Lochlainn McKenna On Recreating Troubling Fatherly Adventures for the Magnificent ‘Two For the Road’

I wish I could’ve talked to my dad after seeing Lochlainn McKenna’s Two For the Road. There is a distinctive feeling of diving into someone’s memories or like seeing a family photo album brought to life. There is an alive-ness to these scenes. McKenna’s film is deep and beautifully made. It’s about how, as children, we sometimes see our parents in a light that we never thought we’d see them in. A lot of kids hold their parents up as superheroes or idols, and the realization that they just might be people can be hard to reconcile.

Based on McKenna’s own short story (Guinness & Coke, which you can read here), Two For the Road centers on Hugh and his young son, Oscar. On the weekends, Oscar looks forward to adventurous trips with his father, and the possibilities seem endless. Has your dad ever looked at you and asked if you wanted to take an adventure? Unfortunately, this particular trip leads down a dark path when Hugh brings Oscar to a pub and Hugh proceeds to get blind drunk and Oscar has to take care of him.

**We have linked McKenna’s film below. Please watch it and then scroll back up to read our conversation with the director. 

An inspiration for the livelihood of the pub came in the form of Lynne Ramsey’s Gasman. “…there are these long-lens shots where it picks up on all these little moments,” McKenna says. “It was a great way to capture this bustling atmosphere, and it showed me how I wanted the pub to live.”

At first, everything is going well. Oscar is running around the pool table with another young kid and Hugh is laughing with other gents at the bar. The night slowly gets away from them, though. A moment that stuck out to me was when Oscar steps outside and Hugh hides his cigarette behind his back as his picture is being taken. Hugh knows he shouldn’t be doing certain things or, at least, he doesn’t want to be seen doing certain things. Children understand more than parents give them credit for.

“With the cigarette, his picture is being taken,” McKenna says. “The evidence would live forever. In terms of the malleability, this is based a lot on my own childhood. The film could be told through loads of lenses, but by showing it through Oscar’s eyes, you see an adult environment through the eyes of a child. I thought that was important. As an adult watching it, you automatically think he shouldn’t be there. I’ve been asked if I ever felt in danger, and I never did. Not really. Oscar is very forgiving, and it only takes a bit of football to help make him feel better. That’s not to say that there isn’t something deeper going on, and there is this massive conflict. There is a constant give and get going on.”

As Oscar, Ewan Morris conveys a lot with his eyes, and we can immediately see dread percolate up as trouble sets in. Because Morris is so capable of transmitting such high emotions, I was blown away to discover that he is a newcomer.

“He’s never acted before,” he admits. “We did a rehearsal day with him and his mom and we talked about the processes of using a slate and having a microphone on him. When he got on set, he was so game for anything. He’s so malleable and spongey that when we went to the shoot, he would pick on stuff like his character holding his bag in his left hand in scene 17 so it should be in the same hand in scene 18. He asked things about continuity. He would ask me about how when I was a little boy, there was no technology, and he wanted to know what I would be doing in the car when I was driving with my dad. Ewan was asking so much about character from day one.”

Since so much is told from Oscar’s perspective, I kept thinking of being his age inside a bar. It would feel very much like “an adult space” that I shouldn’t be in. You would need a boost to get into the high stools and your feet would dangle and hang as other people toss drinks back.

“There was one scene when the adults are talking and the static frame cut off their heads,” McKenna says. “Whenever Oscar is having fun, we use handhelds, long lenses and it’s loose. When things are stark or dangerous, we go wider. That was especially important in the drunk scene. Whenever you see drunk scenes, the focus drifts, but, from his perspective, it’s crystal clear. Oscar truly sees the drunk characters when they are so far gone. With a lot of the look, we wanted it to feel like a memory–that’s why it was always going to be in 16mm. I wanted it to feel rich and colorful, because Oscar is a child. That should be seen in such a rich sense.”

When Oscar steps up to a urinal in the restroom, a drunken man walks up to the space beside him and stares Oscar down. It’s our first sense of danger since this man is a stranger. McKenna reveals that he had another great shot filmed, but it would’ve altered the tone of the story.

“We had an amazing shot in the bathroom where we shot the back of this man’s head and when he turns his head, the light catches the corner of his eye,” he says. “And he looks down at Oscar. It’s a great shot, but it felt too sinister. Instantly, we were like, “…oh…” It took the film in a different direction before coming back to the story we were telling. It also made this man too much of a character, so it was a good call to cut it.”

When Hugh gets too drunk, he and Oscar get booted from the bar, and a wide shot makes us realize the danger we are in. It feels like McKenna put the camera up in a tree as we look down at the action as it feels like a light is flicked off. Oscar is now in charge since Hugh is too drunk to handle himself. Such bar frivolity–that warmth and that lightness–is snuffed out.

“It was my intention for that to be the first wide shot in the film, because that was the first time that he was properly isolated,” McKenna says. “We shot that whole scene in about 40 minutes. The starkness and the fear was setting in quickly right after we come from the warmth of the pub. It’s dramatic, and that is also reflected in the small scene in the bathroom. That’s a turning point where it goes from Oscar having fun or Oscar being bored to us thinking that maybe this kid shouldn’t be here. There are a lot of strange interactions that I felt uncomfortable with. Even though nothing ever happened, I wanted to reflect that as well. It makes us question what is going on. From there, it gets darker, stiller, and more frightening from there.”

The sweetness and the sadness linger shoulder-to-shoulder in McKenna’s film. We get the sense that Oscar loves his father hopelessly, despite all the trouble is he put through. McKenna never vilifies his father through his characters, but he doesn’t let them off the hook either. He presents this evening in such a concerning, troubling way that we imagine that the memory of this night will live inside Oscar’s head for a while, if not forever. Towards the end of the film, though, there is promise of more adventure, and Oscar is excited for the next weekend to come.

“When I used to go back with my father on the weekends, I would feel this loneliness on Sunday nights. The weekends would be so rambunctious and then I’d return to this stable setting. Honest to God, I can feel a placeless-ness on those nights. It’s strange. In the lead up to the film, my mom reminded me that the story has these quotes about feeling like a boat that can’t make it port. She wanted to know how I was going to get that across in a film. I thought it quite a lot, and I thought that it was so important to include that.

When they come home, it’s so lovely. We did some intimacy coordination about how Hugh would hold or touch Oscar, and that’s different than how the boat scenes are shot with all this distance between them. I tried to think of these moments to show this Sunday Syndrome, but I wanted to keep it on Oscar. I went on a lot of different types of adventures with him–and that word sounds light. As my father said, “this is just the tip of the iceberg,” and there were a lot of trips that were more colorful than others. By calling them adventures, it deflects from the negative and keeps them feeling positive.”