As a solo artist and as frontman for The Frames, Dublin native Glen Hansard has been in the music business since he was a teenager, but he only dabbled in cinema once, in 1991's The Commitments. Not liking the attention that came with film fame, he avoided cinema projects until 2006, when former Frames member John Carney asked him to write the songs for a low-key love story—and then star in it, when planned star Cillian Murphy dropped out. Made on a shoestring, Once became a critics' darling and a surprise arthouse hit. It's a raw, tender love story in which Hansard plays a character much like himself: a Dublin street musician singing his own songs, and collaborating, sometimes painfully, with real-life partner Markéta Irglová. To commemorate the film's DVD release, Hansard spoke to The A.V. Club about guerilla filmmaking, how stardom steals the soul, and sneaking in the back door at Sundance.
The A.V. Club: How did you and Markéta originally meet? How did you start collaborating musically?
Glen Hansard: We first collaborated some five, six years ago—I was making some home recordings. I know Mar's father, he's a friend of mine. And he invited me to stay over at their house to write some songs. I went over and stayed two or three weeks there, and made a bunch of home recordings. And because Mar played piano, we got her to jam along—which was kinda weird for her, because, though she's a really good pianist, she only ever did music that she read. But I got her to play through these tunes, I got her to sort of jam along. And I remember, she was listening to one of these tunes and she was like, "Glen, what you're singing about here, did this really happen to you?" And I was like, "Well, sort of. Poetic license, it didn't happen exactly—" "So this didn't happen to you." "Well, it did, but not exactly—" "So did it happen to you, or not?" "Well, it did, but… well… No." [Laughs.] "So why are you saying it did?" "Well, I was just trying to make a point, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit maybe, but…" And I remember at that point realizing that this girl was fucking brilliant—she was totally questioning what I was doing, but what was wonderful was that she was listening. I mean, the guys in my band, they know me very well, but they still don't know what some of these songs refer to. But she was actually listening to what I was saying, and she was kind of challenging me on it. And then I listened to some of her songs, and I thought, "This girl, she knows what she's on about."
AVC: Is your songwriting collaboration usually that contentious?
GH: Yeah, it is. It's definitely 50 percent argument and 50 percent cooperation. Like anything—you sit around and you come up with ideas, and then it's like "This is fucking bullshit, why don't you do it this way?" And then "That's brilliant, you're brilliant." If you're going to have an artistic partner, it needs to be someone you can absolutely strip. You know what I mean? [Laughs.] I don't mean literally, but you need to be able to strip them down and be very straight with them.
AVC: You worked as a busker for years, and you play a busker in the film. What did you learn from busking that you wouldn't have learned by just being a studio or concert musician?
GH: Everything. Well, everything about singing, I learned from busking. Everything I learned about songwriting, I learned from busking. The one thing I didn't learn about was mic technique, which is no big deal—you can learn that in half an hour. Busking, you learn people, you learn about reading people. You learn about reading the atmosphere of the street. If you stand still in any city long enough, you see everyone pass you by. So you're in Chicago. If you stand on the corner of Belmont and Clark, and you do that for three years, you'll pretty much have seen everybody in Chicago pass that junction. As a busker, it's like you're like a lamppost, you're part of the architecture. And so you see everybody, you get to read how people are. You get to know who the pickpockets are, you get to know who the whores are, you get to know the drug squad, the undercover cops. You suss it all out. You just develop this radar for how things are gonna be—you know the person who is going to give you money, and you know the person who isn't, and you know the person who'd never give you a fucking penny if you were dying. It's almost like you get to know personality types, just by watching people walk past. You get a sense for things.
AVC: The street scenes in Once were shot live on the street with real passers-by who didn't know you were filming. Did that make things awkward or self-conscious?
GH: Well, as a busker, you have to show it off. As a busker, one thing that does not work is self-consciousness. A busker needs to be working. A busker needs to shed all ego and get down to work. Play your songs, play them well, earn your money, and don't get in people's way. Basically, you're panhandling. You're begging, that's how it's viewed. In Irish law, busking is considered vagrancy—you can be arrested for it. It's risky asking people for money in public. So it's not like it's a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money.
So when we were filming the movie, we ran into some trouble, because my band is fairly well known in Ireland. So people thought, "Ooh, what's he doing out here?" At the same time, because I was a busker for so long, I knew how to disregard any attention that I was getting. It did make it difficult to shoot, though. John [Carney] had to hide the cameras across the street in a doorway, because if you put a guy on the street and stick a camera in front of him, people will wonder, "Who's he?" Whereas if you take the camera away, all they see is a busker.
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