A 27-year-old novel still getting loved is turned into star-studded film

"There are moments when you feel trapped by the life that you are on as if it is a commuter train ride in and back every day and you go in, you give the best of yourself to your work and you come home tired in the evening."

RNZ Life editors
5 min read
Helena Bonham Carter, as Margaret Gore, in Four Letters of Love, holding the hand of Gabriel Byrne, as Muiris Gore, standing behind her.
Caption:Helena Bonham Carter plays Margaret Gore and Gabriel Byrne as Muiris Gore in Four Letters of Love.Photo credit:Supplied / Vertigo Releasing

Internationally best-selling Irish writer Niall Williams has returned to his first novel from 1997, Four Letters of Love, to turn it into a screenplay for a star-studded cast including Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne.

Set against the west of Ireland backdrop, the novel explores pursuing your heart – something Williams did in 1985 with his wife when they left America and went on a quest of searching for meaning and questioning the value or non-value of an artistic life.

“We had been living in New York and both of us felt after five years there that we were somehow living the wrong life, riding the commuter train into Manhattan every morning. But you could close your eyes and five years would have passed and you'd still be on that commuter train into an office.”

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The fact Four Letters of Love – his biggest seller to this day - is still finding an audience 27 years later is “extraordinarily heartening”, Williams told Saturday Morning.

“I think that's a timeless thing. That [the] novel had intentionally got a sort of fable quality to it and I think the film has that as well. So I think for all people at all times, there are moments when you feel trapped by the life that you are on as if it is a commuter train ride in and back every day and you go in, you give the best of yourself to your work and you come home tired in the evening.

“There's nothing wrong with that if the work is fulfilling you or has some of you in it. But I think that it will always be the case that people have a sort of perhaps spiritual yearning inside them for something other, that feels truer to themselves or where they can take control over their own life a little bit.

“Even though I have to say that in 27 years it's been extremely difficult at times and certainly financial hardship, insecurity, lots of things - anyone knows who pursues an artistic life...

“So there is a price to be paid for freedom for sure. But the rewards, personal, internal kind of rewards I think are immense.”

Pierce Brosnan, best known for playing James Bond, stars in Four Letters of Love in the character of painter William Coughlan.

Pierce Brosnan is a painter himself and was creating pieces on set, Williams says.

Supplied / Vertigo Releasing

The challenge of revisiting his novel after all these years was to leave the passion and intensity of his feelings back then unmarred by his current growth and mindset, he says.

It took about six years for the film to get to the screen – but it’s been even longer since various directors have tried to get it off the ground, Williams says.

“I think when Four Letters of Love was published in 1997, almost immediately people would write to me or say, I can see this as a film.

“For a while, they would be pursuing it, and then the money would fall apart, or they would change direction, and it wouldn't happen.”

He says it’s been an honour to have an all-star cast on the film, and each has a personal connection.

“It's just wonderful kind of synchronicity when it comes together. But I think in a novel and in a film which deals a lot with the question about coincidence, chance and fate, it seemed right in some way that these people who had been in some way obliquely connected to the story would eventually stand on the beach in Donegal and be part of it.”

Fionn O'Shea as Nicholas and Ann Skelly as Isabel in Four Letters of Love.

Williams says "the landscape is a key part of all story[-telling] in Ireland I think both for its history, its lore, the magic of it, the sort of timeless quality of it, the beauty of it."

Supplied / Vertigo Releasing

Pierce Brosnan, for example, is a painter himself and plays the painting father on screen.

“On every film set that he's been on, Pierce is painting, he's working, he's doing paintings. He gave us one of his prints of a painting he did called Four Letters of Love while he was on the set.

“Gabriel for about 20 years, I think, knew about the novel and was always interested in playing the part.

“And Helena told us, and I think said in an interview last week on the BBC, that her mother gave her the book when it first came out in 1997 and she thought that maybe she could play the daughter. Of course she's now playing the mother.”

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