UK director Polly Steele’s Four Letters Of Love, an adaptation of Irish author Niall Williams’ novel of the same name, is being released in the UK and Ireland on July 18 by Vertigo Releasing.
Helena Bonham-Carter, Pierce Brosnan, and Gabriel Byrne star in the film with rising stars Ann Skelly and Fionn O’ Shea, Skelly and O’Shea play a young woman and man pulled together by ghosts, fate and the power of true love. Four Letters Of Love follows their lives as their family situations tear them apart and ultimately bring them back together.
Skelly and O’Shea were both Screen UK & Ireland Stars of Tomorrow in 2021 and 2017 respectively.
The film is produced by Debbie Gray and Douglas Cummins’ London-based Genesius Pictures, with Martina Niland of Ireland’s Port Pictures. Cornerstone Pictures is handling worldwide sales.
Four Letters Of Love shot on location in Ireland and Northern Ireland in Donegal and Antrim in January and February 2023. and world premiered at the Dublin International Film Festival in February this year.
Steele, renowned for documentaries including The Mountain Within Me, made her debut fiction feature Let Me Go, starring Juliet Stevenson, Jodhi May and Lucy Boynton, in 2017.
She talks to Screen about returning to a beloved book, unseasonably pleasant weather in Ireland, and her move towards “joyful” stories.
How did you turn Four Letters Of Love into a film?
In 2017, I was spending a year in Paris as my partner was working there. I had taken a dozen books with me and one of them was Four Letters Of Love. I’d read it 20 years previously and loved it. Then my husband had a bad heart attack and during the recovery phase I began reading it again.
I felt so drawn to turning it into a film that I wrote to [author Niall Williams]. We emailed each other for a few months and he invited me to come to Ireland.
A week after I got back, he wrote to me and said: “I’d love you to do it”. Lizzie Pickering, the producer with whom I made Let Me Go with in 2016, fundraised with me to raise the development money that paid for the option and writing the screenplay. It was private equity raised under our company Steele Moon Films.
Then it was a five-year journey. We had a couple of different producers on board, cast came and went. Douglas Cummins [at Genesius Pictures] was the producer who worked with me through the buildup to making the film, then Debbie Gray came in when we were in prep, and got it across the line.
How did you pitch the film to your cast of Gabriel Byrne, Helena Bonham-Carter and PIerce Brosnan?
Each one of them had their own relationship to the book. Gabriel was fully embroiled, because he is a poet, and was a teacher. Pierce is an artist, he paints wild, wonderful paintings. AndI had worked with Helena 20 years previously when I was at Rocket Pictures, on a film I made called Women Talking Dirty. Four Letters had been her favourite book. They all had a strong reason to be there.
Where did you shoot?
The main interiors were all genuine interiors and the exteriors were places like Glenveagh National Park [in Country Donegal]. We were reliant on the weather so I trusted that whatever happened, happened. As a documentary maker, you are so used to that idea of turning up and just having to go, “OK, well, what is it? What do we have here? You know, let’s go with this. Let’s play with this”.
I find that quite exciting because it means that there’s change available. You never quite know when a magical moment is going to arrive for you.
And we had a really magical time. It was January and February when we shot but we never had a day of rain. The weather was unbelievable. The crew, all Irish, every day they would wake up shocked that it wasn’t raining. We were very lucky.
As the weather was cooperative, what was the most challenging part of the shoot?
The schedules on these things are extremely tight. I would like to have been able to give the actors a bit more time. But you just have to get practical and get on with it.
You’ve done quite a lot of documentary work. How was the change to working with a fictional world with ghosts and miracles?
I’ve made an awful lot of stories about trauma and healing. I wanted to move through it and into something more joyful. I know there’s a lot of tragedy in Four Letters Of Love, but the overall feeling is one of hope.
What are you working on now?
I’m working with Turkish novelist Elif Shafak on an adaptation of her latest book, There Are Rivers in the Sky. We are just beginning.
I also really want to make a tiny microfilm in my own local community in Sussex – throw off all the shackles and write a script around communities. It’s a real buzzword at the moment because we’re all trying to find a way of reconnecting after Covid.
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