Third Time's Just as Charming: John Carney & Cast Talk About Following 'Once' and 'Begin Again' With 'Sing Street'

Jack Reynor, Mark McKenna, Lucy Boynton, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, and John Carney (Deadline)

Once. Begin Again. And now, Sing Street.

John Carney’s trio of heart-warming, toe-tapping, critically acclaimed indie musicals are not narratively intertwined, but that hasn’t stopped the young cast of his latest, Sing Street, from attempting to connect the dots in ways usually reserved for Disney or Marvel mythologies.

In his 2007 breakout hit, Once, the Irish writer-director followed the ill-fated pairing of a Dublin street musician (Glen Hansard) and Czech immigrant (Markéta Irglová). His 2014 follow-up, Begin Again, hopped the pond and landed in Manhattan, where a lovelorn Brit (Keira Knightley) inspired a has-been record exec (Mark Ruffalo), and vice versa. Now in Sing Street, a bullied Dublin teen (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) starts a band to get the girl (Lucy Boynton).

The Sing Street Band in ‘Sing Street’ (Weinstein Co.)

“We came up with a story to connect the three films,” said Walsh-Peelo, who plays Sing Street’s lead Conor, over brunch with Yahoo Movies last week in West Hollywood, where he was joined by Carney and co-stars Boynton, Jack Reynor, and Mark McKenna. Along with costar McKenna, “We decided that Glen [from Once] is Conor grown up,” Walsh-Peelo explained. “And the connection with Begin Again is that Percy Chamburuka [who plays Ngig, an African immigrant living in Dublin whom Conor and company recruit simply because he’s black], he becomes Cee-Lo Green [who plays himself in Begin Again, thus making for a little bit of stretch].”

Carney admitted the three films function nicely as companion pieces, even if his young stars’ theories are pure fantasy. “Not that I intended to do that from the beginning, but they definitely are. You couldn’t not see that, in a sense,” said the filmmaker.

The films also have each helped shape the next. “They do actually inform each other,” Carney continued. “Begin Again was a little bit about the reaction and the kind of fame that we all found from Once, in a weird way, which was unexpected — or the fame that the film found, really, not me. I can still walk around town 365 days without anybody ever recognizing me. Except South Koreans, who recognize me.”

Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová in ‘Once’ (Fox Searchlight)

Shot on a shoestring budget for an estimated $200,000, the bittersweet romance Once premiered to loud cheers at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and earned nearly $10 million at the U.S. box office. Stars Hansard and Irglová, who had become a couple in real-life, became the toast of the Oscars in 2008 for their poignant performance of and acceptance speech for Best Original Song winner, “Falling Slowly.” The film also spawned a hit Broadway play.

With a budget of $8 million, Begin Again was shot for roughly 40 times the price tag of its predecessor. While it took place under the bright lights of the big city, had a glossier production design, and featured marquee stars Ruffalo and Knightley along with a strong supporting cast that included Adam Levine and James Corden, it maintained the same soulful feel of Once and explored similar themes of love, music, and loneliness.

Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo in ‘Begin Again’ (Weinstein Co.)

“And then Sing Street was a reaction to that,” Carney said. “It was sort of the Keira Knightley reaction. I’m going to go back and work with actors — no movie stars in this movie. It was about the work, and about discovery and character everyday, sort of going back to my roots a little bit.”

The budget of Sing Street is unknown, but it’s likelier closer to Once than Begin Again — and Carney acknowledged that’s not what the town he’s visiting for the new movie’s U.S. opening expects from filmmakers. “Americans like that upward [movement], like everything has to be bigger. It’s called capitalism, basically,” he said.

“I don’t really buy into that. I think you should do what appeals to you next. And never mind how that looks or how that fits into your career or concept of yourself. So it was nice to go back to Ireland to make a film with my mates. But I don’t see that as brave, as some people have said.”

Those mates included Reynor, who may not fit the “no movie star” mandate Carney attempted with Sing Street. The 24-year-old from Ireland’s County Wicklow, who plays Conor’s musical knowledge-dropping and slackerish older brother, Brendan, is most recognizable to American audiences as Shane Dyson in the 2014 hit Transformers: Age of Extinction. But he’s also currently on the shortlist of actors being considered to play a young Han Solo in a buzzed-about Star Wars spin-off.

Reynor’s relationship with Carney extends back several years. Carney was part of a Dublin filmmaking collective called The Factory, along with Lance Daly and Kristen Sheridan, who directed Reynor in his first major feature film, Dollhouse. “And for the next two or three years I spent all my time in The Factory and cut my teeth there,” Reynor said. Hollywood came calling, but he was happy to return home. “I was like, ‘Brilliant, this’ll be great, to go back and hang out with friends and get back into that headspace again.’ And that’s exactly what that was.” (Though as Carney joked, “Jack Reynor was just a bet I had with a friend of mine, that I could get a performance out of him in the movie. They said I couldn’t.”)

Boynton came into the picture to play Raphina, the older teenager and aspiring model living in a girl’s home who inspires Conor to make a music video to woo her, by submitting a tape of her in character. “It’s kind of something that I used to absolutely loathe doing,” said the London native, who nails the Irish accent in Sing Street. “But it’s something that I look forward to now. It’s sending the message that this is the best I could do as this character, this is how I would play it. Whereas in the room, the nerves can get the best of you, or the person reading against you can change the performance you want to give.”

Watch a clip from ‘Sing Street’:

To find Sing Street’s titular band, Carney and company held an open casting call that attracted hundreds of teenage boys from around Ireland. Included in that queue were Walsh-Peelo, who was especially excited to try out for the director since he had a musical background and his family watched Once together every year, and McKenna, who agreed to audition only after a friend offered up a free ride.

“Loads of guys my age were going out for this,” Walsh-Peelo remembered. “It was kind of like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the golden ticket. It’s like, 'One of us is going to get it. Who’s it going to be?’” McKenna, who plays Eamon, the old soul among the young group, waited over two hours in line. “I finally got in to do it, there was a two-minute-long audition, and then I left,” he said. “And I was like, 'That was a complete waste of time.’” By the time McKenna got home, though, there was already an email from the film’s producers inviting him to the next round.

“I don’t know if I would do that again,” Carney said of the process, admitting he didn’t like the “X-Factor” aspect of judging teens to their faces. “It causes me a little bit of anxiety and concern… There’s only four parts in this film, and there’s 400 people standing in line. That’s a lot of people going home saying, John Carney promised me something, then took it away.”

Reynor and Walsh-Peelo in ‘Sing Street’ (Weinstein Co.)

Carney said Sing Street, which he dedicates “to brothers everywhere,” includes lots of actual events from his own life, though “the results are things I made up.” Still, he doesn’t consider it his most personal film.

“I’d say Once is a bit more personal to me, actually,” he explained. “ Once described my feeling of melancholia and sadness and all that stuff. This is definitely a story about the optimism of youth, and that strange sort of sense that kids have where they don’t know any better.”

And of course it was that sort of blind optimism that had hundreds of Irish lads lining up down the street and around the block to be in John Carney’s Sing Street.

Sing Street is now in select theaters. Watch the trailer: