Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends to be filmed in Belfast

The filming of Conversations with Friends — the follow up to last year’s hugely successful Normal People — is planned for Belfast, rather than Dublin where the novel is set.

re-production on the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel was due to continue in Belfast this month, director Lenny Abrahamson revealed.

But work was delayed for at least eight weeks due to the surges in Covid-19 numbers, the director said in an online conversation hosted by the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University.

Industry insiders confirmed the plans to film in Northern Ireland, suggesting it could begin as early as April on the adaptation of the 2017 novel, set in and around Trinity College and south Dublin, including Monkstown.

The production, like Rooney’s Normal People, will be largely funded by the BBC. Normal People, which received some support from Screen Ireland, was filmed and produced in the Republic.

When asked to confirm filming will be in Belfast and why, the producer, Dublin-based Element Pictures, said: “I’m afraid we can’t comment on this currently.” Details of the production were revealed by director Abrahamson in an online conversation with Michael West, who teaches creative writing at the Heaney centre.

Conversations with Friends, which follows two best friends, and former lovers, and their relationship with an older married couple, will be in the same format as last year’s hit BBC show, 12 approximately half hour episodes, Abrahamson said.

The director said pre-production, nearly finished and due to continue in Belfast earlier this month, was delayed for at least eight weeks because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“At the moment we are in a little bit of a hiatus. I was to come to Belfast on January 6th…to start working on, to start to finish prep,” Abrahamson said, adding that “prep” work started before Christmas on the adaptation.

“I am in this funny situation that I have always wanted to happen…a number of weeks to get prep really done…and it will be interesting to see if I actually make use of it or just see it out in a kind of torpor in Dublin for the next eight weeks,” Abrahamson said.

Conversations with Friends, produced by the same team as Normal People, centres on the lives of Trinity student Frances, her friend Bobbi and couple, Nick and Melissa.

He described Conversations with Friends as having a “kind of family resemblance” to Normal People, largely due to Rooney’s “distinctive way of writing”.

“They are analogues with the characters in Normal People but…there is a particular focus in Normal People, it is a love story, there’s a powerful engine which drives the drama through a lot of screen time,” Abrahamson said.

“In Conversations with Friends, there is a central character..we are in her head for the novel, a third person narrator.

“But there are three other very important characters, her close friend who she had a love affair with in school…and then there is this older couple who these two young women meet and get involved with in variously complex ways.”

The novel, and its adaptation, explores various themes, including the potential shape of romantic relationships, and the way sex operates within those and among friends, the director said.

“But tonally it is a little bit colder, it’s structurally a bit more complex but we have decided that the format that we used in Normal People, which are those shorter episodes, focused, will be the same,” he added.

Belfast Telegraph