Irish cinema is famous over the past ten years for social realism and I wanted saturated Technicolor, no sepia tints or no blue filters on the camera. What would another dark, dystopian film do for us? Not a lot.”
One of the key scenes in Dare To Be Wild and one that pretty much sets out De Courcy’s worldview sees young Mary Reynolds write her acceptance speech for a Gold Medal months before she’s even given the go ahead to take part in the prestigious Chelsea show. De Courcy clearly invested a lot of herself into the fictionalised character of Mary.
“Mary and I have an unusual marriage of sorts over the past ten years. We are very much aligned in how we feel about the wilderness," she says. "She’s a designer and I’m a storyteller of sorts. Mary told me about saying mantras and that scene in the film is represented exactly as Mary told me it happened. I started saying a mantra of my own and here we are.
“Some of the actors on the set started saying mantras too and some extraordinary things happened to them as a result - one of them is now one of The Avengers and Tom Hughes is now in [ITV drama] Victoria. I think if you say the mantras morning and evening they have the effect of really focusing you on a goal or an agenda. Write yourself a mantra! Don’t be afraid to follow your dreams.”
Dare To Be Wild is in the grand tradition of the feelgood underdog story. “It’s more than a gardening movie; I think it’s Rocky for people who are interested in the environment,” says De Courcy.
“It’s a classic against the odds story from a rank outsider and in that respect it certainly follows my own path because it was extremely difficult to finance particularly in Ireland where I’m not a member of any club.”
Dare To Be Wild is in Irish cinemas now
Alan Corr @corralan
