Triple Threat Liam O Mochain Talks About Things LOST & FOUND

Liam O Mochain, originally from Galway, now lives in Dublin, Ireland. He trained in theatre with The Gaiety School of Acting, Geasog Theatre Co. and The Galway Youth Theatre. He wrote/produced and co-starred in the short film Fortune, which screened at the 1997 Dublin Film Festival and won best short at the 1998 Houston International Film Festival.  O Mochain made his feature debut as a writer/director/producer with The Book That Wrote Itself, which world premiered at the 1999 Galway Film Flead and internationally premiered at the 1999 Vancouver International Film Festival. It went on to screen at numerous international film festivals, and won a critics prize at the 1999 Austin Film Festival.

O Mochain has worked as a writer, producer and presenter for amongst others RTE Radio 1, BBC Radio Ulster, 2FM, RnaG, Anna Livia FM , WDAR 96FM and Dublin South FM. As an actor he has performed in theatre, radio, tv and film. He made his on-screen debut in 1995 as Joe Heaney in the drama documentary, Joe Heaney: Sing the Dark Away for RTE. The film featured Maureen O Sullivan, Pete Seeger and Liam Clancy.

Seven Interconnecting Stories

Liam O Mochain’s latest film, Lost & Found is made up of seven interconnecting stories set in and around a lost & found office of an Irish train station.  All segments are inspired by true stories, share a theme of something lost or found and characters that come in and out of each other’s lives. Explaining the title Lost & Found to the readers will tell them a lot.

O Mochain obliges. “Lost & Found – it’s the title that comes from a lost and found office that you have in train stations, airports, bus stations and places like that. This particular one is set in the lost and found office of an Irish train station, and the first story is set over one day, and all of the people who come in and out of the lost and found office to either bring in an item, or to report an item they’ve lost, are the main characters of the other six stories that follow it.”

And, so he actually has seven separate stories that intertwine? “Yes, seven interconnected stories, yes,” he says. Which is an unusual way to structure a movie.

“Well, it’s a portmanteau film, it’s an anthology,” O Mochain says.  “It’s the first one that’s been made in Ireland of this sort.  I mean we’ve had loads of other movies like that, like Short Cuts, Robert Altman’s film, or the series of I Love You films, New York I Love You, Paris I Love You, and movies like that also Seven Days in Havana was another movie which happened to be seven stories, each starting at a certain time of the day and the next one starting at the exact few minutes later of the next day.  So there’s been a good few, but obviously there’s not many comparisons to sort of other genres and other types of movies.”

O Mochain is a triple threat on Lost & Found, which he wrote, directed and starred in.

“Well, I am one of the actors,” he says modestly. “There’s about 21 actors altogether and yes, my character – I felt like somebody needed to connect all the other stories and the people so I decided that my character would be the person who works in the Lost and Found office so you keep coming back to him. Sometimes he’s the main character in the story, sometimes he’s support, sometimes he’s just a cameo. So yeah, to just give it more of a connection.”

“I find the directing more stressful than acting, because you have so much more to do.  You are dealing with so many different things at the same time from your crew, director of photography, lighting, sound, production design, costumes, continuity, all of the other actors, the script, things changing, the locations – so that is much more stressful than just being there as an actor. But when you are doing something else as well, and you don’t have time to procrastinate – sometimes when an actor has too much time on their hands they start thinking so many different ways of doing something – it kind of works out okay, because I spent a lot of time with the crew before we started shooting in preparation just to make sure I was as prepared, as much as you can be, because you can never be 100% prepared.  Things will always change.”

Inspired by Real People, Real Events

The end credits say that these stories are apparently all at least inspired by actual people.  Were they all people that O Mochain knows or knew personally?

O Mochain says: “Some of the stories happened to me.  Some happened to people that I know and others I was told about.  So one of the ones that happened to me was the guy begging.  I was in Morocco at a bus station – but I much prefer to base that in a train station – waiting for a bus and this guy was going around talking to everybody, he had all of his belongings with him, and he said he was on his way to the airport to go to London to meet his sister and then he was telling somebody else a different story and I just thought – ‘Wow, this is a really interesting idea – who he is, where he comes from and why he’s doing this – And the fact that the first thing we think of is that he’s lying, or he’s begging, and I was thinking, ‘What if there was something else as the reason why he is doing this?’ And that kind of inspired that one. The wedding one of the girl really wanting to get married, that was a friend of mine, and I really liked the idea so I changed it so that one, wouldn’t recognize themselves and two, that it would fit in with the film that I am doing.”

When did it occur to him that all of these stories would have some kind of a common thread that he could tie together into one film?

The answer is less technical than one would expect. “I mean it doesn’t have to be an item that moves, sometimes you see an item in different stories, and most of the time it’s people. So it’s both the physical and metaphysical, the spiritual connection of the lost and found, and that’s really how I was connecting them, if you know what I mean. And also, every story has the theme of something lost or found. So whether it’s the bar owner who has lost his customers, whether it’s the guy in the proposal who may or may not lose his bride-to-be, or in the Will where somebody maybe gets something that they didn’t expect by finding the Book of Condolences.  So there is something that everybody is getting or losing.”

Shot Over a Five Year Period

How long did it take to shoot Lost & Found? “We were filming on and off over a five year period,” he says.  “We would film for three to four days every year.  The same bank holiday weekend in June, because a lot of the crew worked on major TV shows and films, and they would get that bank holiday weekend off, so that’s why we shot then.  Sometimes we filmed one story, like ‘The Tent,’ which took three and a half days, and also there were ones that were done two together.  So, like ‘The Will’ and ‘The Ticket to Somewhere’ were done together, because they had main characters in common, and they were two days each.  If it was a longer piece we did it as one, if it was a shorter piece we did two together.”

Interestingly, although O Mochain aged five years making the movie, he doesn’t appear to age in the movie. He laughs at this. “I never age, yeah, I have fantastic genes. My hair was my only worry.  My hair and beard.”

Was Lost & Found shot on film or digital? “It was shot on digital, HD, with an Arri Alexa,” he says. “And some of the stories were shot with the RED camera.” So obviously he must have been doing other projects in between while he was working on this. “Yeah, I work in radio,” he says. “I produce and present a lot of radio shows, cultural programs and documentaries both in the Irish language and also in English.  So, I spent six months of the year doing that, and the other six months putting the different segments together, both making them, doing the post production on them and looking for money for the next year.  So always stuff to do.”

Is there any chance we are going to start seeing O Mochain in any Hollywood productions, or is that something that doesn’t interest him at all? O Mochain says: “You never know – you know if I get good enough offer and it’s good script.  As an audience member I am interested in watching every kind of movie whether it’s a big budget movie – whether it’s a small movie – whether it’s an independent movie.  If it’s good, I mean that’s really at the end of the day, is you want to work on stuff that’s good and you want to see stuff that’s good.”

What’s next up for O Mochain? “I am working on a script that is sort of inspired by Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” he says. “My own version set in the west of Ireland.”

Film Inquiry thanks Liam O Mochain for taking the time to speak to us.

Lost & Found is playing in Boston, San Francisco and Charlottetown, Canada, and just added  New York City, Albany, New York, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary and then after it’s opening in Los Angeles, Long Beach and other cities.