Tom Berkeley & Ross White On the Humor and Heart of Grief and Family for Live Action Short Contender ‘An Irish Goodbye’

An Irish Goodbye is a true crowd-pleaser. The story of how two brothers confront their relationship’s past and look forward to the future is one that a lot of us can relate to, and its sensitive writing and direction could land it in the Live Action Short Film category this year. Directors Tom Berkeley and Ryan White have constructed a funny short that can team us a lot about reconnecting with our loved ones.

Lorcan and Turlough (played by James Martin and Seamus O’Hara) come together to mourn the loss of their mother, Grainne. Turlough, the elder brother, immediately tried to get affairs in order as well as find a relative who could look after his younger brother who happens to have Down Syndrome. When they discover a bucket list written by their mom, Lorcan convinces his reluctant brother to finish every item to honor her passing.

Berkeley and White have been friends for years, and they attended drama school together. Writing An Irish Goodbye seemed like an organic process, but they always approached it with honesty. It’s almost as if they took their lessons of being a performer and transferred that to the script.

“When Ross and I started taking our writing very seriously, we both left London to go to our home towns so we could afford to have more time to write,” Berkeley said. “The themes of leaving home and returning home and being flung back into your family organism was happening for us. Osmosis was filtering through. I had been to a football match with my dad, and I saw these two brothers a few rows ahead of me that found compelling. They became the blueprint for the characters. They were big, salt-of-the earth lads, and they were at each other’s throats. When a goal happened, they would jump into each other’s arms. I remember we had a conversation about that and how we found those characters interesting. We thought about how these two characters would process grief in two very different ways.”

There is a huge and obvious different in the ways that Lorcan and Turlough are processing their mother’s death. Lorcan lives with his mom, and he doesn’t want to leave their home, but Turlough carries a mental checklist in order to make sure everything gets done. The harder Turlough pulls at Lorcan at the beginning, the sturdier Lorcan becomes. The push and pull between these characters is very relatable and present from the first frame.

“We spoke a lot about how Lorcan is led by his heart, and he is led by his feelings,” White revealed. “For him, he doesn’t understand how his brother isn’t the same way. Turlough is very led by his head, and he doesn’t want to process it. There are practical things to do, and he is very pragmatic in that way. That felt very true to us in terms of the male figures in our lives. The conflict with the guys we speak to now is leaving behind this Turlough mindset of being head-led. It felt interesting to have a character where their openness is their superpower or their greatest strength. Having these two kinds of characters also lead to great moments of comment.”

It’s interesting that both An Irish Goodbye and Best Picture contender The Banshees of Inisherin are films about connection of land with a strong male bond at its core. Berkeley and White’s film resonates on a different level because of the blood bond between these brothers, and it makes you think of the connection that you share with your siblings. I didn’t grow up in Ireland, but I did live in a house that wasn’t close to many other family homes. When you grow up in an area like that, you instinctively imagine that your brothers and sisters will be your closest friends.

“Ross is from Belfast and I am from the southwest of England–both of these rural fringe,” Berkeley said. “You can be in the middle of a city and the middle of nowhere very quickly. The kind of rural, offbeat characters are well-trodden or lawless or slightly looked down upon. In Ireland, you can get elements of that. There’s part of us that connected with these people who are in the middle of nowhere. There are no other characters other than the brothers and Father O’Shea. You don’t see any other houses or people, and we wanted to give it an almost fable, last two boys in Ireland feeling. It’s very isolated landscapes where stories like that come to live a little more.”

“Banshees captures the loneliness of the countryside,” White added. “For this story, looking at grief, it felt like we were commenting can feel like an isolating process. Only you can cope with it. In the short form, you get to put a magnifying glass by not providing an escape. Even in the big landscapes, it doesn’t feel like tourism as much as we tried to make it remorseful or sorrowful.”

Martin and O’Hara are extraordinary together, and it’s clear that they put the work in to build their bond.

“Having come from an acting background ourselves, casting is a fun part for us,” White said. “As directors, it’s 85 percent [of the job] is finding the right people and getting out of your own way. We built it around James. He was on a BBC show called Ups and Downs, and I had known him a little bit from other things. He’s sort of a local hero. He was on a local radio show, and he is a big ambassador for a big charity. We didn’t know that he acted, though. We feverishly tried to get the script to him, and, lucky for us, he loved it. One half of the pairing isn’t good enough, though. Seamus is one of the most exciting Irish actors coming up at the moment. He was in between shooting The Northman with Robert Eggers and a big Netflix series, so we were so fortunate to nab him.”

“He’s got a great face, too,” Berkeley said. “There’s a lot of currency there. With a short, you don’t have the luxury of building a rapport, and we wanted to have a few days rehearsal to find the best avenue of directing with everyone together. They would run lines over Facetime and spend time together so they spent a good time building that relationship. They put a lot of work in, so they were further along than you’d expect with a short.”

With the subject matter, the directors wanted to make sure that the humor shone through without taking away from the tragedy. Lorcan and Turlough couldn’t shoot fireworks or smoke pot together and then not remember that they were doing this for their mother. There is a lovely montage of them counting down the numerous things their mother wanted to achieve, and we can literally see these two characters getting closer and closer.

“We talk a lot about it feeling true to life,” White said. “Tragedy and comedy live so close together. When these terrible things happen, it can bring about the strangest feeling of humor. I think of any Irish wake that I’ve been to, and we’ve talked a lot about gallows humor. It’s a cultural thing where we think that if we can laugh about it, nothing can get us down. There’s something very truthful about that, and what excites us is when it can turn on a dime. You can undercut a moment of awful grief with a fart joke.”

When I think about what I would put on a bucket list, a lot of things come to mind. Audiences will, surely, do the same thing, and I had to turn the question onto the directors.

“I would be lying if I said it was anything crazy like skydiving,” Berkeley said. “That doesn’t appeal to me. I think I would want to travel. We didn’t get to do that much as a kid, and doing the film festival circuit has really helped with that. I would like to step foot on every continent.”

“I think I would like to see the Northern Lights. They have these pods where you can camp underneath them. There’s beauty that I want to see there,” White said.