Once Upon a Time
The movie Once was shot on a small budget and secretly on the streets of Dublin. Now the Oscar-winning musical has also conquered theater stages around the world.
About half a kilometre long picturesque route called Grafton Street curves through the centre of Dublin, which is one of the two well-known tourist and shopping streets of “The Fair City”. In January 2006, a film camera with a giant long-range lens tube stood at the northern end of the street, but due to the distance, passers-by had difficulty seeing what was actually being filmed with it. And if someone had made the mistake of asking, it’s likely that the answer wouldn’t have been entirely honest, because a completely unknown little music movie called Once was secretly being filmed at the time.
Behind the camera, with their faces almost completely covered in thick scarves, stood photographer Tim Fleming and director John Carney. At the other end of Grafton Street, the camera followed two young red-haired street musicians, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. They could hardly have imagined it at the time, but exactly two years later they would be at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood celebrating their Oscar trophy.
“We were forced to shoot in secret because we couldn’t afford the permits,” director Carney later said. The film’s total budget was just under a hundred thousand euros, most of it funded by the Irish Film Institute. The rest came from Carney’s own savings and a small bank loan, which also became one of the film’s key scenes.
Once’s international success was a complete surprise to the team – just a year after the premiere, this story of two poor musicians and their hopeless love for each other and their music had already netted twenty million euros in ticket revenue. And there is no end in sight.
The stage version of Once , the stage form of which was created by the Irish playwright Enda Walsh, premiered exactly ten years ago at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A year later, Once conquered Broadway and shot up internationally. The first non-English screening was seen in Korean in Seoul in 2015.
Once had its Nordic premiere in Swedish at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki on 28 October 2020 and on 20 January 2022 it will be the turn of the Finnish premiere!
Text Janne Strang