A Londoner with Irish roots, Portia A. Buckley is a writer/director who shoots primarily on film. In 2015, she co-founded independent production company Afternoon Pictures with Michael Lindley in the hopes of bringing original stories of life in contemporary Britain and Ireland to the big screen. Her latest project – a short film entitled Clodagh – recently qualified for consideration for the Oscars and is currently on a festival run around Ireland and the UK.
The last thing I saw and loved… Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest. It is such an intelligent and powerful piece of cinema, totally unflinching and unsentimental. While I was watching it, I felt like I was in an art installation, fully and uncomfortably immersed. Like all the best art, it was bold, original and relevant.
The book I keep coming back to… perhaps because I am making short films at the moment, I am really drawn to short stories and am lucky to be doing this at a time when there are so many gifted short story writers, especially in Ireland. I love Wendy Erskine, Colin Barrett, Kevin Barry and (of course) Blindboy Boatclub, but the book I keep coming back to this year is Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These which I’ve bought countless times as I keep on giving it to people as a gift, mostly so that they can read it and then we can talk about it!
I find inspiration in… everything, whether I know it at the time or not! The framing, composition and lighting of my short film Clodagh was massively influenced by the Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam that I saw just before we started shooting. Vermeer’s depiction of women in service, off-centre, while their service was centrally framed, presented as a virtue, was something that I felt connected with the character of Mrs Kelly. The story itself centres around the magic of a young girl, who changes a work-orientated woman’s life. Retrospectively, I realise that the script was written in tandem with the birth of my own child, and the profound experience having a baby had on my own life and worldview.
My favourite film is… my answer to this question changes all the time, but it’s usually Terence Davies’ Distant Voices Still Lives. It was recommended to me by my writing teacher at Tisch, NYU. It’s about a working-class family in Liverpool and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to find it. It’s a masterpiece of social realism, told in an impressionistic style.
My career highlight is… returning back to NYC, the place where I studied film, to see Clodagh play at Tribeca this year. I wasn’t sure how a film about a priest’s housekeeper in rural Waterford would play with a New York audience but, after Clodagh’s dance scene, the whole audience spontaneously erupted into applause. I know it was instant gratification/validation and a bit of a cheap dopamine hit, but in this business, you take them where you can!
The song I listen to to get in the zone is… I always read interviews where writers I admire talk about listening to classical music while they write and it sounds so romantic and cool. I tried it once – it didn’t work, I just listened to the music and got nothing done. So, I’m afraid I now have to write in silence staring at the wall. Not cool or romantic in the slightest.
The last thing I recommended is… while I was in NY this summer I went to see Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club with Gayle Rankin and Eddy Redmayne. I don’t usually enjoy musicals, but the production’s staging and Rankin’s performance were special. I felt incredibly lucky to have seen it.
I never leave the house without… a Babybel in my pocket. Actually, two Babybels because if my two-year-old son wants one, God help me if I don’t have one on me and a second one, in case he wants a chaser!
The piece of work I still think about is… Phyllida Lloyd’s, all-female cast of Julius Caesar, set in a women’s prison at the Donmar Warehouse. It felt like it had been written that way, for that setting, with that cast, which isn’t always the case with modern adaptations.
My dream cast would be… it really depends on what it is for. Casting does not work like that for me, it’s so specific for each character we write. We have never written for anyone specific, so for everything my creative partner, Michael Lindley and I have ever done, we just have to wait for the right person to walk into the audition room – the person who fits the character we have written and imagined for months. It can take a while to find them, but when the right person does walk in, we both immediately know it.
The best advice I’ve ever gotten… ‘What other people think about you is none of your business’ will always serve you well. Also, something I have been reminding myself of recently when speaking about Clodagh at festival Q&As is, ‘Never let yourself get in the way of the work’.
The art that means the most to me is… the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. I went on a first date with a guy there over a decade ago. I was doing an Art History degree at the time and he clearly didn’t know who Rothko was but bravely blagged his way around the whole gallery, trying to impress me. It worked – we got married, had a kid together, and have been working, writing and making films together ever since.
My favourite moment in Clodagh is… the dance. It is what the whole film hinges on. It was something we wrote without thinking about the reality of taking it off the page and into a performance. Then we had to find this girl who dances “as if touched by God” and who could also act! We didn’t think we would be able to pull it off until the unicorn that is Katelyn Rose Downey came into our lives.
The most challenging thing about being in film is… finding an idea that is not only worthy of your time, of years of your life, but that also can inspire a cast and crew to make it and ultimately an audience to pay to see it. If anyone has any ideas like that, please get in touch…
After I wrap on a project, I… get sick! The last film we did, I called “That’s a wrap” and immediately lost my voice. All that adrenaline you’ve been feeding off desserts you. I usually spend a week in bed recovering and then get into the edit.
If I wasn’t a director, I would be… a designer. My mother is a designer and a source of great inspiration to me, and in another world, I believe that we could have done that together.
The magic of film to me is… I will answer this literally because I shoot on film. When the film spools through the magazine and into the gate, the sound it makes brings a special kind of magic. Everyone knows that sound is money-burning! Everyone pays attention, nobody is on their phone or wants to mess it up. We all bring our A-game and that is when—if you’re lucky—you can catch lightning in a bottle.
Photography by Kate Martin. The story of a priest’s housekeeper and her moral battle between religious integrity and bending the rules in the name of passion, Clodagh will show at the Cork International Film Festival. You can find out more information and screening details here.
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