Any indie kid who loves musicals knows who John Carney is. Whether it’s from his 2016 coming-of-age, ’80s-set teen musical Sing Street, the emotional ballad ‘Lost Stars’ from Begin Again, or the low-budget, dreamy love story Once, Carney’s films are essential to those who love their screen experiences soaked in tunes. With his musical collaborator Gary Clark, he seems able to effortlessly write and direct humans who are lost in the world and ultimately come together through song. And so it is with Flora and Son, his new, Covid-era love story, which shows the emotional power that can come from just Zoom and a guitar. 

Flora and Son is centered by a captivating performance from Eve Hewson as the title character, a single mother raising her rebellious teenage son, Max (newcomer Orén Kinlan). After playing the best brother to ever exist in Sing Street, Jack Reynor reunites with Carney to play Flora’s ex-husband, Ian. Whilst trying to find Max a hobby, Flora takes up guitar lessons. Only thing is, these lessons are remote; taught by none other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jeff, an attractive music teacher from Topanga Canyon. 

“Where do I sign up to get guitar lessons from Joseph Gordon-Levitt?” asks Letterboxd member Tyler, quite reasonably. Jmoney19 writes that Flora and Son is “an old-school, old-fashioned and beautiful telling of a long-distance romance, but not without something new to say on kinships built in the digital age.” Sameen swoons: “John Carney has once again made me believe in love (I wept like a baby)!”

Carney’s films tend to bring out big feelings among film lovers. Sean Kernan says the director “has the keys to my heart. I have never felt as much emotional kinship to a filmmaker.” Sing Street, in particular, shows up in the four favorites of more than 6,000 Letterboxd members, and is consistently included in lists like Hungkat’s “When you’re young, vibrant, and lost in this world” and Bel’s “For when you want to feel something”.

Having the chance to chat with Carney and not including our community in the conversation felt wrong, so, we invited your questions and selected a few to put to him (due to time limitations!). Many of you were concerned about whether Raphina and Cosmo actually made it to London, so we start at Dalkey, with a small boat headed out to sea. 

That’s as far as I know. So let’s just say: they’re definitely in London and their paths cross. Cosmo’s in a band. She’s trying to work as a model and together they find a way to bring their two art forms together to create something beautiful.

People will love that. Do you have any insights into what makes a film so watchable? It’s like an album where you can listen to it over and over and you know what’s coming, but you notice different things every listen.
I think you’re a hundred percent right. The movies I used to watch over and over when I was young were musical films, because you can. You don’t need to watch them continuously. You can have your favorite parts and the music works as a whole extra element for the film. I used to fast-forward and rewind over scenes of Singin’ in the Rain and Guys and Dolls and these great musicals I loved. I consider my films to be visual albums, so what you say completely connects with that idea that you can skip back and forth. You can have favorite tracks and favorite scenes. They don’t need to be watched as a whole and they are very repurposable. They’re not relying so much on story and plot, but more on tone and romance—that’s very watchable.

A scene I rewatch a lot in one of your movies is the one in Sing Street where Brendan and Cosmo are sitting on the stairs watching their mom outside and the sun’s coming in. It’s so beautiful.
My mother used to do exactly that, I lifted that image from real life. She worked really hard, so she would only get a little bit of sun in the evening and she’d drive across town in Dublin. Our house was facing west at the back, so the sun comes up in the east, goes down in the west. The sun would be coming down over the trees and she’d get ten minutes. If I was sitting there, you could see the sun moving off her body. She’d try and get as much sun in those last five or ten minutes of the evening, having worked a long day at work. I’m glad that image resonated with you.

I love that personal element of it. What’s a film that you’re happy to rewatch again and again?
I have two small kids, so I don’t get the chance to watch anything anymore. It’s Paw Patrol. But definitely musicals, I think An American in Paris—the Gene Kelly movie—I watched on VHS until the tape almost shredded and the tape was dust.

I’m very preoccupied with that idea of trying to connect the strong things about my Irishness to the mainland of Europe or across to America and trying to relate to that in some way, but to also use my Irishness and the geographical facts of where you grew up to my advantage and in terms of storytelling.

In quarantine, a lot of people were starting or having to continue relationships over FaceTime and Zoom, much like myself, which brings us to Flora and Son. I’d like to hear about how you developed the relationship between Flora and Jeff and whether their story was inspired by these Covid-era tales of love and longing.
Of course. The only productive thing that came from the Covid thing for me was the permission to write about Zoom. That was a stumbling block in the movie because I didn’t think people could relate to it before the pandemic, to online guitar lessons. I thought it was too niche. Then the pandemic happened, and of course everybody was suddenly Zooming and talking and it had a very peculiar effect on people.

On one hand you’re grateful for it, because you can see your loved ones or a guy or a girl you met before the pandemic and you’re really into—at least you can continue something with them. But actually in a way you wish you didn’t have it. Sometimes it’s better to wait and not get this screen image of somebody.

I’m not sure of the effect that’s going to have on us in the long run. It would cut us off a little bit from our feelings and touch. When somebody’s in a room, it’s so different. It was weird because it gave me permission to finish the film because people now know the exact rules of Zoom, how it makes you feel. We do it every day, so we know how to manage these different relationships online.

Now you can email it to everyone.
I don’t know whether it’s good or bad, but it will definitely change and shape the art that we make for sure.

Letterboxd member AnnaNappi comments that, “Your films often have an authentic, raw energy, unafraid of approaching the more human and complicated side of behavior, and that really shines in Flora. Can you speak to how you find that balance between likable and messy or controversial?”
I think that’s what appealed to Eve, was to try and really mix that up and really push it and see how far she could take the character and then redeem her and bring her back. There’s so much judgment of people nowadays. There are so many people judging mothers in cafés because the child is screaming or a father is with his kid and the father’s giving out to the kid and we’re like, ‘Oh.’ It’s so much outrage, faux-outrage at the way people are behaving and so little sympathy for what other people might be going through.

The internet can often feed that. Sometimes when we’re out in the street and we look at people, we’re so shocked by things and this fake shock at somebody screaming at their kid or arguing or looking a bit worse for wear has people filming and putting them online. It’s so mean and holier than thou. Both of us wanted to have Flora be a problematic, difficult, messy character that was hard to like sometimes, but who did have insight.

If you saw her on the street, you could very easily write her off as an angry bitch or drunk. She is and she does have a lot of those problems, but then she’s unregulated and extreme, which is a bit like my mother, actually—not that those characters are similar at all. But there are two big things you see her do on a street: scream at a cyclist who almost runs her over really aggressively; hug her son suddenly in a moment of reflection and guilt about the past and fear of the future. She has an animal reaction to take him in and shelter him.

You don’t really normally see those two things together. I’m not casting any judgment on either act. I’m not saying she’s good or bad, I’m just saying she is, she’s alive. 

This brings us to other common themes in Letterboxd member questions, which is the use of music in your movies. I’ve pulled out a few as examples. Hannah Mark asks: “When a movie is taking shape, what comes first? The music, the characters that are making the music, or the storyline?”
It’s a mix between the storyline and the characters. You have to have that right first, and then the music comes in, after you know your characters and the world they live in. For example, I really want to make a film with disco music in it, but because that’s my first thought, I’m struggling finding the characters—it’s the wrong order.

For years, myself and Gary [Clark] and a few others have been like, ‘I really want to make a disco film where the main sound is four-on-the-floor and strings and Chic and Sister Sledge and the celebration of dancing and of movement.’ But you can’t begin saying, ‘Oh, I want to do something about jazz, something about funk.’ For me it has to be, ‘I’ve got these characters and this story I’m interested to tell,’ and then from that, they tell you what music they will be playing.

Is it because it feels like you’re forcing the story in a way?
Exactly, or not even the story, but now I’m just making a musical. I’m latching the characters onto the songs as opposed to latching the songs onto my characters.

Bryn wants to know how you approach producing songs which have to be believable as undeniable hits in the story, while still allowing them to stand as individual pieces of organic risk-taking art.
That’s exactly right, and it’s very observant to point that out. They can’t be a Joni Mitchell song. Our character is going to know eight or nine chords at this stage. Jeff is not a successful singer-songwriter. Max is experimenting with beats on his laptop. It’s going to be an unusual sound. It’s going to be simple, not too complex and convoluted. It’s not going to have huge amounts of changes because they’re not natural songwriters. They’re learning and they’re expressing themselves.

I don’t want to undermine the songs. We wrote these songs from the point of view of the limitations the characters have, so the most important thing was that the audience feel that the songs are coming from the characters with all their messiness, limitations, talents and voicings. We weren’t looking for hit songs. We were looking for beautiful songs these three characters could plausibly create.

Our tools were limited. We stuck to three or four chords. We lyrically spoke in what we thought was the language of the characters, and out of that we created these songs, but they were the rules of how we could create these songs.

He’s great in Oppenheimer. Lastly, can you tell us anything about your next film, Fascinating Rhythm?
That’s not necessarily going to be my next film, but I always have three or four things in my desk drawer. Every time I release a film, or Modern Love—the TV show from a couple of years ago—when you get reviews and you put a film out there, you’ve usually worked for two or three years quietly away on your own or with actors, you don’t know what it is you’ve got. You put it out in the world and you see yourself, a bit like the thing we were talking about in Ireland, actually. You step out of yourself, you look back and you’re like, ‘Oh’. This other sense of yourself starts to tell you what you should do next, and it’s important to be flexible with that.

I found if you have two or three things, you feel like, ‘That’s interesting. That’s what people want. Maybe I’ll surprise them, or maybe I shouldn’t just keep doing the same thing. Maybe I should do this.’ You have to pull back and see where you are on the timeline of your career. I never just have one thing that I’m doing, no matter what. So I have a couple of things, but they all have a musical dimension to them.