A Romeo and Juliet-type romance set in Northern Ireland about a Protestant girl in love with a Catholic boy, This is the Sea (1997) was adapted by writer-director Mary McGuckian from her own play, Hazel. It was 32-year-old McGuckian’s second feature film, and while it did not receive a theatrical American release apart from film festivals, it is also known as the feature film debut of actress Samantha Morton. Morton would go on to become a household name, earning Oscar nominations for her performances in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and Jim Sheridan’s In America (2002), and starring in major Hollywood films. Her co-star, Ross McDade, was also a newcomer but never made another movie. Lending support are veterans Richard Harris, Gabriel Byrne, and John Lynch, with McGuckian herself also taking a small role. The film’s title is drawn from the title song of a 1985 album by the Irish folk band The Waterboys, whose music permeates the movie. Variety gave the film a positive review, noting that “McGuckian has a firm sense of place and time (Northern Ireland after the 1994 cease-fire) but concentrates on individual characters rather than converting them into walking symbols... [She] easily handles shifts of mood from comic to tragic, deftly avoiding situations that have turned into cliches from overuse.” In a 2019 interview, McGuckian described herself as “a writer fundamentally. Except now I write with pictures in the edit as well as with words. My first love was poetry, then plays, and eventually when I figured out that it was impossible to earn a living writing for poetry reviews and theater, I studied acting as a day -- or rather night -- job. Acting is almost as precarious a profession, and when I started, roles for women over 25 with any agency were few and far between, so I supplemented my income writing screenplays and treatments... There is no such thing as being too close to the material. It is simply not possible to do the best by your movie without an intimate knowledge of the script and resulting rushes... You know the material better than anyone. You know how it was intended to be assembled down to the last frame. Every nuance of every performance in every take, every slight shift of the camera, the energy and pace of every shot, as well as the overall narrative scope and tone of the film.”
by Jeremy Arnold
