Interview by Brad Balfour
In 2015, Irish writer/director/producer Mary McGuckian did an incredibly difficult thing by making The Price Of Desire — her politically charged yet romantic film about architect Eileen Gray. The seasoned filmmaker threw a spotlight on this once unsung creator, who is now getting props in both Irish history and architectural circles.
Gray had been long forgotten, even though her innovative work contributed to the development of a modern vision of cities and use of space.
In a touching and poetic way, McGuckian illustrates how the bi-sexual Gray provoked and pushed to get her work done among the rich Parisian artistic community of the 1920s. She managed to have her visionary house built in 1929, but was thwarted in being recognized for her elegant masterpiece, e1027, the Cote d’Azur-based villa, now seen as one of the most influential 20th-century works of modern architecture. The house plays a crucial role in the film and is an ideal visual metaphor for the attitudes that condemned her legacy to nearly a century of neglect.
The prickly, strong willed artist’s career had been obscured by the insidious chauvinism of Le Corbusier (Vincent Perez) — the egotistical “Father of Modernism” — and Jean Badovici (Francesco Scianna), her lover, and his co-conspiratorial friend.
Finally she’s getting recognized as one of the top influential designers and architects of the modern era. Today, her reputation has been rightfully restored, and the film uses unique cinematic devices to highlight her essential aesthetic.
To bring Gray alive, it took a masterful actor like Orla Brady to pull it off. The Price Of Desire brings to light not only gender discrimination of the day, but also the grit and determination that Gray had to have to work around it as much as she could.
The Dublin-born Brady has been nominated for several awards from the Irish Film & Television Academy as well as starring in A Love Divided for which she won the 1999 Golden Nymph Best Actress Award. Her career began by touring with the Balloonatics Theatre Company; later she was cast in a minor TV role in 1993. In ’94, Brady got her first film part; over the years she has worked with McGuckian and other indie films, but lately she’s landed roles (some recurring) in a number of genre US and UK series such as Fringe and American Horror Story as well as being in a Doctor Who special. And most recently she was in Star Trek: Picard.
Though this film hit festivals in 2016, it has found a new distributor to bring to audiences digitally. And that prompted Brady to talk about making the film and other concerns.
Q: How much do you recall the experience of making the film and the issues it addressed?
OB: It’s not so much that my view has changed, [but that] the world has changed around me. And we are now in much the same way assessing all sorts of things in relation to race relations in America and elsewhere.
We have spent a few years reassessing how we have rather dismissed the contribution of women in the past and [Eileen Gray’s] is a case in point. When I first learned the story of Eileen Gray, I knew almost nothing about her. I had heard her name, very fleetingly, but I didn’t know what her contribution was. It was buried, it was a story that was not told. My fascination with it hasn’t changed. It’s more that the world around us has changed in relation to a story like hers. Now she would be seen as an essential part of design history, and indeed Irish history, if you like, and women’s history. Whereas at the time, that was just emerging.
Q: How was it the making of the film, and learning about the character?
QB: One of the things I very much admire about Mary is she is a very determined finder of these stories and is very determined to tell them in a compelling way.
My memory of doing it is that there was a lovely intensity to playing somebody who was as passionate as she was and that [I] also had a certain sense of responsibility because she existed, she wasn’t fiction.
Q: We are hearing a lot more now about Irish women writers and poets, women artists.
OB: Women writers had to be very heavily championed recently by people at Connect Leeson who hosted the book show and who promoted women writers tirelessly in a way that was very encouraging. It’s made a huge difference. So that there’s a confidence now amongst women who are artists that wasn’t there before. There is a paradigm shift, it has happened, and we’re not going back.
Eileen was recognized to an extent, to a small group of people who knew quality when they saw it, in terms of her visibility in the world. She didn’t have it in the way Corbusier did. And I rather like that we with this film have a little part in bringing her out of the shadows and into a bit of a spotlight, because she deserves it.
She really was wonderful, and she never shouted about it. She thought her work was enough. She put her work there and she walked away back into the shadows. She wasn’t interested in self-promotion.
Q: Unlike with “Gray Matters” the documentary about her made by Marco Orsini, you had to create who she was and how she dealt with the frustrations of her day, Corbusier, etc.
OB: It’s quite hard with her. Eileen was intensely private and she burned a lot of her stuff. I’m insanely curious: what was there, what would we have learned? Of course it was her right to take her total feelings to her grave with her, but yes, you would want to know. One has to extrapolate from what we do know.
The role of drama is to come in and try to understand from the snippets of what she did write and what she did leave, and what people said about her — her feelings, her passions.
Clearly she loved this man, and clearly this iconic house was built for him and to celebrate them and be a place for them and their love. She gave it to him. Clearly, to me at least, it was not reciprocated. It was rather used, I think, on [his] part.
When you see the house and when you see what he did with those paintings, it seems frenzied. It seems it required him to understand as a designer, especially someone like him, who was working in a similar area in that kind of pared down aesthetic. For somebody to come in and graffiti these sexual images on the wall — there was something very, very intensely interested in a dreadful way in covering her work up.
It was more that I was trying to stay in the place of, not understanding, [but] to experience that [sensation] that can happen to one in life when people clearly go against you and you don’t know why. And of course it isn’t about you, it can often be about their own insecurities. And I think that’s what was happening there. I think she worked away and tried not to involve herself in the personal. She sort of tried to stay away and above it. But it’s very clearly there to me.
Q: I wonder what she would think about this film and her story?
OB: These people couldn’t have known at the time how we would view them historically, and how they would even be seen as a movement, in a way. They weren’t. They were just acquaintances in Paris.
Even if you’re playing somebody who is already famous — which she wasn’t — [the character is] your own self with your own petty problems. No one sees themselves primarily as how they appear to the world.
You’ve had quite a bit of success with Television; at this point, do you choose any of your jobs or just take what comes?
OB: I think unless you’re unlucky or you’re extraordinarily lucky and a big star, most people have suggestions made all the time to them. The only power you have is to gently bat away the things that you aren’t interested in the story, or don’t think you’re right for, or whatever. And to look more closely at the things you are interested in. So it was a lucky surprise, to do Dr Who and Fringe and Picard, so I’ve become a little part of Star Trek universe.
Something that I couldn’t have foreseen in the past few years is the science fiction element. It’s a whole new element. If you had said ten years ago “What would you think about being in Star Trek?” I think I’d go “Me? No no no, they don’t want me, and what would I do?” But it turns out that there are very layered roles and stories that can be told within the realm of science fiction. So it’s become very very interesting to me, and I rather enjoy it.
It’s delightful, because one of the glorious things about this job is it takes you to surprising places that you would just never have considered yourself. And that’s a good thing. Isn’t it?
Since this film and the issues it addresses are coming out at this contentious time, what do you think about these issues of racism and Ireland’s own reaction.
OB: We have our own emerging issues with our own attitude to race which we never had to confront before because Ireland was quite Catholic about it. Now we have to confront it and understand our marginalization of Travelers, that was our internal racism. And now we do have an open system where people are coming to our country to live and be and are Irish, and there are people of all ethnicities.