The brothers Darren and Colin Thornton were basking in the success of A Date for Mad Mary, their debut feature film, when their mother, Trish, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND). Darren was returning to Ireland after a screening of the film in Los Angeles when he heard the news. “I remember the flight back from LA, staring out the window at the clouds.” Colin, meanwhile, was at a film festival in London: “I remember coming home, thinking, everything is going so well, everything is falling into place. Then Darren picked me up from the airport, told me about our mam, and my whole life fell apart.”
The Thornton family rallied around Trish at her home in Drogheda and the brothers became carers, taking night-time shifts to look after her. But her MND — the same rare neurological condition that afflicted the journalist Charlie Bird — progressed rapidly. “Every day there was something new, the loss of some power,” Darren recalls. “It was like someone hit fast forward on her life.” While caring for their mother, the brothers were simultaneously promoting A Date for Mad Mary, which won awards at the Galway Film Fleadh and the Iftas — and this absurd scenario blossomed into their new movie.
Four Mothers was directed by Darren and he co-wrote the script with Colin. It follows Edward (James McArdle), a writer about to publish his debut novel while caring for his 80-year old mother, Alma (Fionnula Flanagan), who is disabled following a stroke. Edward is getting ready for a book tour of the US, but his career is put in jeopardy when two friends depart Ireland for a gay pride event in Gran Canaria, leaving their mothers at Edward’s door. The novelist vents to his psychoanalyst, played by Rory O’Neill (aka Panti Bliss), only for the shrink to dump his mother and elope to the Canaries as well. Four Mothers is a delicately funny tale about the responsibilities facing certain middle-aged men with aging parents — and for the Thornton brothers it is deeply personal.
“It’s not directly autobiographical, but there are details in here that you would recognise if you knew our mum,” Colin says. In the film Alma has lost the ability to talk and she communicates with the world using a tablet app. The same was true of Trish, who lost her voice due to the MND. “Mam became aware that she controlled the flow of the conversation using her iPad,” Darren says. “You can all wait for me to type this out’.” Colin adds: “We had fun playing around with different accents on the iPad. Our mum wasn’t the best speller so she would spell things wrong and we try to decipher what she was trying to say.”
Eleven months after her diagnosis Trish died. When the brothers were ready to get back to work they decided to adapt Mid-August Lunch, an Italian comedic homage to older people. This idea, alongside their experiences with their mother, became part of the stew that led to Four Mothers. Initially Flanagan (The Others, Lost, The Guard) struggled with the concept of communicating through a tablet instead of dialogue. “Your voice is your greatest tool as an actor,” Darren explains. The fact the app kept malfunctioning did not help. “The weekend before we started filming Fionnula wanted to smash the iPad over my head.”
She settled into the role, using facial expressions and gestures (as well as intense typing) to convey her character. “I never wanted to take the camera off her,” Darren says. “‘I’m not doing anything,’ she would say. I was like, ‘But you are!’ Fionnula is utterly unselfconscious ,which is unusual in general for an actor. Older actors can become very guarded about how they look on screen and how the scene is being lit. That was never an issue with Fionnula.”
Working with the Thornton brothers surely eased the process. The brothers have an easy rapport; they are friends as well as creative collaborators. They grew up in Drogheda — Colin is the younger by three years — where they indulged their obsession for cinema through VHS tapes and trips to the cinema. There is a scene in Four Mothers in which the women talk about how their sons came out as gay. Colin is gay and “there are probably elements within all of the stories that pull from my own experience”. He came out to his mam when he was 17.
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Trish didn’t react well. “It was as bad as it could possibly be,” Colin says. “She said, ‘I’m never going to have grandchildren!’ Our parents were very religious. In fairness, she did come back and apologise and say she got it very wrong and was embarrassed by it.” Darren laughs: “You had a boyfriend three weeks later and he was staying in the house.”
As the brothers grew older, they gravitated toward the arts. At the age of 19 Darren established Calipo, a theatre company in Dundalk that included the actors Simone Kirby (Kneecap) and Orla Fitzgerald (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) among its ranks. Darren recalls the thrill of community-led theatre: teaming up in the back room of pubs to drink pints and spitball ideas. “The flip side was the frustration of being in a small town and the challenge of small-minded views. We did Trainspotting, the play, and some locals were disgusted because it was about drug addiction.”
There was more small-town controversy in 2004 when Darren turned his play Love Is the Drug, a relationship drama set in Drogheda, into a TV series for RTE. The show’s frank description of sex — and an amusing scene in which St Oliver Plunkett’s head [a relic on display in St Peter’s Church in the town] offers romantic advice — drew condemnation from the pulpit. “I wouldn’t let them near St Peter’s,” Monsignor Francis Donnelly was quoted as saying in the Drogheda Independent. “The show was a disgrace to Drogheda and drama.” Darren sighs. “The bishop of the town barred us from the church.”
During those heady days the brothers began writing scripts together: plays, then short films and finally A Date for Mad Mary (2016), the story of a young woman (Seána Kerslake) with a violent past who is released from prison in time for her friend’s wedding. Kerslake was superb casting, bringing vulnerability and volatility to the role. Mad Mary and Four Mothers both explore queer themes, some of which draw on Colin’s experiences. But Four Mothers also has universal resonance for people who have made sacrifices in order to care for loved ones. “After screenings people who have been carers have come up to us for a chat,” Darren says. “It’s really moving.”
The brothers are excited to unleash their second feature, but it’s a bittersweet process — they are acutely aware that someone is absent. “In the lead-up to the release of A Date for Mad Mary our mother was such a huge champion,” Colin says. “It’s weird that she’s not here now. We are both aware that this film would not exist if we hadn’t gone through that experience with her. I’ve been thinking about her so much over the last few weeks. She is never far from our minds.”
Four Mothers is in cinemas from Friday
