The feud between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy, manager of Ireland’s national team going into the 2002 World Cup, remains one of the most divisive news events in Ireland’s history.
Now dramatized in the movie Saipan, with Normal People star Éanna Hardwicke as Keane and Steve Coogan as his put-upon manager, the release of the movie has proved that the dust is far from settled in the country. Who was ultimately responsible for Keane’s firing from the national squad during training on the eponymous island remains a heated topic of debate – one directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa realise has made their movie an unexpectedly controversial one to Irish audiences.
Leyburn told Zavvi: “It's interesting, we showed the film at the Cork International Film Festival, and when we left the screening and got into a taxi, the driver said to us that he hoped the movie we were there with wasn’t Saipan. We laughed and said yes it was, and he looked at us directly and said: “I hope you realise that Roy Keane is a religion in Cork.”
“it's no exaggeration when we say this divided the country. Somebody told me the other day that his brother and sister didn’t speak for a full year due to the fact both had different allegiances in this debate!”
Speaking to an Irish friend ahead of seeing the movie at its London Film Festival premiere last October, he told me that one of his biggest childhood memories was the national mood being one akin to the world ending, as the star player who gave the country a real shot at the World Cup abandoned training for the tournament. Co-director Barros D’Sa was living in England at the time, so could easily avoid international sports coverage, and Leyburn was living in Belfast, where the story was still huge, but didn’t bring the country to a standstill like it did south of the border.
“When the script was first sent through to us, the film was subtitled A Football Story on the front page”, Leyburn continued. “Lisa raced through to me from her office and was adamant that we weren’t going to make a football film – and even as a football fan, it wasn’t on my list to make one either.
“But it became very clear when I started reading this that there’s more to this than just football. For a while, we talked about making a football movie with no balls – you don’t have to be a figure skating fan to enjoy I, Tonya, for example, and we wanted to take the same approach here.”
“The footballs don’t even show up until quite late in the story!”, Barros D’Sa said. “I don’t follow sports, but I think the best sports dramas are great because of the stakes, and the passion and commitment of the characters about the work that they do, not because of the sports in them.
“When we first started talking about the movie, we were referencing I, Tonya and even non-sports biopics like Frost/Nixon. The psychological drama between these characters is what gave it a universal appeal – we hope it’s compelling to football fans, but the human drama is the driving force.”
After reading the screenplay, the director duo immediately began researching, enlisting the help of an academic to look through Irish news archives to understand why this long-gone sporting controversy continues to be the subject of debate.
“We wanted to understand why this was amplified so much in the culture, to the point of it becoming a key part of the mythology of contemporary Ireland”, Barros D’Sa continued. “To tell the story properly, we knew we needed access to all sorts of archival material, and that’s when we started working with this brilliant academic Marcus Free, who realised at the time this story was hitting all the big themes in culture from masculinity to national identity.
“He kept all the newspapers, archived all the discussions on web forums and television recordings to help us understand the full scale. People in Ireland still talk about it as an event that divided families, which fascinated us, and we’re prepared for any backlash because of that; we’ve seen Irish headlines saying that we’re kicking the hornets' nest by making this movie about relatively recent history!”
With all that being said, a biopic of the Saipan incident has been a long time coming; Irish football fans have long speculated who would play both characters in a movie adaptation. For Leyburn, Steve Coogan was the only name that came to mind when he read the script.
“We both had the immediate reaction that it should be Steve Coogan, and when we spoke to screenwriter Paul Fraser, he told us that’s who he also had in mind when he was writing it. He in initially wasn’t able to do it, but his schedule changed, and we’re incredibly lucky that he was able to take part, as he could engage with this material on a brilliant level as a second-generation Irish cultural figure himself.
“He understood that Irish diaspora story and wrote a lot about what Mick feels about his Irish identity into the script, which was really something else.”
“And we were relieved when we cast Éanna, because we felt that if we didn’t find the right actor for Roy, we couldn’t make the film”, Barros D’Sa added. “This all hinges on a compelling performance as this is a very specific character everybody in Ireland knows, and you need someone with the power to change the electricity in any interaction he has, whilst still feeling palpable to the audience.
“When Éanna stepped into the audition, it was clear he could immediately do that; he’s such an emotional, nuanced actor, and yet he’s compelling as this larger-than-life figure who could make a two-sided argument look like a one-sided monologue! Plus, he’s from an area of Cork near where Roy grew up, so he felt like he understood that character, from having his cultural presence looming throughout his life – it's hard to imagine anybody else playing him.”
The debate about who was really responsible for Roy Keane’s exit rages on, and the blockbuster release in Ireland on Boxing Day has yet to settle the argument by design. The movie lets audiences make up their own minds – which, as non-football fan Barros D’Sa pointed out, is very much in the spirit of the beautiful game itself.
“As Roy Keane says in the film, football is a game of opinions – everybody in the pub, every taxi driver, has a strong opinion about it. And we’re lucky our film is generating strong opinions, because it means people are interested enough to want to talk about it!
“We hope that people on both sides of the debate feel their point of view has been explored. A good drama lets the audience experience the validity of both points of view, and that should be what keeps people watching and interested until the end.”
As for whether it could heal the rift between Roy and Mick as much as their supporters, well, they’re less optimistic.
“I don’t know how far the power of film extends! This is real people’s lives – the ball is in their court.”
