Flora and Son Director on Why Eve Hewson Didn’t Try Outsing Her Father Bono in Musical Drama (Exclusive)

John Carney is not his son Flora and son — at least not directly.

As the Irish writer-director told PEOPLE ahead of the film’s Sept. 29 premiere on Apple TV+ streaming, it’s the story of a fictional single mother in Dublin who gives her wayward son a guitar only to discover her own musicianship. And although his own late mother gave the teenage Carney a guitar that set him on a path to music and filmmaking, this sequel to the 2007 Oscar-winning Once and in 2016 Street of singing not a true tribute to her.

“You can’t help but put who you are into your work,” says Carney, 51, of the ways in which Flora’s struggle with her son resembles and differs from his past. He also weighs in on inherited musical moves Bad sisters star Eva Hewson, whose role as Flora won the 2023 Sundance Film Festival this January. Flora and son costars Jack Reynor as the father of their son Max, played by Orén Kinlan, as well as Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Flora’s guitar teacher.

PEOPLE: Eve Hewson is first and foremost an actress, not as involved in music as her father Bono. Considering Flora and son he pulled her more into that musical side, what was it like working with her?

For this role, we don’t think that Flora is actually a musician or a singer. We haven’t seen her like that. We saw her as someone who’s more like a rapper or someone who realizes, “I have a little ability or ability to put down something that’s funny or surprising.” But she’s not going to end up as an amazing songwriter or singer, that’s not what it’s about. So she was never worried, and neither was I, about her singing level or her relationship with her father, who is a famous rock star. That was never really an issue. It’s always been about acting, which is her job.

And in a way, about singing, we didn’t really talk about it in the beginning. I never said, “By the way, can you ruin the singing?” Because we both knew that Flora could probably hold a tune and could probably play four or five chords pretty well, and Eve said, “I can do that.” That’s all I needed to know.

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Orén Kinlan and Eve Hewson in “Flora and Son”.

Apple TV+

You said that the seed of inspiration for this film came from thinking about your mother when you were around Max’s age. How much Flora and son are they similar or different from your real-life memories?

Well, I didn’t try to be too detailed. I wanted to kind of hide it because then it just becomes a memoir, you get too caught up in how it was and you’ll never get it right. Now I like to find stories that move me and suggest things, but that I can feel personally connected to — but that I can also lose my personal connection to, if that doesn’t sound too paradoxical. And this was perfect.

My mother is nothing like Flora. She was from a completely different background, she was from Roscommon in the countryside, she came to Dublin. She was a very different type of mother, but she bought me that guitar and listened to me when I asked her for something. She also ignored a lot of what I asked her to do, rightfully so! Because you can’t get everything for your kids when they’re screaming at you.

But she got the right thing for me at the right time and invested in it in a way that was very significant and meaningful to me. And that’s really more that side of the story and being grateful and trying to write and thank her is what I wanted to achieve in the film. And I think I did it pretty well. The kid finally seems to understand and see his mother and is grateful to her despite all the crap she put him through. In that sense, I now feel liberated from the film in a good way.

Does the inspiration for your films often come from a personal connection, but avoid a documentary recreation?

That’s the nature of art, not to do that. The nature of art is to cover your tracks and cover up the art of what you are doing! Hide tools.

Writing to your mother and thanking her is a nice idea. How cathartic was this filmmaking process personally?

I’m not sure if there was a direct catharsis, it was more of a coming full circle. You don’t say “thank you a million” to your mother when you’re 14; you thank her like a testosterone driven little bitch, and just go to your bedroom and play. And now I have a child, he is seven years old. And sometimes you can see how little they understand how much you have done for them. And it’s not that they’re not grateful, they’re just in a different phase of life.

I just thought, “If I feel this way because I saw my boy play this game this time or build this thing with him, I wonder how my mother felt when she bought me a guitar.” At the time, I never had the maturity to actually sit down and say, “I’m so grateful you did it. Dad didn’t do it, somebody else didn’t do it. You paid money for it.” And so in that way it was cathartic, or more than that it’s just a nice wrap-up — the combination of the story of how she bought me that guitar that ends with a musical film about a mother and a son.

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Composer Gary Clark and director John Carney behind the scenes of “Flora and Son”.

Apple TV+

How has having children affected your art or this project in particular?

In many ways actually. And I can’t specify them, but I’m definitely on set now and I’m thinking, especially in a movie like this, obviously, which is about parenting and all that, my relationship with my kids is with me every day. I’m just thinking about the complexity of that relationship and the fact that I’m so privileged.

We were talking about it the other day, me and my wife, like, “Of all the people on a global scale, we, me and you, are the luckiest”… And it’s still hard sometimes and it’s still challenging. We are the most privileged people on the planet, and it is still confusing, bewildering, surprising, challenging and exhausting.

Flora, who lives in a shoebox, doesn’t have much money, was a child when she had a child, doesn’t have many resources — let’s see how we can accept a broken relationship and suggest a course of repair. That’s all [this movie] really was. These were things I was thinking about in terms of my own family dynamic and how lucky I am, and in a way, how unhappy Flora is and how gifted and brave she is to try to find a way forward with her son.

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Eve Hewson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in “Flora and Son”.

Apple TV+

Finally, how much is gratitude a guiding value, in your art and life?

This is very important because it is the biggest fact. These things sound like self-help clichés, but gratitude is the most important factor in everyday life. And actually, if so many people who were jerks at the time thought about how grateful they should be — even though things occasionally need fixing and things aren’t perfect, they’re pretty darn close.

Flora and son now streaming on Apple TV+.

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Source: HIS Education