Room Taken – Interview with Film Writer Michael Whelan and Producer Colmán Mac Cionnaith

Hi, I'm Shaurya Thapa of Borrowing Tape, and today, I'm joined by the team behind Room Taken, which is a 2024 short film that made it to the Oscar's shortlist for Best Live Action Short. Joining me today are writer Michael Whelan and producer Colmán Mac Cionnaith. Congratulations guys for making it to the shortlist, and I hope the odds are in your favor.

My first question is for Michael, who wrote the screenplay. Michael, I must say that your film is incredibly heartwarming and for our listeners who haven't watched the film yet, Room Taken is the story of a homeless man named Isaac who secretly finds shelter in the house of a blind woman named Victoria, and these two end up forming a unique bond. So Michael, where did you get the inspiration for a story like this?

Michael Whelan: Yeah, it probably comes from a few different sources. The first one was probably more of a subconscious thing which I maybe took a lot of insight from, but it's my partner, Helene. She's French, and her great-aunt is actually an elderly blind woman in her mid-90s. She's French, she doesn't speak English, and I don't speak French, but we spend a lot of time over there, especially at Christmas, when we'll be in each other's company in her apartment. Sometimes, I'll walk into her room, and because she's blind and doesn't have great hearing, she won't even know I'm there. It won't be until maybe I walk past her and brush past her leg or something that she actually realizes there's even somebody there. And then sometimes I'll make her feel more comfortable by just letting her know that I'm sitting beside her just by putting my hand on her shoulder and just observing her as well. Even though she is surrounded by family because she has impairment issues with her vision, she comes across as quite lonely as well. We might be sitting around watching TV or we might be looking at photographs, and she can't really join in in the same way, and you can see it on her face. So there's that element.

Michael Whelan: In terms of the actual genesis of that little narrative nugget that set the crux of the idea in motion — I was just traveling to work one day, and I saw a homeless person walking down the street, and they were just walking behind a blind person, an elderly blind man. I'm a big daydreamer, and I get a lot of inspiration by just watching people. A lot of it comes from me trying to put myself in other people's shoes. And I was thinking, if I was in that position — would I try to take advantage of this situation? If I was really struggling, and then that led into this whole bigger story with these two characters, and then the world's built from there. I think it was actually later on that day, I was out having drinks, I had to set up for the story. And then I figured out the ending that — I don't want to say a twist at the end, which is quite an emotional bit where everything pieces together. And it all came quite quickly, and then when I got talking to TJ, and he was looking for scripts, and I actually happened to have this, and there was that scene really stuck out with him. When we actually decided to work on it together, we both worked on developing it out a little bit more. Trying to refine all the characters, and I guess little motivations and things like that as well.

Even without many dialogues between them, the characters in the film are quite memorable, like Isaac and Victoria. So Colmán, how involved were you or the rest of the crew in the casting process for Isaac, Victoria?

Colmán Mac Cionnaith: Yeah, Michael and I worked quite closely when casting for both Isaac and Victoria. We worked with an Irish casting director called Don McAllister, and we put out quite a big net to, I don't know how many young Irish actors to cast for Isaac, and we got a lot of people to do some self-tapes but Gabriel's tape — there was just something about him that just was really striking on screen and his vulnerability that he was able to put across really, it impacted the three of us very quickly. So we asked Gabriel to come back in for an audition after going through quite a lot of tapes. It always kept on coming back to Gabriel, and then WWE asked him to come in. As you see in the film, he's not a small guy, he's quite broad, he's quite muscular, and yet he was able to make himself look so vulnerable and empathetic and small. So that moment where Isaac decides to stay in the house, we needed the audience to really root for him in that moment and with Gabriel, we just knew that the audience would be behind him 100%. While it was a long process, it was such an easy decision.

Colmán Mac Cionnaith: To cast Victoria — that was slightly trickier because we were looking to cast a blind actor, and a lot of our efforts went to talking with the National Council for the Blind in Ireland, which is now called Vision Ireland, and working with a drama group called Sightless Cinema, which is all blind actors and is run by a man called Ciarán Taylor. But he introduced us to a woman called Dolores Cullen, and we were working with her for a few months before we decided to change tack. After a few rehearsals with her, we had a conversation, and I think it was decided that for the good of the project, we needed a more experienced actor. But Dolores stayed on board; she worked with us even more closely, almost as our visual impairment consultant, and when we ended up casting Brid Brennan, who was absolutely just gold, Dolores spent a day with Brid and talked her through Dolores's own experience with blindness. She's been blind since 1999, so she lived a lot of her life with a visual impairment, and it's just amazing watching her work. Not work, but live. And if you see Dolores, especially in our own house or walking around the street, it doesn't have a cross as a disability or an inability at all. This is a woman who really lives her life to the full and that is exactly what we wanted to put across with the character Victoria. So I think having Brid spend that time with Dolores just really enhanced the character completely. And I know that's what Michael, the character that Michael had written as well, but not a character that was struggling. It is a character who is blind but not a woman who is incapable or who has lost any independence.

As you mentioned, Colmán, you have an elderly, blind character in your film, but you were trying your best not to make the character come off as seeking the pity of audiences; a sorry case. But with Isaac's character as well. Not only is he homeless, but you also see him sending money to his family, wherever they're from. That's a very universal struggle, especially for migrants or immigrants, when they come to a country like the UK or any European country, because you have to look for shelter for your own, and you also have to provide for your family back home, like whichever country they're from. You see right from the opening, we figured out that Isaac is a character of Nigerian descent because he's talking about Yoruba, the language. With a lot of these narratives these days, you have the risk of 'trauma porn.' You don't want to fetishize or exploit a character's trauma, be it a disabled character with visual impairment or a character who is struggling to make ends meet and who might be an immigrant.

So, this question is for both of you, how did you consciously try not to make Room Taken "trauma porn" and to make it more humanized, more normalized?

Colmán Mac Cionnaith: Well, the first time I read the script, Michael dealt with things like the isolation with the elderly and migration and homelessness so delicately. There was never a point where the trauma, as you put it, was overblown. It was all just very, very gentle. Yet quite heartbreaking at times. And I think that lent itself to make it a little bit more real because oftentimes, people's struggles aren't these big, grand things that happened in such explosive ways; they're really silent and slow and wear people down. And I think the way that Michael handled it in a script, even very early on, it was so gentle and delicate and made you really empathize with the characters in such a huge way. But I should give Gabriel a shout-out again here because [in] the opening scene, it was Gabriel's input and his advice to set it in Yoruba, and he was dead right. If Isaac was staying with somebody from back home in Nigeria, he wouldn't be speaking in English; he would be speaking Yoruba; he would be looking for things that remind him of home and connect him to where he's from. And I think that when he's unable to stay in that space anymore, it makes him even more isolated. It was such a small thing, but it had such big consequences. And it just elevated that character so much.

Michael Whelan: Just in terms of storytelling, though, as well as opening sentences, they tell you so much about who he is. What his background is. In terms of approaching that balance between respecting the struggles of migrants or people who are going through the asylum system. I think the approach we took, in terms of the storytelling, is making sure that this is a story that feels like it could happen to anybody. We want people to see this and be able to see themselves in that situation and realize that sometimes people's circumstances just put them into this situation. In terms of bringing in the idea around asylum, there's a narrative reason for that as well. One thing we really wanted to do was to make sure that these characters felt as different from one another as possible. So you have this elderly blind woman who's from Ireland, but then also having somebody who's a migrant from a different country who's younger, is of a different race. Also, having a character be a migrant who is couchsurfing, maybe they have one or two contacts that they have. But once that initial contact dries up or the generosity dries up, that leaves him very vulnerable compared to somebody who maybe has grown up here and has a lot more contacts. They might be able to get out of the situation a little bit easier. So, we wanted to make him very vulnerable by making him as isolated as possible.

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Colmán, my question for you is: I'm moving away from the narrative, and I'm coming to the technical details now. This might be a heavy question, but Room Taken isn't the first short film that you've produced. But what are the challenges of producing a short film and then sending it to Oscar-qualifying festivals like Holly Shorts and just finding distributors? What are the hassles, especially with a short compared to a TV movie or an episode?

Colmán Mac Cionnaith: Well, I think that one of the biggest obstacles or difficulties that I think every short film faces is that there are so many of them. When you go to these festivals, you really get hit by how many incredible short films are out there. So it's about really catching your audience straight away and getting people engaged right away, especially when you're going out to festivals because they might have three, four, five short film programs with six, seven in each program, but that's still only 40, 50 short films. That might be only 5% of the submissions that were submitted to that festival. So, to get into something like Holly Shorts or even local festivals like Dublin Film Festival, Cork Film Festival, and Fastnet Film Festival, you have to catch people's attention straight away. For us, it was all about that opening scene that Michael wrote, that that was him sort of losing the safety blanket and that Gabriel was able to translate to Yoruba. We also worked with a fantastic composer called Jamal Green. And I think his score really helped reflect the tone and everything that we're going for that the audience was able to be submerged completely into the film quite quickly. And I think that helped us a lot because the tone for us needs to be set very early because of what happens quite quickly when he stays in this woman's house. That could potentially pull people out of this script or go, oh, hold on a second. But because of those things, I think people are able to really engage with the story.