INTERVIEW: Tomm Moore, The Secret of Kells

Illustration rises off the page in “The Secret of Kells”

Here is the transcript:

April Benavides: The first time I heard of THE SECRET OF KELLS, I was watching the Academy Awards^® telecast and thought, what is this film competing against Up and The Princess and the Frog? How did you find out about being in the running for the Best Animated Feature Oscar^®? 

Tomm Moore: It was funny even being there that night. Do you remember, the Fantastic Mr. Fox clip had George Clooney doing the voice of the Fantastic Mr. Fox and he goes, “What’s THE SECRET OF KELLS?” [Laughs] I think everyone was asking that question. Well, we were glad they were asking the question because it meant they might be more interested in finding out, you know. We’d had a good run in the festivals and stuff in Europe and we’d won some prizes and we’d just been picked up by GKids here in New York, which is a distribution part of the New York Children’s Film Festival and they just screened the film enough in New York and L.A. to qualify for the Oscar^® so we thought it was a fairly outside chance that we could get a nomination, we had no, like, marketing machine behind it like some of the big studios had. So, literally, the night before the Oscar^® nominations, my wife said something to me about, “Oh, wouldn’t it be amazing!” and I said, “Yeah it would be amazing but I thought [that it was] good that we were even considered. So it was amazing when the next day, it was sort of the middle of the day in Ireland and someone out in the office started screaming and we thought maybe she’d seen a mouse or something and we went out to see what was going on and she was watching the telecast. And she told me that Anne Hathaway had said my name, which was pretty exciting.

AB: That’s pretty cool. So how did things change for the film—and you—with the nomination?

TM: We’d originally been planning to come out here and do a small tour around St. Patrick’s Day, in some key places, and then after the nomination there was so much interest that the film ended up playing for months and months and going around the art house circuit in the United States for much longer than we anticipated. And I came out for the Oscar^® in L.A. and then came over here, to New York, and then I was in Boston for St. Patrick’s Day, so it was pretty exciting.

AB: You got a good U.S. tour out of it.

TM: Oh, yeah. What’s amazing is that I’m back now, for the DVD. It’s fantastic. Two years after putting down me pencil, thinking we were finished with the thing, I’m still getting some travel out of the back of the thing so it’s fantastic. [Laughs]

AB: Good for you. So the film pays tribute to the past, with a story that takes place circa 800 AD, and hand-drawn animation that takes its inspiration from illuminated manuscripts and ancient art. In fact, Kenneth Turan from the Los Angeles Times called the film “an anachronism many times over, and what a good thing that turned out to be.” Were you wary of attempting that in this tech-happy day and age?

TM: There’s two things about that actually. I mean, first of all, setting the film at 800 AD, Middle Ages, it sort of lends itself to the imagination because times were sketchy around then, there were a lot of room for fantasy and there were a lot of people interested in [it] in that period, you know? But for us to be doing hand-drawn animation, to the level that we wanted to do it to, wouldn’t have been possible without technology. And that’s because we worked with different studios all over the world. I mean, it was an Ireland, French, Belgian co-production. And we also had some animation done in Hungary and even in Brazil. So a lot of communication was by e-mail, we did a lot of uploads and downloads of each other’s scenes so we could see what everyone was working on. So, it was quite a technical endeavor even though we were doing it the traditional, old-fashioned way.

AB:  What inspired you to make the film? Did any of it come from your own life or childhood?

TM: Maybe one of the things about the story is that it’s a little bit self-reflexive, on nearly every artist, I think, trying to create something against difficult odds, or whatever. So, some of that comes from my own experience, Brendan’s journey comes from my own experience but that’s what kind of kept me inspired while trying to make the film, over such a long period, but the actual subject matter of the film was actually that I was in college [and] one of my friends in college was Aidan Harte, who ended up being the director of the Skunk Fu TV series that we made. But at the time we were kicking around the idea of, “Would it be possible to make an Irish animated film based on Irish art?” And it was only really that, whenever we looked at the Irish art, that a lot of what’s considered Celtic designs and stuff can be traced back to the Book of Kells. And the Book of Kells is Ireland’s national treasure and designs from it used to be on our currency, it’s everywhere in Ireland—so everywhere that it’s almost like a cliché. And we just, sort of, realized that the original document that all the stuff had spiraled out of was really fascinating. And its own story in history—and the legends around it—sort of, lent itself to a pretty interesting story and I think you can make about ten different films based around the back-story of the Book of Kells. But, for me, it was something that, even now, when I look at it, it is surprising that we made a film about such an esoteric subject.

AB: But some of the characters, at least in some ways, are based off real-life people…

TM: Well, yeah, I mean, Brendan is my son’s name. And when I first started to developing the project, he was about 8. And we were in production, working on it every day so he contributed a bit to some of the ideas. He was a good test audience. And then I really wanted Aisling to be like a pesky little sister. I’d had a younger sister, around two years younger than me, and I really based Aisling a lot on my sister Kathy, even gave her the bushy eyebrows. I think even Brother Aidan was based a lot on different teachers I’d had over the years, people who’d helped me. And he originally looked a bit more like Paul Young, the producer. And then we made him an older chap and more of a Merlin figure, he somehow morphed into this Willie Nelson-type and I didn’t realize it was happening until someone else pointed out to me that he looked like Willie Nelson [Laughs].

AB: So, more inspiration there, from Willie Nelson.

TM: Yeah.

AB: How does your sister feel about being the inspiration for Aisling?

TM: Oh, she’s chuffed now. I mean, she likes that Aisling’s got the pink knees as well, cause she [used to] always be climbing trees and falling down and she was a bit of a tomboy. So she knows that Aisling has pink knees and I said yes, that’s because she always had pink knees, they were always grazed from falling down and climbing trees and so on. 

AB: That’s great. So it did take a number of years to create the film, how did you keep that momentum going over the long production cycle? 

TM: For a long time, it was more a pipe dream. It was something that myself and a few of the other crew members would go back to between commercial jobs or whatever other work we were doing in between to pay the bills. And so the momentum was more of that, “Oh, someday we’ll make this film,” but it was kind of keeping our sanity while we were doing other things. But then, when we actually went into production, there was about three, three-and-a-half years of actual production time, and I suppose what kept it all interesting was subject matter and was that we were working with so many different teams, it was really exciting to, kind of, work with different teams in different countries, at different phases of production and get to know new people. It was really exciting, it flew by, actually, to be honest with you. The three years—I kind of blinked and I turned around and my son was suddenly 11.    

AB: Did you find there was a balancing act that you had to engage in to make the film work on both levels—for children and adults?

TM: Oh, definitely. I mean, it started out being a little bit more adult-skewed, I suppose, or less taking kids into consideration. And it was really with the encouragement of our co-producer in France, Didier Brunner, he kind of encouraged us to see the film again through the eyes of Brendan, a young boy who’d only been kind of a secondary character in the original draft. And so when we started to work with Fabrice Ziolkowski, the screenwriter, we sort of were all looking for ways to open up the story and open up the world that wasn’t a dry history lesson but a universal story that kids could relate to, no matter where they came from.

AB: Well, that’s interesting, because the film is very much about a very particular place and time—the distant past in Ireland. Yet its appeal has been universal, I mean, it’s been embraced across countries and demographics. Why do you think that is?

TM: Yeah, I opened that Joseph Campbell thing, that Hero’s Journey idea, that in all different traditions of religion or mythology or legends, there’s a commonality that people relate to whenever they see the film. And hopefully it says something to the modern world as well, even if it is set in 800 A.D. I think there’s parallels to the challenges people have today in there.

AB: Yeah, I definitely think so. Irish literature can be quite difficult to read and explain to children. Did you find that animating the idea difficult?

TM: Yeah, we had to be selective as well. I mean, there can be a lot of difficult material in Irish mythology and stuff. For me, when I was a kid, I didn’t think the Book of Kells was particularly interesting. I found it a bit boring; it was like a history lesson. It’s like this little brown book in Trinity College and you get brought up on a school trip and told it’s important but you don’t really see why. So for us it was kind of interesting coming back to that stuff and trying to think how we could make it interesting for kids, and how we could make it that kids would relate to it in a fresh way.

AB: Did you have a favorite scene that didn’t make it into the final film?

TM: No, my favorite scene was in the film. It’s when Aisling sings the song to Pangur Ban. But there was a really great scene we had to cut out, I think it’s on the DVD. The whole movie used to be a flashback, of Abbot Cellach. He’s looking back on his life and looking back at when Brendan was a boy in Kells and wondering what’s happened to him. So that was, kind of, an intro but we cut it because it seemed a bit too dark to start it on that note so we ended up making it start with Aisling, which I think is better to grab the kids, but [the initial scene] was really well-animated so it was a pity to cut it.

AB: Right. Is there anything else about the film you, maybe, wish you could have changed in the film or were especially proud of?

TM: The other thing that I always kind of felt was a pity was that people didn’t really understand why Cellach was the way he was or where Aisling came from—kids always have questions for me about Aisling. So I did a little bit in the graphic novel I was able to expand a little bit, I did little short prequels to the graphic novel adaptation to show how Brendan had been saved from the Vikings as a baby by Cellach and that kind of explains why his uncle is so protective and so focused on saving everyone from the Vikings. And, similarly, with Aisling, I showed a little bit of her back-story and encounters her faerie folk had had with Crom in ancient times. So, in a way, it was cool to not have it in the movie so that I could have it in the comic book but it might’ve been interesting to have as a little, kind of, prologue in the movie.

AB: Right, I agree, having just seen the prequel that the Abbot especially is more sympathetic and very heroic in the prequel and it did give me more of an understanding of why he is the way he is in the film.

TM: I think Nora and I both ended up thinking of him more as the hero. Like, we’re both parents and we both, kind of, understand how difficult it is to the parent. And we’re both kind of in charge of our company and we both know what the stress is, and you can kind of lose your way a bit if you succumb to them. But I definitely relate to his paternal, protective instincts, even if he goes too far.

AB: Well, speaking of the graphic novel, you are a confessed comic book fan…

TM: Yup, nerd. [Laughs]

AB: Comic book nerds are very cool these days.

TM: Geek chic, it’s rockin’, I love it. I was a geek before it was chic.

AB: Right, so what are some of your favorites to read these days?

TM: Well, these days…I mean, I grew up loving every type of comics from Asterix from France to American comics—Batman, I loved, superhero comics. But now I read mainly alternative cartoon, I suppose, it’s not a great word, but, Chris Ware, really like his work, I love Jeff Smith’s stuff that he did for Bone, and Craig Thompson, he did a graphic novel called Blankets and another one called Chunky Rice. So, those guys I think are really inspiring and are kind of modern illuminators, I suppose.

AB: And your son will get to read all these after you?

TM: Well, he’ll get to read it when he’s old enough. [Laughs] These are more grown-up comics. Except for Bone, Bone is a great all-ages comic.

AB: So what are you working on now?

TM: Well, as usual in the company we’re working on all sorts of stuff just to pay the bills but I’m really focused on developing my new film, Song of the Sea. And it’s kind of a continuation of some of the themes from THE SECRET OF KELLS but it’s a modern fairytale, maybe aimed at a slightly younger audience, again. And it’s about the last little selkie child. And selkies are these creatures in Scottish and Irish legends that are kind of a link between the faerie world and the human world. There people that can be seals or human and there’s this whole story of the seal maiden. So this is the last one, she’s a little girl and she’s lost in the city and her and her brother try and find their way back to the sea. And on the way back to the sea, they kind of discover all these fading creatures from folklore that are just fading back into the landscape.

AB: Wow, I can’t wait to see it!

TM: It’s gonna be great! [Laughs]

AB: Many thanks to Tomm Moore for joining me to discuss his film THE SECRET OF KELLS, now available on Blu-ray, DVD, for digital download and On Demand from Flatiron Film Company. Thanks so much, Tomm.

TM: Thanks a million, April.