“We had a notion that we were actually going to go to Saipan,” reveals Glenn Leyburn of how Saipan was almost shot on the titular tropical island where a bust-up between Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy and star footballer Roy Keane during pre-tournament training threatened to maroon Ireland’s World Cup 2002 campaign.
“We discovered that the hotel the Irish team actually stayed in had just closed down, so it was completely empty, and it was pretty much still as it was when they were there.
“So, for one crazy week during pre-production, we sort of thought we could balance out the cost of taking everybody to Saipan with not having to build sets and all that sort of stuff.
We had a notion that we were actually going to go to Saipan
— Glenn Leyburn
“But we realised that for all the reasons why it was a really bad idea for the Irish football team to go to Saipan, it turns out it would have been a really bad idea for us to go as well.”
Indeed, Leyburn and co-director Lisa Barros D’sa ultimately decided not to travel half-way around the world to battle heat, humidity and holiday mentality while dramatising this most seismic of sporting disagreements, dubbed ‘Ireland’s second Civil War’ for its divisive impact on a nation forced to choose sides while anxiously praying for a sudden outbreak of peace between the mercurial Cork-bred Manchester United midfielder (portrayed by Cork-born Éanna Hardwicke) and his affable, Barnsley-born former Ireland teammate turned manager (played by Steve Coogan).
Read more: It’s going to happen sometime - so why not Roy Keane for Ireland job now?
However, the Belfast-based filmmaking duo then faced a potentially even bigger challenge: recreating the sun-baked scenery of a tropical island in notoriously inclement Ireland.
“It turns out we had to do the majority of it in Belfast, Carlingford and Dublin,” explains Leyburn, one half of the acclaimed filmmaking duo whose previous films include Terri Hooley biopic Good Vibrations and the Liam Neeson romantic drama Ordinary Love.
“For example, the sequences where the team are training [in Saipan] were all shot in Jordanstown.
“So it was all about having a great team around us - a great art department, a great cinematographer - and the movie gods even smiled on us and gave us some sunny days in Belfast.
“I mean, it has to be said that Saipan is a tropical island, and on tropical islands, it does rain. So, if it had rained, we would have leaned into that. But luckily, it didn’t.”
Rain-starved, rock-hard pitches, cheese sandwich-based sports ‘nutrition’ and, almost unbelievably, a total lack of footballs and training kits, provided ample catalysts for Keane’s ire toward his manager and the Football Association of Ireland comically inept organisational skills during Ireland’s pre-World Cup finals training and acclimatisation stay on Saipan in May 2002.
However, Premier League star ‘Keano’ was also harbouring a grudge against the McCarthy which dated back a decade earlier: he felt the then Ireland captain had humiliated him with a public telling-off during the 1992 international tour.
Read more: Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn on directing Liam Neeson in Ordinary Love
Tension between the pair had quietly simmered ever since, coming to the boil in the tropical heat of Saipan when, as team captain, Keane took issue with the admittedly shocking lack of facilities and how McCarthy was running their training sessions.
After storming off the pockmarked pitch in anger, Keane threatened to quit and return home: suddenly, the embedded press at the team hotel were salivating over a potential scandal.
Desperate to avoid further embarrassment, the Irish FA ordered McCarthy to get the side’s star man back onside.
Just as things were calming down, Keane then poured petrol on the situation by relating his dim views of McCarthy, the Irish FA and many of his team mates to an Irish journalist.
With the story now front page news back in Ireland, a crisis team meeting was called which immediately descended into an explosive confrontation between the two men.
This now legendary tirade involved some eye-wateringly robust accusations from Keane regarding McCarthy’s character and nationality and, infamously, climaxed with the Cork man telling his manager to “shove your World Cup up your bollocks” before decamping to his room, en route to the next flight home.
“I don’t really know very much about football, so the unfolding of the story was something I hadn’t been aware of,” admits Barros D’sa of what drew her to Paul Fraser’s script for Saipan, a drama which skilfully and stylishly mines the inherent comedy and absurdity of the scenario at hand for our entertainment.
“I really did follow it as a drama, through these two characters. I think what makes it really fascinating is that clearly there was validity on both sides of the argument.
“They were both coming from a really authentic place, and were both really well meaning - they wanted the best for the team, for Ireland.
“But there was almost this fated inevitability that they seemed headed for a collision at the end.
“I think one of the things that was so intriguing, so fascinating and absurd, was that this argument between these two men over football ended up bearing so much cultural weight.
“It became a debate about identity and who Ireland is as a nation, and whether that was changing at that particular point in history. So that felt really fascinating.”
She adds: “We talked about as being like a fever dream that took over these two islands - The Tempest with footballs.”
“We lay it out quite clearly that it’s not a documentary,” agrees Leyburn.
“It’s told in a heightened way, which signposts to the audience that there are obviously elements which are dramatised - and we also make it quite clear with a very large disclaimer at the start.
“We have the greatest respect for both Roy and Mick, but I guess maybe seeing a dramatisation of yourself is never going to be easy for anybody - especially when it’s of such a painful and pivotal moment.”
Indeed, in the film - which has a satisfyingly appropriate running time of 90 minutes - Keane labels McCarthy as ‘a plastic Paddy’ which, as a fellow Englishman with Irish heritage, was something that Saipan star Steve Coogan immediately related to.
“Steve’s Irish heritage is very significant to him,” explains Leyburn of the Middleton-born Coogan, whose mother is from Co Mayo and whose father’s family hail from Co Kilkenny and Co Cork.
“When we first met with him about this, he spoke about his own family’s decisions to leave a country that they loved , to leave family and friends.
“It wasn’t an easy decision, but they made it because there just was no work and they had to feed their family. So then, for them not to be allowed to be ‘Irish’ seemed particularly cruel and unpleasant.
“So Steve was very engaged with the notion of second generation Irishness. He really connected with Mick’s character on that level, and brought a lot to that aspect of the storytelling.”
Stepping into Roy Keane’s boots was a big responsibility for Éanna Hardwicke, given the Cork legend’s status in their shared home city.
However, despite looking more like John O’Shea than Keano, Hardwicke nails the tortured intensity of the Ireland and Manchester Utd star who is disgusted by his national side’s lack of ambition and professionalism on the world stage.
“It was very clear that Éanna had the same ability as Roy to just change the energy in a room right away,” explains Barros D’sa, who says they spotted Hardwicke in ITV drama The Sixth Commandment.
“Everybody feels his presence. And, of course, the other great gift is that he’s also from Cork. He really understood Roy as a kind of cultural force there, where it’s such an ‘empire of Roy’.
“So he approached [the role] with a huge amount of commitment, respect and love.”
Intriguingly, it seems that we almost got a Quentin Tarantino-style ‘revisionist history’ version of Saipan:
“There was a version of the script where it was kind of like a fantasy ending, where Ireland go on and win the World Cup and Roy is there,” reveals Leyburn.
“But we thought that might have been too confusing for those who perhaps don’t know the real story.”
Given the truth of what went on in Saipan is already so very entertainingly stranger than fiction, that was probably a very good call.
Saipan will be released in cinemas on January 1
