When Emer Reynolds was trying to get Olivia Colman on board for the making of her debut feature film Joyride, she wrote the Oscar-winning actress a letter.
In it, Reynolds quoted Seamus Heaney’s poem, Postscript, in which he writes of a meditative car journey through the west of Ireland:
“A hurry through which known and strange things pass/ As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/ And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
Colman was won over.
In the end Reynolds would craft something that lives up to Heaney’s verse – a film that captures the full cinematic beauty of the Irish countryside. It was filmed on location in Kerry, where rainbows framed rugged landscape – and blows the heart wide open.
Joyride is an emotional, funny, coming-of-age road movie in which a young boy, Mully (talented newcomer Charlie Reid), falls in with a train wreck, Joy – Colman – who is reeling from the death of her mother. Her baby girl was born just a few months after her mother’s death and she feels unable for motherhood.
Her plan is to ditch the child, leaving her with a friend of hers while she jets off to Lanzarote, but the sudden appearance of Mully, whose own mother is dead, complicates matters. They drive across the country – with him at the wheel – and, unexpectedly, he teaches this bedraggled older fugitive about nurturing and tenderness.
Film-maker Emer Reynolds. Picture by Frank McGrath
Reynolds was drawn to Ailbhe Keogan’s script, and the character of Joy, which seemed to fly in the face of the anodyne qualities often associated with motherhood: “pastel, floral, soft and pliant.”
“I had a very strong interest in making something that would look at motherhood in all its different facets,” Reynolds says. “It’s a story of three mothers. Joy is hellbent on giving away her baby for some ludicrous theory she has – that it’d be better for her, and better for the baby.
"We see in the film that her own mother had some darknesses, and perhaps not the happiest life with young Joy. And then Charlie’s mom, who has died, is much missed – and was an incredible loss to him.
"So through the script, and through the film, I was looking at different questions. What is a mother? What makes a mother? And do you need a mother? What is the effect of a mother?”
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It was perhaps no surprise that Colman was so sure about taking the part. Her recent work – most notably her Oscar-nominated performance in The Lost Daughter – has brilliantly explored the unspoken ambiguities of motherhood.
But questions about maternal loss have also informed Reynolds’s life. When she was four years old, her own mother, Mercedes, died from breast cancer.
“I hope I don’t start crying,” she begins. “I only have very few memories – flashes really – of things that happened every day.
"I remember when my dad and my oldest sister would go out, to school and work, she would take me and the other two [siblings] back to bed in the morning.
"She was a kind of mythical creature for me growing up. She was always described as an angel who was too good for this world – I think adults do that to spare children – and it was only in adulthood that I began to connect with her properly as a person.”
Her father, Seán, continued to care for her and her siblings – and their time was divided between home in Raheny and their aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Tipperary.
“We had a very happy life. I credit him for some of my instincts. He was a proper intellectual – loved to read, loved novels, loved literature and science.”
She remembers seeing the film 12 Angry Men in school when she was 16.
“I would’ve never seen a film like that before – and I came home and had a long discussion with my dad about persuasion and prejudice, and all the ideas to do with how the film played out. I went to bed that night thinking film could change the world.”
Her father was her “north, south, east and west” – so when she was aged 18 and he died suddenly of a heart attack, it was a blow “that almost seemed to eclipse the loss of my mother.
“It’s 30 years now and still sometimes I wake up and I simply can’t believe it’s really true. It’s reverberated in my life to this day.
"I think I grew up thinking that, because our mother was dead, nothing could happen to him. It was like I’d made a sort of weird deal with the universe. When he died, he didn’t have a will. We also think he thought he couldn’t die because he was the only parent standing between us and disaster.”
After his death, Emer lost her way, dropping out of a degree in maths and physics at Trinity College.
“I can see now from a bird’s-eye view, looking down on those years, that I was really lost – really feeling my way through how I might keep going, and it was film that saved me after the loss of my father.”
Filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle took her under his wing, and she trained for a number of years as an assistant editor, before becoming an editor in her own right.
Over the following decades she worked on disparate subjects, including Songs for While I’m Away (a brilliant documentary on Phil Lynott); the poignant 2014 film based around Glasnevin Cemetery, One Million Dubliners; and Here Was Cuba, a feature documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis. She also edited one of the most successful Irish feature films of all time, I Went Down.
If there was a theme that links these disparate subjects, it is summed up by the words which are written above her desk today – humanity, heart, humour.
“Those are the things that I’ve always been after,” she says. “And I’d now add ‘hope’ and ‘healing’.”
Those themes were interwoven with her most high-profile project to date – The Farthest, a documentary about the Voyager space programme, for which she won an Emmy Award in 2018.
“I wanted to make a film about science and space that would speak to how I felt about it. It isn’t cold and analytical. It’s all about heart, it’s about beauty. It’s a film about love, about death, about the afterlife, and that ache you feel when you look up at the night sky.”
She lived and worked in England for many years, but in the 2000s she moved back to Ireland to be closer to her nieces and nephews. She was in a relationship with actor Brendan Coyle – an Olivier Award winner who played the valet in Downton Abbey – for many years, and they remain friends.
Olivia Colman and Charlie Reid in a scene from 'Joyride'
She met her husband of 18 years, Tony Cranstoun, when they worked together on a BBC series called Funland. They’ve continued to work together and he was the editor on The Farthest and now, on Joyride.
She says “he’s twice the editor I am” and adds that, in the making of Joyride, she “tried to express what I’m after, tried to hook him into ploughing that [creative] field. And I listen to him if he wants to go another way, or if he’s challenging me, or wants to try something else. It’s a learning curve – I won’t lie – but I enjoy it.”
Joyride recently premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh, where the screening was the scene of “huge laughs and huge tears”.
Sitting in the cinema, watching it among strangers for the first time, there was a line that jumped out at her – when Joy starts to tell a friend about the complicated emotions that are coming up for her.
“Her friend says to her, ‘You’ve been turned inside out.’ And for Joy, that was having the baby and allowing herself to be a mother, allowing herself to be enough, allowing herself to love this child.”
For Reynolds herself, the film has done something similar.
“It unseated some carefully built walls and allowed me to say: ‘Losing my mum mattered and changed me, and that’s okay, and we survived, and that love she had for us, even though she was gone, persisted.’
"So the crying was cathartic – for me and for the audience. And I hope Joyride will continue to put a little bit of healing out there in the world.”
