In a small town in Ireland in the early 1960s, 12- year-oldFrancie Brady (EAMONN OWENS) and his best friend Joe (ALAN BOYLE) live in a fantasy world of cowboy stories and adventures, fueled by the advent of television and a thrilled but confused awareness of the dawning Atomic Age. But Francie's real life is sadly different from his imagined one. His father, Benny (STEPHEN REA), is the hardest drinker in town and his mother (AISLING O'SULLIVAN), struggling with poverty, her husband's alcoholism and her own frailties, seems to be drifting slowly into madness.
The bane of Francie's life, though, is the family's nosy and pretentious neighbor, Mrs. Nugent (FIONA SHAW), who proudly clings to her role as one of the isolated little town's opinion-makers and who seems to hold Francie responsible for all the misfortunes that have befallen him. As the boy's family falls apart, Francie's extraordinary energy and will to survive manifests itself in a series of manic episodes -- some shocking, some heartrending and some unexpectedly hilarious, that magnify and reflect the pretension and small-town hypocrisy around him..
Bewildered by his neighbors' cruel response to his losses, Francie retreats more and more into the fragmented, comic- book world of his solitary dreams. After being shunned and scorned by the people of the town and, finally, estranged from his only friend, his frustration at the cruelty of the world finds its outlet in a vision of a gorgeous and worldly version of the Virgin Mary (SINEAD O'CONNOR), whose comforting words of advice initially sustain Francie. Ultimately, though, they goad him on to an explosive state, with shocking and violent consequences.
Academy Award- winner NEIL JORDAN directs "The Butcher Boy," an ironic look back at a time and place in recent Irish history, as well as a funny, startling and compassionate examination of the forces, both social and emotional, that send a child spinning extravagantly out of control.
The screenplay is by Jordan and PATRICK McCABE, adapted from McCabe's award- winning novel of the same name. The film is produced by REDMOND MORRIS and STEPHEN WOOLLEY, and executive produced by Neil Jordan. Warner Bros. distributes Geffen Pictures' "The Butcher Boy" worldwide.
Filmed on location in Monaghan and Dublin, Ireland, the blackly tragi- comic film is produced with the creative and technical skills of an impressive team, including director of photography ADRIAN BIDDLE, editor TONY LAWSON, production designer ANTHONY PRATT and costume designer SANDY POWELL.
It is the early 1960s: Kennedy is in the White House and the Cuban missile crisis is looming on the horizon. In a small town in a remote part of rural Ireland, young Francie Brady's dreams of adventure and excitement, fueled by comic books and TV, contrast with the grim reality of his family life.
Francie shows a child's mischievous face to the world, but privately he struggles with the hardships of his family's imminent disintegration. His father is a drunk with shattered dreams and his mother has already been hospitalized once due to a nervous breakdown. With his closest friend and "blood brother" Joe, Francie jokes and invents games to keep harsh reality at bay.
As Francie's family falls apart, his fantasy world grows more and more powerful. He runs away to a nearby city, discovering on his return that his despondent mother has killed herself. His growing obsession with the disapproving and snobbish Mrs. Nugent (FIONA SHAW) leads him to break into her house with thoughts of revenge. But a child can't compete in the closed world of adults that surround him in his little Irish town: Francie is caught and sent to reform school. There, his frenetic energy and grandiose behavior alienate him from his classmates and intensify his retreat into the world of his dreams and fantasies.
Upon his return, Francie finds a job in the local slaughterhouse., gory cleanup work that
is an unusual situation for a child of his age and estranges him still further from the children he once knew. Although Francie hopes for nothing more than to resume his friendship with Joe as if nothing had ever come between them, it soon becomes clear that Joe, his "blood brother," has deserted him for more conventional companions, including Phillip Nugent, the son of his nemesis. Francie can barely believe this, much less comprehend it. His friendship with Joe is the only positive connection that Francie has with another human being. Its loss propels Francie further down a course of self-destruction as powerfully and unstoppably as a nuclear bomb.
Then Francie's father dies and the boy is completely alone. Shunned by the local townspeople, he struggles with his sense of loss and pain as his fantasies become ever more grotesque and his behavior more and more threatening. Finally, Francie loses his last links with reality. Goaded by the callousness of his neighbors and ignited by his hatred of Mrs. Nugent, Francie explodes into murderous violence.
Savagely funny and deeply tragic, "The Butcher Boy" is a searingly powerful portrayal of cruelty, madness and loss. In the character of Francie Brady, acclaimed filmmaker Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game," "Interview with the Vampire," "Michael Collins") creates a unique portrait of a childish imagination damaged beyond repair.
When writer- director Neil Jordan first read Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy, in 1992, he knew immediately that he wanted to develop the novel's filmic potential. Says Jordan, "The novel of The Butcher Boy would seem, on the face of it, to be impossible to film. That it has proved possible at all is due to several things. First, the power of the basic structure of Pat McCabe's novel, which is, I think, the best account of a childhood, damaged or otherwise, since Maxim Gorky's My Childhood. Eamon Owens, the actor who plays Francie, could relate so well at every moment to the basic movement of the narrative, precisely because the novel itself is so well imagined from a child's point of view.
"Secondly, for me as a director, it gave me an opportunity to reinvent that extraordinary mixture of paranoia and paralysis, madness and mysticism that was the Ireland I grew up in in the `fifties. And thirdly and most importantly, the film as a whole was driven by a voice, the voice of Francie Brady, which runs in counterpoint to the whole film, wraps its around with Francie's wonderful logic, or lack of it, as the case may be. Anyone who has read the book knows this voice. Many who have read it can't escape it. And with Stephen Rea playing it, the voice, becomes the key to a film that had to invent its own aesthetic to exist at all."
Jordan quickly moved to acquire the motion picture rights to the novel. At the time, he was in production on his version of Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire," starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, but he began the process of bringing The Butcher Boy from page to screen.
Jordan worked closely with McCabe and wrote a draft of the script that, he felt, reflected both the original story and the cinematic possibilities of its translation to the screen. "When I had the finished script, I got very excited about it and decided I wanted to direct it myself," he recalls.
For Jordan, McCabe's imagination was an important asset in the development of the movie. "Pat is very knowledgeable about film and he's also a good actor. He has a very fertile mind," says the director, who cast McCabe in a small part in the movie.
The power of the central character created by McCabe, the troubled young boy Francie Brady, dominated Jordan's imagination. "When I began to write the script myself, the boy's voice entered my brain and I couldn't stop writing it. The way he talks about things and the way he sees the world became totally compulsive. What I had to do was re-create that inner voice in a film."
McCabe's version of small- town life in 1960s Ireland is drawn directly from his own experience of the time. Recalls McCabe, "We were running all over the town with English comics, watching `The Untouchables' on television at 11 o'clock at night. We were wild kids."
"The story wasn't difficult to adapt to a movie," says Jordan. "In many ways it's very cinematic; there are so many references to popular culture and TV, horror movies and science-fiction movies."
The Location
Francie's colorful interior world contrasts with the drabness of the small provincial town in which he lives -- based in the book on McCabe's own home town of Clones, where Jordan decided to shoot the exterior sequences. Says the director, "Pat has written the best portrait that I can think of of childhood in a rural town. It's quite unique -- there's something about the simplicity of the central part of the story that's almost universal in a way. It could be a small town in the heart of Russia, or in Kansas."
For McCabe, it was a remarkable experience to return to his home town with a motion picture crew in tow. Many of the townspeople with whom he had grown up acted as extras in the film. He says, "The people in Clones have been very supportive, although, for me, acting in front of 400 critics could be tricky at times! But it's just astonishing to see the Clones of the 1960s re-created."
Producer Redmond Morris was very appreciative of the help the production received on location. "The cooperation we got from the local people was terrific. We were lucky, because it's the actual location for the book, but it's also ideally suited cinematically for the way we wanted to tell this story."
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