Inside the An Cailín Ciúin farmhouse: ‘We wanted to immortalise our home on film’
Like casting the right actor, a location can make or break a film. We speak to the real residents of some of Ireland’s most famous on-screen homes, including the Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin about what it’s like when a production crew moves in
Dara Reilly and Carola Curran-Methner at their home near Culmullen in Co Meath, where the Oscar-nominated Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin (inset) was filmed
Dara Reilly and Carola Curran-Methner photographed at their home near Culmullen in Co Meath where the Oscar nominated Irish language film-An Cailín Ciúin was filmed.Picture Credit:Frank McGrath
Dara Reilly in his kitchen, which featured in An Cailín Ciúin. Picture: Frank McGrath
A scene from An Cailín Ciúin shot in the farmhouse’s kitchen
Aidan Gray with his parents Christopher and Hanna at Higginsbrook in Co Meath. Picture:Mark Condren
Christopher, Aidan and Hanna in the living room at Higginsbrook. Picture: Mark Condren
Higginsbrook house.
Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane
Antoin O'Looney, credit Eamon Ward
Antoin O’Looney at Moy House in Lahinch, Co Clare, which was used as the location for RTÉ drama Smother. Picture: Eamon Ward
Moy House, lahinch, Co Clare. Photograph by Eamon Ward
Dara Reilly and Carola Curran-Methner at their home near Culmullen in Co Meath, where the Oscar-nominated Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin (inset) was filmed
When the location scout of An Cailín Ciúin walked into Dara Reilly’s farmhouse, they must have felt like they had struck gold. The house is a time capsule. There is the Formica table (without the Kimberley biscuits), the Aga, the purple peony curtains. It is even fitted with two pin-plug sockets. “Every time we go to Germany, we buy a heap of plugs,” Reilly says. It is almost identical to how it appears on screen in the Oscar-nominated picture.
Reilly inherited the farm, in Meath, from his parents, William and Conny, who bought it in the early 1950s. “The house is nearly the same as when my mother died,” he says. Neither Reilly nor his partner of 27 years, Carola Curran-Methner, felt the need to change it. “I like old things and so does he,” Curran-Methner says. “I call this place ‘Sleepy Hollow’; it has that feel about it. It is the character, the outside, the surroundings. There is a serenity here.”
The production team were pointed in the direction of Reilly’s home by a local undertaker. “They asked if he knew any nice avenues [of trees] in the area. My father died here and he [the undertaker] came to take him out of the house, so that must have made an impression. He told him and they came out here,” Reilly says. The location scout knocked on the door and explained that they would be interested in using the house as a location.
Reilly answered straight away: “No.”
He farms sheep, and the filming, which would take six weeks, would cause significant disruption to his daily life. “It was a lot of undertaking,” he says. But then the idea started to germinate. He thought of the legacy of the house, and wondered how soon satellite towns and urban sprawl would crowd the views. What better way to preserve the house, and the fields as it is now, than on film.
“Them trees are not going to last forever. And God only knows who is going to come after us; they might never plant a tree. That avenue could be blown down tonight. So it’ll be immortalised in the film. There forever,” he says. When Reilly discovered Claire Keegan, the author of Foster, the book An Cailín Ciúin was based on, was from the same part of Wicklow his mother had grown up in, he took it as a further sign to say yes.
A scene from An Cailín Ciúin shot in the farmhouse’s kitchen
Curran-Methner, originally from Germany, lives 20 minutes away from Reilly. The couple move “like a pendulum” between their two houses, but during the shoot, Reilly moved to Curran-Methner’s home. “He had to sign for six weeks that we wouldn’t come into the house. And he lived the whole time with me. Normally, people move out. They may have put them up in a bed and breakfast, but because of Dara’s business with sheep, he had to be here. He was just about allowed to use the toilet,” she says.
The couple had no idea how successful the film would become or how many people would see their home on screen. “It’s a lovely story…from my little unimportant brain, it is actually amazing that the film, from a book that is so small, made such an impact in the film world,” she says. “I think the Irish language… put the stamp on the paper.”
The level of international and national film production in Ireland has radically accelerated in recent years. This is partially down to the introduction of Section 481, which financially incentivised filming here and resulted in a record-breaking €500m expenditure in 2021 thanks to movies such as Disenchanted, The Last Duel and The Green Knight being shot here. It has increased the demand for location scouts, who are always on the hunt for interesting and striking panoramas and sites to film. Indeed, finding the perfect location is crucial for the success of a film.
Mike Swan is a location manager and a member of the Location Guild of Ireland. He has worked on series like Sharon Horgan’s award-winning Bad Sisters, and feature films including Martin McDonagh’s acclaimed The Guard. “We chose the locations to tell a story. It’s like casting an actor. If you cast the wrong actor, the story is not told properly. If you cast the wrong location, you are not telling the story right. The location has to reflect the character… and tell a story,” he says.
Dara Reilly in his kitchen, which featured in An Cailín Ciúin. Picture: Frank McGrath
The job, he says, is a mix of detective work and troubleshooting. It can take weeks, if not months, of driving around to find the perfect boreen, or palatial home. Then there are the subsequent discussions with property owners, liaising with art departments and directors, highlighting potential issues, and negotiating terms.
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The rates for giving your home over for a shoot vary considerably. Screen Ireland says there is no set rate card and that production companies must negotiate their own budgets. However, most can expect several hundred if the property is being used for a day and several thousand if the shoot extends for weeks. Some productions will provide ‘disruption fees’ if filming involves taking over on-street parking.
Swan says the amount a property owner will receive is primarily dependent on the budget of the production, and how long the shoot will go on. A small indie film is going to have considerably less in their coffers than a full-scale Disney musical.
“It is very subjective, and it has to make sense for the owner,” he says. “To have a film crew in your house is very invasive. [The crew] are working and invading your space. Invariably you won’t be able to be in the house… It is a huge inconvenience to the life of the house. The fee has to reflect the inconvenience, so it’s hard to put a figure on sufficient remuneration.”
Locating residential properties can often be one of the hardest things to get right. “Finding the perfect location is like uncovering treasure,” Swan says. He recalls spending three weeks trying to find a family home “with warmth” for Tara Road (2007). “For some reason, a lot of people have a very boring aesthetic… I am not dissing people, [but] it can be the same and generic. It is tricky to get somewhere that very subtly says something very interesting.”
Aidan Gray with his parents Christopher and Hanna at Higginsbrook in Co Meath. Picture:Mark Condren
Another Meath home that has buckets of character is Aidan Gray’s Higginsbrook. Built in 1743, it has featured in several period dramas with big-name casts, such as Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway and Dame Maggie Smith; Northanger Abbey, with Carey Mulligan and Felicity Jones; and, most recently, Mr Malcolm’s List, starring White Lotus alumni Theo James.
Gray’s parents, Christopher and Hanna, were still living in the house when they were approached by Miramax in 2006 to shoot Becoming Jane at their home. Novelist Jane Austen, on whom the film is based, grew up in the Hampshire village of Steventon, and, in the film, Higginsbrook became the rectory house in which she spent the early years of her life.
Since that production, Christopher jokes that Higginsbrook has been typecast as “the bottom rung” of the period ladder. “We are the slightly distressed vicarage building that the heroine starts off in,” Christopher says. “And then she improves and her lifestyle improves. That’s what we are.”
The house, which Christopher believes was influenced in architectural style by German-born Richard Castle, has been in the family since it was built and is filled with idiosyncratic detail. “The house is quirky,” Aidan says. “There is subsidence, there are drooping window ledges, and funny-angled doorways. It is quite private, it is nestled in the trees and has a wonderful charm… It rambles. As Maggie Smith says in Becoming Jane, it’s a wild, ramshackle house.”
Christopher, Aidan and Hanna in the living room at Higginsbrook. Picture: Mark Condren
Christopher submitted the house to the Irish Film Board in the 1990s as a potential place for filming. And, over the years, they have had various meetings with art directors and locations scouts. “There is always a bit of prep for the meetings,” Aidan says. “A frantic amount of cleaning to make your house look its best — it’s like Hello! Magazine is coming in.”
Some of these meetings result in productions, but often they don’t. Both Aidan and Christopher talk about how exciting and surreal it is to see A-list celebrities such as Smith, James McEvoy and Mulligan wander around your living room or knock around your kitchen looking for the Wi-Fi code. On occasion, you can have off-the-cuff conversations with actors in between takes. “You get a whole collection of anecdotes and memories meeting all these people and chatting with them,” Christopher says.
Becoming Jane was the most substantial shoot to date — the crew took over the house for six weeks. While the family were put up in alternative accommodation, Christopher remained on site. “It was wonderful because they provided a double-decker bus that was catering, and a second double-decker bus that was a restaurant,” he says. “Food was available from 5am until they went home in the evening. I was first in the queue in the morning.”
A lot of homes have to go through some cosmetic changes before filming — photographs are removed, TV screens stowed away, and furniture replaced. Higginsbrook was painted muted Farrow & Ball colours and additional rooms were built.
“For Becoming Jane, they utterly changed the house. They put in corridors and rooms. It was terrific fun. They put in a conservatory. It lasted 10 years because it was poor-quality wood but, for 10 years, it was lovely. If they have deep pockets... Miramax [did], they were able to not just put it back as it was but improve it. It was wonderful.”
However, he says others have not been as fortunate. He remembers one household he knows whose home was painted a rather garish colour when the production went bankrupt. The property was left in the unflattering shade.
Antoin O’Looney recommends recording all the items in the house and photographing the rooms before a production team goes in. That way you can ensure everything is returned to its rightful place. “You have a record. If it is only a week, then it’s fine, but if it is a month, you do forget where things go,” he says.
Antoin O’Looney at Moy House in Lahinch, Co Clare, which was used as the location for RTÉ drama Smother. Picture: Eamon Ward
O’Looney’s Moy House, located in Lahinch, was the setting for RTÉ drama Smother. When he was first approached about filming, he was wary — at the time, the house was a Blue Book-listed guest house with famous clientele including Kyle MacLachlan, Hugh Grant, Marian Keyes and Edna O’Brien. O’Looney was concerned filming may interfere with the tourist season. The producers agreed to shoot in the early months of 2020, when the guest house was closed, and to vacate the premises by St Patrick’s Day.
But then Covid hit and devastated the hospitality industry, and O’Looney never reopened it. Instead, the set was left in situ for months until filming of season two went into production. After that, O’Looney, his wife Louise and their four children, Sophie, Tola, Tori and Mason, moved into the nine-bedroom property. He says there is a frisson of excitement when they see their living room on a TV screen.
One expected outcome of the show was an influx of fans visiting the family home. “When we moved into the house, the gates were open and we were inundated with people driving in and out… That’s human nature,” he says. “One day, my daughter woke up and there were people looking in the window… There is a line. You try to be sympathetic to their wants. It is a private house, so what I did is, I put a gate to stop the amount of traffic.”
After Becoming Jane, the Grays had Austen fans coming to the house. “We will get a trickle of people coming out on location trails,” Aidan says. “Or an American family will arrive out of the blue.”
For those who may be contemplating offering their home up for filming, Swan says be aware of the upheaval it will cause. While Reilly and Curran-Methner feel immense pride when they watch An Cailín Ciúin, they say it is unlikely they would do it again. Undoubtedly it would be hard to top its success. “The best part is seeing our names go up in writing on the screen, and know they’re going up in Hollywood,” Reilly says.
But the Grays relished filming — in fact, they even nabbed a role as extras in one party scene in Becoming Jane. The experience created a real sense of excitement in their local community. “We were able to get a lot of tickets and we could bring people to the premiere, and we had a screening in the house, so it is a community thing,” Aidan says. “For Mr Malcolm’s List, there was a teenager who had a book for Theo James to sign, so again, it became a local event.”
On top of this, many relationships he forged during filming continued long after production wound down. “We have made many lasting friendships, with actors and crew. A lot of people have become close family friends. That’s part of the legacy.”
