On Movies | Gritty realism meets the musical in 'Once'

Irishman

John Carney's

funky little musical

Once

begins with its star -

Glen Hansard

, lead singer of the band the Frames - singing and strumming his guitar on a Dublin sidewalk. His character is a busker, making a living from the coins and bills tossed by passers-by into his open, beseeching guitar case.

Then a twitchy, strung-out guy comes along, hovers nervously, and grabs the case - and its loot. The thief makes a run for it.

"We shot those busking scenes from across the street, the camera was 30 feet away," says Hansard. "And the scene where the guy steals my money, people would be walking, and they didn't know that that was being filmed, so the guy got chased - and he got kicked - by people who thought he was genuinely robbing this busker."

That scene - overzealous citizens doing a bit of vigilante justice at a Dublin intersection - isn't in the film, but it could have been. Shot in 17 days on the fly, with camcorders and a meager budget of $130,000, Once, which opens Friday, brings digital, documentary-like realism to that time-honored Hollywood genre, the movie musical.

"The idea was to try to imagine how George Cukor would make a musical now, if he had a camcorder," says writer-director Carney, referring to the Hollywood legend of My Fair Lady fame. "How would he do it? And maybe he wouldn't do it a million miles away from the way we did."

Carney, 34, has been working in TV and films since the mid-'90s, and he's a big fan of old-school song-and-dance cinema. But for Once, he wanted to try something new, incorporating songs by Hansard - and by leading lady Marketa Irglova - into the fabric of the story. The action doesn't stop for a big production number. In fact, there are no production numbers. And because the two leads are portraying musicians who write and sing, there are many scenes where they simply - well, write and sing.

"I think that anybody watching this film will probably say that the director hates traditional musicals," says Carney. "Actually, I love musicals. I love Guys and Dolls, I love Singin' in the Rain. . . . I think A Star Is Born with Judy Garland is a fantastic film. Great music, great songs.

But he had no specific template, or reference points, for Once. He wanted it to be different.

"I just ended up looking at the rushes and thinking well, the really good thing about this film is that it looks like nothing I've ever seen," he says. "And that I'm going to trust - I'm going to go out and try to get the same thing tomorrow as well. And I'm going to stop the actors if I ever recognize anything."

Although Once is only now rolling out across the country, it's already a success story. Financed by the Irish Film Board under their "micro-budget" program, the film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it went on to win the Audience Award and nab a tidy distribution deal with Fox Searchlight. It was one of the big hits at the recent Philadelphia Film Festival, too.

And last weekend, playing in just two theaters - one in New York, one in L.A. - Carney's movie had the highest per-screen average of any title in release, beating out even that great green ogre in Shrek 3. (Of course, Shrek 3 was in more than 4,000 theaters, so it earned a tad more than Once. But then Shrek 3 cost a tad more, too.)

Carney and Hansard, both Dubliners, have known each other since their teens. In fact, for the first few years of the Frames' existence, Carney was the group's bassist. (The band is still going strong, with a new album, The Cost, released in February.) Then he left to do TV and films. His 2001 thriller, On the Edge, starred Stephen Rea (no relation) and Cillian Murphy. In fact, Murphy, of 28 Days Later. . ., Batman Begins, and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, was Carney's first choice for the lead in Once.

"That didn't work out for various reasons," says the director, in town recently with Hansard and Irglova. "Cillian's on an upward trajectory, and he has to be careful about the choices he makes.

"But at the end of the day, it was better that Glen played that role. It would have been a different film, and there would have been different expectations. We probably would have got offered [more] money to make it if we had Cillian in it, and I think I probably would've taken it, and therefore wouldn't have the same kind of control that I had with these jokers," he says, gesturing across the table to Hansard and Irglova.

And as for the two leads, their onscreen chemistry - low-key but lovely - doesn't seem to have required much in the way of hard-fought thespian-izing. The Frames' front man, 36, met Irglova, now 19, in a small Czech Republic town where her father was promoting the Irish band's concert. The duo have since toured together, and recorded an album, The Swell Season. Some of those songs show up in Once.

"We're not actors," says Irglova, commenting on the loose, improv-y relationship the pair project on camera. "We don't have that kind of confidence that actors might have. We were just hoping that we were doing it right."

Eternal Malkovich Adaptation guy. Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is about to make his directing debut. Title: Synecdoche, New York. Cast: Hope Davis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tilda Swinton, Michelle Williams. Plot: a theater director (Hoffman) faces crises over his work and his women, reality gets skewed, art and life are dissected in surreal ways.

Definition of synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is used to describe the whole, or the whole is used to describe a part (i.e., "boards" for "stage," or "society" for "high society"). Sidney Kimmel Entertainment is producing. Shooting starts in a few weeks.