Trivia / The Secret of Roan Inish

• Ability over Appearance: The casting call for Eamonn was looking for someone smaller, but Richard Sheridan won them over, despite being much taller than they'd anticipated.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Eileen Colgan took the role of Tess to work with John Sayles, who she knew was an "actors' director", and was impressed by how intelligent the script was.
• Billing Displacement: It's the selkie who's on the poster, despite only five minutes of screen time. Of course, she herself is the real secret of Roan Inish.
• California Doubling: Some filming was done in Scotland, although the original novel takes place in Scotland; the film was relocated to Ireland for practical reasons.
• Creator Couple: Director John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi were together.
• Dark Horse Casting: Jeni Courtney had never acted before, but was cast as Fiona based on raw talent and willingness to do scenes in and around the water.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: The book describes the selkies as turning into gray seals, which are bigger and more aggressive, and tend to windward sides of islands, where it would be more difficult to shoot. They used common seals instead, who are more docile and easier to film. According to Word of God, the hardest shot in the film to do was the establishing shot of Fiona in the opening from the seal's point of view ("How do you get seals to look where you want them to? We had to put the seal on a fake rock on top of a raft.”). Seagulls likewise could only be placated with food and, due to their small stomachs, were only usable for "about an hour". Luckily averted with the child actors, even if they weren't professionals; Mick Lally was very good at working with children, so John Sayles would tell him what he wanted the child actors to do, and he would give them direction so they would be looking at him in the scene rather than off camera to the director.
• Playing Against Type: Directing example. John Sayles had been known for directing politically charged stories. This conservative Magic Realism fable quite a departure.
• Production Posse: John Sayles worked with cinematographer Haskell Wexler on the film Matewan, and would later do so again on Silver City and Limbo. Foley artist Marko Costanzo also worked on ten films with John Sayles.
• Promoted Fanboy: Producer Maggie Renzi had loved the book as a child and brought it to the attention of director John Sayles. The book was actually out of print, and it took them a year to track down author Rosalie K Fry to get the adaptation rights.
• Real-Life Relative: Susan Lynch who plays Nuala the selkie is the sister of John Lynch, who plays Tadhg.
• Throw It In!: The climactic scene of the seals returning Jamie to land was done in reverse; where the seals used had previously been rescued by nature parks and were ready to be let go, and thus weren't used to being on an open beach before.
  "But we put them in this huge open space, they'd never been on a beach before and they just had a ball. We let all of them go at the same time. So they did a few things that we wanted them to do - the scene where they chase Jamie back from the water, they did that basically by releasing them, tilting the camera and reversing the film, so they're actually making helter skelter towards the water and Jamie happens to get in their way and it looks like they're chasing him away from the water, but also a lot of the playing they did in the water was, my God we're in the water, are we allowed to be in the water? Maybe we should go back on the land where they fish are, but no, still deciding to be in the water, and they did an awful lot of relating to each other, just to kind of touch base with something comforting, so they would run around frantically and then they'd go and touch noses together, which really gave us the feeling of, ok they're communicating to each other and so much of our job in this movie was to give both the animals and the sky, the sea, the waves, the wind a consciousness, a purpose and a focus that they of course don't really have because they haven't read the story."
• Troubled Production: Not as bad as most examples, but financing was uncertain. John Sayles had to put up a third of the movie's $5 million budget himself and a deal with Jones Intercable wasn't finalised until two weeks into shooting, with most of the cast and crew unsure if there would even be enough money to finish. One local worker, who'd helped build the thatched cottages, "got really drunk" and burned down half the sets, causing $150,000 worth of damage. That however worked out for the best, as the insurance covered it, and the locals of Rosbeg and Portnoo helped rebuild them; everyone receiving a $650 bonus. Although they had to keep the schedule loose to account for unpredictable Irish weather, the film was brought in on time and under budget.

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