Prime-Video - Herself, the new Phyllida Lloyd’s film

By Mulder, 01 december 2020

Herself tells the story of Sandra, a young mother who seeks to rebuild her life from scratch, and provide a safe home for her two young daughters. In order to do so, she must escape the grip of a possessive ex-partner, circumnavigate a broken housing system, and bring together a community of friends who can support her and lend a helping hand. Herself is led by acclaimed director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!, The Iron Lady) and emerging Irish actor Clare Dunne, who plays Sandra, and is widely known for her theatre work, including Lloyd’s all-female stage version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Dunne also envisaged the story, co-writing the screenplay with Malcolm Campbell (What Richard Did). Key cast includes Harriet Walter (Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, Killing Eve, Succession) and Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones, Dublin Murders). The film was co-developed by Element Pictures (The Favourite, Room) and Merman (Divorce, Catastrophe, Women on the Verge), and is produced by Rory Gilmartin, Ed Guiney and Sharon Horgan.

Key crew include cinematographer Tom Comerford (Michael Inside, The Hole in the Ground), costume designer Consolata Boyle (The Queen, Philomena), production designer Tamara Conboy (Sing Street, Once), casting director Louise Kiely (The Lobster, Dublin Murders), and editor Rebecca Lloyd (additional editing on American Honey, Fish Tank). Natalie Holt (Journey’s End, Three Girls) composed the score. Herself is backed by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland (FÉ/SI), BBC Films and the BFI (with National Lottery funding). Cornerstone Films is handling worldwide sales and distribution. Lloyd, Element’s Andrew Lowe, Merman’s Clelia Mountford, BBC Films’ Rose Garnett, Mary Burke from the BFI, Lesley McKimm of Screen Ireland and Cornerstone Films’ Alison Thompson are exec producing. The film was shot on location in Dublin, Ireland, with post-production work completed in London.

Clare Dunne was in New York when she dreamed up Herself. The Dublin actor had just signed with an agent in NYC and was auditioning for roles as part of pilot season. In the middle of her busy schedule, a close friend back home in Ireland -- a single mother with three children -- phoned her, explaining that she had to declare herself homeless. Her landlord was throwing her out in a month’s time, she explained, and while her parents were able to accommodate her, they only had a single room for her and the three children. Dunne, stunned by the news, found that she could not focus on her next audition.

"'Here I am, in New York, trying to be discovered, while my friend is technically homeless’," she thought to herself. "I remember feeling so angry and frustrated and thinking, ‘Everything about this situation is wrong.’ Mortgages and sky-high property prices are a mirage." The situation played on her mind over the next few days. Then the idea hit her like a lightning bolt. "What if a woman said, ‘I’m going to find a bit of land, I’m going to build a house.’ It's just bricks and wood, after all. I Googled 'self-build Ireland' and discovered an Irish architect called Dominic Stevens who had built a house for himself for an affordable price. That was the beginning of all of this."

Dunne's acting theatrical career continued to flourish, as she developed a working relationship with the director Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!, The Iron Lady). "I first met Clare when I was auditioning actors for Julius Caesar at the beginning of my all-female Shakespeare project," says Lloyd. "Clare came to read for the role of Portia. I'll never forget her audition." Dunne interjects: "I thought it was the worst audition in the world." But the director recalls it as "an incredible moment of seeing an actor who is completely themselves, who closes the gap between themselves and their character."

Dunne went on to perform the play at London's Donmar Warehouse and in New York. Over subsequent years, she performed in further Shakespeare productions for Lloyd. But, behind the scenes, she worked on the screenplay for Herself. When she finished an early draft, she emailed a copy to Sharon Horgan, the Irish actress, writer, and producer, known for shows such as Pulling (2006-2009), Catastrophe, (2015-2019) and Divorce (2016-2019), and produces film and television content under her Merman banner.

"If anyone in your company can read this, it would be amazing," wrote Dunne. Horgan picks up the story: "Clare blindly sent me an email with the script for Herself. I’d never met her before. I was in New York, making Divorce at the time, so I gave it to our script reader. She sent me a note back saying, ‘I’m not sure this is right for us'. Because Clare was Irish, and she sent me a lovely email, I thought ‘I’ll give it a read, just in case’." Once Horgan started reading, she didn't stop. "I read it to the end. It blew me away. I got in touch with her and told her I wanted to do something with it." "The next morning I woke up and there were two emails from Sharon," recalls Dunne. "The first one said, ‘Hopefully someone can get to this in the next few months.’ There was another email underneath it that said, ‘Sorry Clare, forget that last email. I started reading the script and read to the end. Can you phone me tonight?’"

Horgan was won over by the story. "It is a difficult story that has so much hope in it. Sandra is in a difficult position: a destructive, awful relationship that she managed to get herself out of. Yet Herself didn’t feel like a sad story. There’s lows and difficulties, but she has an inner strength. People come together to help her. At the same time, it’s hard for her to accept that help. It’s a simple story with a very powerful narrative."

Rory Gilmartin, a producer at Element Pictures, was in his previous position at Screen Ireland when he first read a draft of Herself, which Dunne had submitted for development funding. He was immediately taken by the story. "Clare has such a fresh writing voice," says Gilmartin. "It felt like a fresh and hopeful approach to the themes of homelessness and domestic abuse. Sandra wants to find a way out of the problems she is in. I was drawn to the hope in Clare's story."

Screen Ireland's development funding was forthcoming, allowing the actor to spend four months writing and researching her story. Meanwhile, Phyllida Lloyd's Shakespeare theatre project was ongoing. During a production of Henry IV in New York, Dunne gave the director her script to read. "I was struck, even before I got half-way through the screenplay, by what an extraordinary sense of proportion Clare seemed to have about writing films," says Lloyd. "For someone who had never tried it before, she had such a good sense of the relationship between words and pictures. She was a natural writer."

Lloyd was struck by Sandra's quest to self-build her journey to recovery. Herself is a story about a woman digging herself out of hell. "Sandra is literally rebuilding herself, from the complete lack of entitlement that domestic abuse creates in a person. She's somebody who has had all her agency, autonomy, taken away from her. It's what happens when a woman asks for help, and goes on asking for it. What's fascinating is the help doesn't come from where she thinks it's going to," says the director. Crucially, the story was not just bleak social realism. "Clare is a very funny and witty person," says the director," and Sandra is such an indomitable character, I fell in love with her."

For years, Dunne undertook the heavy lifting on the screenplay for Herself. Not only was she writing dialogue, but also she researched the self-build market, and the relevant laws around it in Ireland, also consulting with Dominic Stevens, the architect who had first inspired this journey. She accumulated suitcases full of research notes and storyboards. With a production timeline beginning to form, it became time for Clare to start thinking of her role as lead actor on the film, and the team agreed to bring writing collaborator Malcolm Campbell (What Richard Did, 2012) on board to continue the work on the screenplay.

Both director and co-writer were keen to preserve Dunne's vision. "It felt like it was a hymn to hardworking women," explains Campbell. "The idea of somebody having to completely start over, not only build a house but rebuild her life, was appealing. At its heart, you have this amazing character that Clare created and embodies. It was important for me to populate her world. Ultimately, she starts with nothing. It sometimes takes a village to make things happen. Part of my job was building the support network around Sandra."

Sharon Horgan's tenacity was invaluable, according to Phyllida Lloyd, who commends the producer's energy. "She'd be producing something, directing something else, doing the school run, and still have time to get up at 5am and read the latest draft of Herself and give notes. She is such a positive force on this film."

Clare Dunne at first never envisaged herself in the role of Sandra, Herself's protagonist. "I always assumed it would have to be played by someone else in order to get funding," she says. "I sent the project to a number of actors. All of them wrote back to me and told me, ‘Why don’t you play it?’ Once Phyllida got on board she said 'My only condition for directing the film is that Clare stars in it.'" Director Lloyd believes the film could have been made on a bigger budget, but felt it important to create an organic ensemble of actors around Clare. The producers happily signed up to this idea. It entailed a lower budget, but brought a degree of creative freedom that may not have happened with the inclusion of big stars.

"Working on a low budget level gives you a certain amount of freedom: You cast creatively rather than with a view to markets," says Rory Gilmartin, producer. Supporting cast included Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones, Dublin Murders), who plays Aido: a building contractor who decides to help Sandra construct her dream home. Hill relished the idea of playing "… a middle-aged white man who wasn’t horrible, or everyone's enemy. As a white middle-aged man who has never been against equality, I find we’re all tarred with the same brush. So it was refreshing to see a character who wasn’t the baddie."

Hill's pedigree -- not only in the HBO blockbuster TV series Game of Thrones, but also on stage – made him a perfect fit. Element were certainly fans. "I think Conleth is one of the best actors in the country," says Guiney. "He has incredible range and flexibility, so I was keen to make his casting work." Harriet Walter (Atonement, The Crown) -- who plays Peggy, Sandra's employer, who offers up her back garden as the site for Sandra's home, in Herself -- was already part of the family. Walter had known Clare Dunne since 2012, when they acted together in Phyllida Lloyd's Julius Caesar. Ian Lloyd Anderson (Game of Thrones, Love/Hate), who plays Gary, Sandra's abusive husband, had also worked with Dunne on stage. The Dublin actor was impressed by the story of Herself: "A tale of a woman's resilience, not just to survive within an abusive relationship, but to grind, survive, and facilitate a good life for her children, no matter what roadblocks keep popping up, whether it's work or the death of her own mother." The actor wanted to play Gary because the character was so far removed from him as a person. “It was a chance to spread my wings and flex my acting muscles," he says.

Casting Sandra's children was a lengthier process. Casting director Louise Kiely (The Lobster, Sing Street) put out a casting call and Clare Dunne met all the contenders. "I got Clare to improvise with all the children," says Phyllida Lloyd. "Clare was fantastic with them. It was a helpful process. We found two remarkable kids" Dunne describes the two girls -- Molly McCann, who plays Molly, and Ruby Rose O'Hara, who plays her sister Emma -- as the true stars of Herself.

"Molly has a very active imagination," says Dunne. "She gets involved in whatever she is asked to do. If Phyllida asked her, ‘Could you look a bit sad, and put your head on Clare’s shoulder?’ She does it, but in a very natural way. Ruby is just the same. Ruby has one of the most important jobs in the film: she tells her mother a bedtime story that sparks the inspiration for her to investigate house building. Right from the auditions we thought, ‘She doesn’t just know the lines, this girl gets what this story means.’ You’d suggest something to her and she’d just weave it in like an absolute pro."

The producers also set about finding heads of department. With production designer Tamara Conboy (Once), cinematographer Tom Comerford (Michael Inside), and costume designer Consolata Boyle, who has been nominated for three Academy Awards (The Queen, Florence Foster Jenkins, Victoria & Abdul), they found an A-list team. Boyle was smitten from the moment she read the screenplay. "This story is so pertinent to now," remarks the costume designer. "It’s a vitally important subject matter. It raises the question of the basic needs of housing, but also violence within our society." During pre-production, director Phyllida Lloyd planned the drama's visual aesthetic with cinematographer Tom Comerford. "Phyllida had a vision for how she wanted to approach the visual style of Herself and my goal was to carry that out," remarks Comerford. "She was keen for the camera to have a grounded handheld, organic feel so we avoided cranes, drones or Steadycam. We spent a lot of time talking through the script: breaking it down into a shot-list, visiting the locations, and talking about how our ideas for the staging might work."

At the heart of Herself is the story of a woman building her own home. This posed a challenge for the filmmakers. They would have to find a location, somewhere in Dublin, to construct a house. Director Lloyd spent weeks scouring back gardens in Dublin, with location manager Niall Martin (The Siege of Jadotville, Greta). The filmmakers finally settled on a garden in the Clontarf area of Dublin. "We put a lot of groundwork in trying to find a garden space, behind a contemporary Dublin house, that would be big enough to take another house," explains Rory Gilmartin, producer. "It was a remarkable space, probably the size of four football pitches. We got lucky. We were starting to get worried."

Before production started, Dunne and Lloyd enrolled in a self-building course in Wales. "It was all about building eco-friendly houses that have very little carbon footprint. It’s such a thrill to learn new skills so fast," says Dunne. Herself was shot in its entirety in Dublin, but Phyllida Lloyd set out to make a universal story. There is, she says, a mythic element to this story. Conleth Hill, who plays Aido, the building contractor who helps Sandra construct her home, described this drama as quite different to his work on Game of Thrones. "It’s a much smaller team, a more intimate set up. They’re very different, but equally fulfilling."

Herself was shot over five weeks in the Irish capital. "It was go, go, go," recalls writer Clare Dunne, who plays Sandra. "There was only one day where I didn’t have much to do. I had to be gung-ho, as Sandra is when she’s fired up. We were in locations all over Dublin: Clontarf, Howth, the Dublin Mountains. We were in a courthouse, at tram stops..."

The locations followed the whirlwind of Sandra's life, as she rushed between school runs, temporary accommodation, and various jobs. The locations, dressed by production designer Tamara Conboy (Once), ranged from grotty apartments to pubs and grand Dublin houses, rural farms to urban hardware stores. It was important for Conboy "to create a real world with believable geography. I wanted to set a tone for the film that ran the whole way through and even though it was a hard subject, I wanted there to be joy in the sets wherever possible.”

Consolata Boyle played a crucial role in creating a believable world. While best known for lavish fare such as Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) and The Queen (2006), this contemporary drama nevertheless required a delicate sensibility from Boyle and her team. The biggest design challenge of all, though, was the construction of Sandra's home. How would the filmmakers build a home on screen, just as Sandra constructed one in the story? Early on in the production, Conboy and Lloyd met Dominic Stevens, an architect who had designed and built his own home, and inspired Dunne to tell the story of Herself.

"It was an economical and efficient project which he documented thoroughly," explains Conboy. "This was of immense help to me and led me to base Sandra’s house on Dominic’s previous work. His project is about the sharing of ideas. This ethos suited our story very well. Dominic has a website where he generously shares his plans and his experiences -- this became our Bible. We had such a short time to build the house that going the tried and tested method was the most sensible option. Not to forget that his design is really beautiful, too. We added a few things to make it more our own." In order to replicate the onscreen drama, the house's construction was filmed chronologically. The first day of shooting was the scene where Sandra sees the plot of land for the first time. Lloyd, the director, recalls that moment: "There was something spiritual about the actors standing on this green patch of virgin land and thinking, 'We're going to build a house here'!"

Cinematographer Tom Comerford (Michael Inside) continues: "From then on we would go away and shoot other scenes from the film at different locations, returning every few days as new sections of the house were constructed in our absence. It was quite the challenge for the art department but they did an amazing job."

There are few films that involve such a physical manifestation of progress, remarks Harriet Walter. "It’s such a symbolic thing: building something from nothing," she says. "Taking the responsibility into your own hands, and enticing a team of oddballs to help you through sheer good will. The first day it was a field. A few days later, we saw a bare timber structure. The next day it had walls; it was clad, then painted. It’s been extraordinary because it’s real. You can’t make that up, you have to build it. Coming around the corner and seeing a new phase of the building each time has been extraordinary."

By the time production commenced, the script was solid. This gave Clare Dunne the freedom to forget her role as co-writer and focus on the character of Sandra. "Clare doesn’t wear her writer's cap with any kind of arrogance on set," remarks Conleth Hill. "It’s all very humble. She concentrates on acting. She isn’t precious about changing things if they need to be changed. She and Phyllida have a brilliant relationship that way, based on trust and affection. It’s a labor of love. Clare is in every scene, and never gets a rest. I’m so full of admiration for her." Ian Lloyd Anderson (Game of Thrones, Love/Hate), who plays Sandra's abusive former partner, and the father of her children, was concerned about depicting a violent scene. "You have to make it look real, but that can be hard to do if someone doesn't trust you physically," he says. Yet the actors trusted each other enough to make it work.

Anderson describes his tiny co-stars who played his daughters (Moly McCann and Ruby Rose O’Hara) as brilliant. "They're so good you start to doubt yourself. They have no inhibitions. When they shout action, they go for everything and don't think about it. On my first day, we were playing a scene where I appear outside a hotel. The girls come across the road and see me. One of them shouts, 'Daddy,’ while the other clung to Clare's leg and looked at me with fear. I nearly fell apart. The child looked devastated." Phyllida Lloyd was the guiding light for all the actors. Dunne describes her friend as a generous and humble leader. The pair had worked together for years, so they had a shorthand. Lloyd and Harriet Walter also had a history in theatre, while Consolata Boyle, costume designer, worked with the director on The Iron Lady (2011). "Phyllida never raises her voice," says Dunne. "She never gets angry or freaked out. She’s always calm and trusts the process. She sees the best in everyone. She will demand stuff from you because she has seen beyond what you think you’re capable of."

Herself is a story that deals with timely contemporary social issues: the housing crisis, which is felt in many cities across the world, and the horrors of domestic abuse. But at its heart, this is a tale about the power of love and resilience. Phyllida Lloyd is blunt about this fact: "I think it's a hopeful story about the human potential for reconstruction. It must seem impossible for some people to transcend their circumstances, but you can when there's a will. It's a call to arms, a consciousness raising piece, but I think people will experience it beyond that: as a transcendent story of a human being. Clare and I both share a sense that comedy and tragedy are closely linked. Because it's dealing with a searing subject, this story has a distinctive, unusual character to it." Clare Dunne thinks that we all might learn from Sandra's renewal in the story. "Before Ireland was colonized we used to build houses for our families. We had a community ethos," says the writer/actor. "You have to give people a hand sometimes. You have to believe that we can begin anew. There’s a cycle to life. I just hope that people take something good from Herself."

Synopsis :
Single mother Sandra (Clare Dunne) escapes her abusive partner with her two young children, only to find herself trapped in temporary accommodation. After months of struggling, she draws inspiration from one of her daughter’s bedtime stories and hits upon the idea of self-building an affordable home. She finds an architect who provides her with plans and is offered land by Peggy (Harriet Walter), a woman she cleans for. Aido (Conleth Hill), a building contractor, appears willing to help, too. But as her past rears its head in the form of Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson), her possessive ex, and as bureaucrats fight back against her independent spirit, will Sandra be able to rebuild her life from the ground ?

Herself
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
Produced by Rory Gilmartin, Ed Guiney, Sharon Horgan
Written by Malcolm Campbell, Clare Dunne
Starring Clare Dunne, Harriet Walter, Conleth Hill
Music by Natalie Holt
Cinematography : Tom Comerford
Edited by Rebecca Lloyd
Production companies : Element Pictures, BBC Films, Merman Films, British Film Institute, Screen Ireland
Distributed by Amazon Studios
Release date : January 24, 2020 (Sundance), December 30, 2020 (United States), January 8, 2021 (Amazon Prime Video)
Running time : 97 minutes

(Source : press notes)