The Carney Code
Brothers John And Kieran Carney discuss Zonad, their fantastical - if unexpected - follow-up to the Oscar-winning Once.
Tara Brady, 15 Mar 2010
It’s 2004 and word on the street has it that director John Carney is making a kitchen sink musical with Glen Hansard on a shoestring budget.
Huh? There are mixed responses to the news but most of them, understandably, question the filmmaker’s soundness of mind.
Five years pass and word on the street has it that Mr. Carney - lately returned from LA with an Oscar winning film, Steven Spielberg as a fan and premier league offers on the table - has teamed up with brother Kieran Carney, acclaimed playwright and co-creator of Bachelor ’s Walk, to remake an early goofy project about an extraterrestrial chancer on a shoestring budget. Huh? There are mixed responses to the news, but this time around, we know better than to second guess the Carney clan.
“It’s a little bit of a pet project,” says John. “Everybody involved still talked about it affectionately. And it wasn’t so personal that either of us wanted to do it on our own; with comedy it always helps to work as a team.”
It was, additionally, as Kieran points out, a case of “unfinished business”. Made with Cillian Murphy and assorted Carney players back in 1996, Zonad was the brothers’ great lost picture. There are rushes on Youtube and plenty of attendant industry lore but the original film has, between one misfortune and another, been lost to the ages. “After everything we went through, we had nothing to show for it,” adds Kieran. “It just seemed so wrong.”
Happily, you can currently catch the complete feature length remake at a cinema near you. “The first version was a pilot we made with our own money and time,” says John. “We just went off and did it.”
Zonad 2010 may have backers in the Irish Film Board and at hip distribution imprint, Element Films, but it retains the same freewheeling wacky spirit that defines the original. Long time Carney collaborator Simon Delaney returns in the title role as an unconvincingly rubber suited alien who uses his celebrity to avail of earthling women and beer on tap. An accomplished moocher, it helps that his gullible hosts all seem to live in a fifties B movie.
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