Tim Mielants sees a close connection between his native Belgium and Ireland, the setting of his new film, Small Things Like These.
The film, based on Claire Keegan’s novel of the same name, stars Cillian Murphy as Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish town who stumbles onto the Catholic Church’s grim method of hiding and exploiting girls who give birth out of wedlock.
The Magdalene Laundries, which operated for decades, were a closely held secret for decades in Ireland, and the last one wasn’t closed until the mid-90s. Mielants saw a parallel between the secrecy around the laundries and the complicity of Belgians when Nazis occupied Belgium in World War II.
The occupation was the subject of Mielants’ previous film, Wil, released in 2023. He has always tried to understand, he says, why so many people fail to speak out against injustice.
“I talked to my grandparents, who were silent too, and I kind of get it. I’ve got two kids. I kind of understand it, and try to understand it,” he says. “But I feel like this silence is very loud and always triggers me: Why are people so silent all the time?”
Mielants also felt a strong connection with Small Things Like These because he, like Bill Furlong, has a deep understanding of grief. Bill lost his mother as a small child in the film, just as Mielants lost his brother in real life.
Grieving, Mielants believes, sometimes builds people up — to be strong enough to do things that others fear to do. Small Things Like These raises the question of whether Bill will do the right thing, or let silence win.
Mielants’ previous work includes the 2019 feature tragicomic Patrick, about a nudist-camp maintenance man looking for a missing hammer, as well as the TV shows Legion, The Tunnel, and Murphy’s Peaky Blinders. We spoke with him in front of a very receptive Newport Beach Film Festival audience about making Murphy’s follow-up to the Oscar-magnet Oppenheimer, working with producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and the tyranny of silence.
Tim Mielants on Adapting Small Things Like These
Tim Molloy: I respect and admire the pace of Small Things Like These. There’s so much pressure to speed up everything, and you really let us take in this world: Bill’s town, his home, his job. Can you talk about any pressure you may have felt to do things faster, even if it was just internal pressure, and how you resisted that to follow your real artistic impulse?
Tim Mielants: My personal connection to the story is grief, and I dealt with a similar trauma in my life, so I was kind of mapping that out, that pain, and trying to understand that pain. And for me, it was going with Cillian through every little thought process along the way on the timeline, and mapping, structuring grief a little bit.
I think the film might feel silent, but I think it’s very loud inside. I think back in the day men weren’t allowed — in Ireland, in 1985, when you were 45 years old — to talk about emotions. That was just not happening.
And you had this very vulnerable man losing his mother. He built like a concrete wall in front of him, and it’s kind of an emotional bursting volcano all the time. So for me, it was fast. It was, emotionally, very loud. So I never pictured it as a slow movie In that respect.
Tim Molloy: I’d say patient more than slow — letting us sit in moments and really appreciate what’s happening.
Tim Mielants: I feel like an audience can fill up the gaps. It’s kind of a minimalistic thing, like a minimalist painting: Feel free to associate whatever you want to associate with and find in it.
Tim Molloy: I understand that you told your crew, “I don’t know anything about Ireland. Guide me through.” I’m sure you knew quite a bit about Ireland to capture it as well as you did. But can you talk about what you learned about Ireland in the process of making this?
Tim Mielants: They’re wonderful, beautiful people, and there’s a lot of similarities between Belgium and Ireland, because we’ve both got the Roman Catholic Church in every layer of society. And I think it’s a very universal theme, which is about when you are silent, you are complicit, and the church asks us to be silent all the time. But when you’re silent, you’re complicit.
What I learned over the years, and also doing World War II movies, is that when there’s an institution that asks for absolute power and you’re not allowed to question anything, abuse will happen eventually.
Tim Molloy: Can you talk about structuring this around the five stages of grief?
Tim Mielants: It’s a theme that always comes back, and what I love about the story: When you’re out of the stages of grief, how it could make you stronger. There’s really light at the end of the tunnel. It can make you stronger, and you might be able to do something that you wouldn’t be able to do if you didn’t go through that pain. … I was finding things that I personally went through.
Tim Molloy: You used a lot of impressive ‘80s touchstones that aren’t the obvious or overused touchstones — a Danger Mouse cartoon, for instance. Can you talk about recreating that era?
Tim Mielants: What we didn’t want to do is have, like, “Oh, this is 1985.” We just wanted to slowly discover it a little bit. And we tried to do it with music. And if they’re boxing fans, at the beginning, when they’re talking about a boxer, people could know it. We give little hints, but it’s timeless. This has been happening for centuries, all the time. So it’s not necessarily ‘85. This is like with respect to many, many victims who have been through this.
Tim Mielants on Working With Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck
Tim Molloy: This movie, in a way, came out of Oppenheimer. Cillian Murphy worked with Matt Damon on the film, and of course won the Best Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer, which I’m sure didn’t hurt Murphy’s ability to get it made.
Tim Mielants: We had a great working relationship on Peaky Blinders together, and then he saw my first feature movie, which I thought would be the end of my career, sincerely, because it’s about a man looking for his hammer in a nudist camp. And he loved it. Loved it. He said, “I want to do a movie with this crazy guy.”
We were looking for material, and, I’m not lying — his wife was waving the book in front of us, like, “You guys should do this.” And then I read it, and found the story of grief that was very personal. And then we started exploring, and a good friend of his, Enda Walsh, started writing it. And he was on the set with Matt Damon [on Oppenheimer], and between setups, he said, “I’ve got this movie, I want to make this.” And Matt Damon said “Sure, I’ll give you the money.” And that’s what it is. That is the real story.
Tim Molloy: Small Things Like These is from Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity, a studio that wants to make filmmaking more, well, equitable. Did things feel more equitable than on a typical set?
Tim Mielants: I love them as movie makers. I admire them as movie makers. I think they did terrific, terrific work. Ben was very supportive, Matt read the script, gave a few notes, and then in the edit Ben gave very good notes as well, which made the movie better. It was very nice to work with them.
Tim Molloy: The last thing I wanted to ask is how you made Bill’s family feel so much like a real family. You did a really beautiful job making their house and their home and their lives feel lived in. What did it take to get that across?
Tim Mielants: I spent a lot of time with the kids, singing songs all the time. The girl who plays accordion had never played accordion. And I said, “You have to learn the accordion a little bit, and you’ve got two weeks.” I thought, that’s enough time to learn to do it really badly. But she played it perfectly! Perfectly.
And I said, “That’s not what I want.” And then I got in a quarrel with her mom, who was saying, “She’s been practicing for two weeks, day and night, and now you want her to play it really bad?” That was the hardest problem I had on this movie: explaining to the mother that playing it bad is really good.
Small Things Like These is now in theaters, from Lionsgate. Photos courtesy of Lionsgate.