The Miracle Club is brought to screen by the filmmaker, Thaddeus O’Sullivan. The ideal director to bring us a vision of Ireland in the 60s with characters pinning their hope on a miracle.

The Synopsis 

Set in 1967, THE MIRACLE CLUB is a heartwarming film that follows the story of three generations of close friends, Lily (Maggie Smith, “Downton Abbey”), Eileen (Kathy Bates, “Titanic”), and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey, “Longbourn”) of Ballygar, a hard-knocks community in Dublin, who have one tantalizing dream: to win a pilgrimage to the sacred French town of Lourdes, that place of miracles that draws millions of visitors each year.  When the chance to win presents itself, the women seize it. However, just before their trip, their old friend Chrissie (Laura Linney, “Ozark”) arrives in Ballygar for her Mother’s funeral, dampening their good mood and well-laid plans. The women secure tickets and set out on the journey that they hope will change their lives, with Chrissie joining in place of her mother. The glamor and sophistication of Chrissie, who has just returned from a nearly 40-year exile in the United States, are not her only difficult traits. Old wounds are reopened along the way, forcing the women to confront their pasts even as they travel in search of a miracle. Deep wounds from the past can only be healed by the curative power of love and friendship.

Nancy Tapia: Hi. How are you?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Hi, very well, thank you. How are you?

Nancy Tapia: I’m doing great. I loved The Miracle Club. One of the characters couldn’t explain it better, and I loved the line, “You come for strength when there is no miracle.”

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Yes, the strength to go on when there is no miracle. Yeah.

Nancy Tapia: That’s brilliant. I understand you are from Ireland, so I’m wondering if the films kind of took you back to the roots of your childhood growing up?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Quite a lot of it does. I left Ireland to live in London around about that period, the mid-’60s. So I was interested to set it there. It’s the Ireland I know, I guess, up to that point. The Ireland after that, I’ve known secondhand. But that particular period and I guess the ’50s as well was clear in my mind. Having lived in that period, I thought it was a good period to set it in so I knew what I was talking about, so to speak. It did remind me a lot of, I came from a similar background, so design and language and all the elements that go to make up a world, I was reasonably familiar with. So in that sense, I was on familiar territory, and it was, I wouldn’t say nostalgic to go back there, so to speak, but it was refreshing to look at it again, especially through the eyes of the women.

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Nancy Tapia: Now, it’s a phenomenal cast. So how much fun did you have in the casting part of these strong personalities?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Fun in casting them?

Nancy Tapia: Yes.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: We had fun shooting the film. I wouldn’t say it was fun casting them. When I came on board, Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates had already been interested in the project in any case. So I met and spoke to them, and we got on very well. So in that sense, the casting was a good experience, and they were happy to make the film with me. Laura came on later. When I was in the pre-production, we cast Laura (Laura Linney, “Ozark”), and we had many conversations on the phone before she got involved, and that was good fun. When we came to shoot, of course, working with the three of those and with Agnes O’Casey, the younger actor who plays “Dolly”, was a pretty interesting experience, to say the least. Working with people with that experience and with that talent was pretty amazing. I’ve worked with a lot of actors over the years, but nothing quite matched this experience.

Nancy Tapia: You mentioned Agnes, who plays “Dolly”, and she was like that little ray of sunshine among the group. I enjoyed the entire cast, but I feel like she had that special personality, that charisma that did help in some of the tense scenes. 

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Well, she certainly is a ray of sunshine in the sense that she’s very expressive. She embodied the character totally and was full of hope for her child. And then that was very inspiring, I think, in the way that she experienced and expressed that. She was a great contrast to the others in so much as she was younger, obviously, but she also represented another period in one sense, but not in another. She’s actually quite old-fashioned in one way, which was important, really, because she’s grown up with some old-fashioned ideas about parenthood. Oddly, it was the older woman who had to put her straight on some fantasies that she had about giving birth. So she was very interesting in that sense and in the sense that, as you say, I think what you mean is that she was… I’m not quite sure what you mean because the others are very funny as well. Did you mean that she’s a ray of sunshine and that she was more amusing or…

Nancy Tapia: Yes, they were amusing, too, but they were living through the past that she was not a  part of.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: No, her story was different. And of course it does sort of join up, I guess, in the sense that she was feeling very guilty about the past and about the things that she had done. And of course, they all had that common issue they were dealing with, a guilt from acts of the past. Consequences of the past, really, are the driving force of the film, and they all had that in common, I think, including the Agnes character. She was a nice foil for them. As you say, she was outside their group, if you like, to some degree. And it made her seem actually lonelier in a way until eventually she speaks through to the past and finally reveals what has been bothering her, and the women are able to talk to her on her level and brings them together in that last act.

Nancy Tapia: Yes, yes. That was a touching scene.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: It was. Yeah.

Nancy Tapia: Can you talk about the visit to Lourdes? That was fascinating. I was super excited to see that part of the film. I’m Catholic myself, so I grew up living with the faith of our ladies as a Catholic. What was the experience in bringing those scenes to the screen?

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Well, Lourdes is a huge, very important in the story. It’s a place of pilgrimage for Catholics, of course, for many people around the world. Pilgrimage is a major part of the Catholic experience. Certainly growing up in Ireland, growing on pilgrimage was a big issue. We were always heading off, well, not always, but there was once or twice a year, we would get into the family car and head off to some sacred site or other. It was considered the thing to do and so Lourdes was in the conversation a lot. I never went, but my mother and father went when I was very young, and they weren’t alone. There were a lot of people in the street who would’ve gone to Lourdes, talked about it and brought back souvenirs, their bottles of water and all that. So we grew up with the idea of Lourdes. 

So when the script came to me, I felt like Dublin of the period, I felt that that was something I could relate to and perhaps say something about. Being brought up a Catholic at that time in Ireland was a pretty immersive experience, to say the least. And so bringing a bit of that to the story was interesting for me.

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Nancy Tapia: I read somewhere that there was an extra and please correct me if I’m wrong, that was part of the film in Lourdes during the filming. Amélie I believe is her name.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Amélie? No, well, because we shot the film, we didn’t shoot it at Lourdes. We shot it on the sets. We built the sets in the studio. Amélie was 12, 13 at the time, she came along to the set as an extra. We put a call out for extras who were disabled, and her mother brought her along. She was very ill from Rett syndrome, which is a wasting disease. Apparently, in that disease, they will die young. And unfortunately, Amélie died two or three weeks after we finished filming. So I’ve been in touch with her mother since then to see if she was okay about including Amélie in the film, and she was fine. So I just mentioned that because it was such a touching moment for all of us, and it was nice that her mother wanted her to have that experience and wanted that experience to stay in the film after Amélie died.

Nancy Tapia: Amélies mom is the perfect example of getting strength when there is no miracle.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Yeah.

Nancy Tapia: Well, thank you so much for your time to discuss The Miracle Club that I loved,

and a film I’m going to be showing my mom.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan: Okay, not a problem. Thank you very much.

Nancy Tapia: You’re welcome. Thank you. Bye-bye.

The Miracle Club is now in theaters nationwide. 

Source: LRMExclusives, Sony Pictures Classics