Eve Hewson 'distracts' you from the fact that she's Bono's daughter in 'Flora and Son,' director John Carney says

At this point “a John Carney movie” is its own subgenre.

Since charming the pants off audiences with 2007’s shoestring-budgeted Irish indie Once, a definitive Little Movie That Could (in its case win an Oscar for Best Original Song and spawn a hit Broadway musical), the Dublin-born writer-director has delivered a trio of spiritual sequels that play in the same sandbox: funny, emotional dramas in which characters connect and grow through music.

There was 2014’s Begin Again (Mark Ruffalo discovers Keira Knightley’s New York singer-songwriter) and 2016’s Sing Street (a group of Irish lads start a band to get girls). And this week comes Flora and Son, a more biting, hard-edged yet just as charming riff on The Carney Movie about a divorced mother who bonds with her ne’er-do-well teenager when they start writing tunes together.

“I think it’s probably a happy accident,” Carney tells us from last week's Toronto International Film Festival when asked how intentional he is in crafting similarly themed, similarly vibed stories. “It’s lovely because I was always obsessed with music, but it didn't work out for me to be in a band or to be a singer-songwriter. I'm not going to be that person. I'm not that talented, but I still love it and [then when I got into movies], it was a beautiful thing when they kind of came in together like a Venn diagram to cross over. That was probably Once when they overlapped. And you're like, ‘OK, there's a thing I can work with now that sort of satisfies the hobbyist musician in me and the professional filmmaker who really wants to make a mark. Maybe this is the way.’ But the point is I'm really comfortable and it never feels like, ‘Oh, this is a slog. I have to do another musical again.’

“So it’s a comfortable place for me, and I will keep doing it,” adds Carney, who reveals he’s passed up on opportunities to direct big-budget musicals for major studios.

Carney was a musician at one point. He was a bassist for the Irish rock band The Frames between 1991 and 1993. And contrary to popular misconception, Once — which paired the Frames’s frontman with Glen Hansard with Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová as Dublin street musicians who fall slowly in love — wasn’t his first film. That was 1996’s November Afternoon, followed by 1999’s Park and 2001’s On the Edge (starring Cillian Murphy). None were musicals. He even made a film between Once and Begin Again, 2009’s space-themed comedy Zonad.

Carney’s also made a splash on TV with his star-studded anthology rom-com series Modern Love. But as films go, there’s no doubt he’s found his bread and butter with the musical drama.

Premiering to critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival before landing in Toronto last week (the film debuts on Apple+ Friday), Flora and Son makes Carney 4 for 4 in his self-styled subgenre.

It also keeps him collaborating with some of the best talent in the game. There was Ruffalo and Knightley in Begin Again, Jack Reynor and Lucy Boynton in Sing Street, and now Eve Hewson, Reynor and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as the failed L.A. musician-turned-teacher who gives Flora virtual lessons) in Flora and Son.

Flora is drawing particular attention for the breakout performance of Hewson, 31, best known up until this point for the television series’ The Knick, Behind Her Eyes and Bad Sisters — and for being the daughter of rock royalty, U2 superstar Bono. (Hewson, you might recall, had one of the most memorable and amusing responses to the New Yorker’s late-2022 exposé on “nepo babies.”) Reads one headline from Rolling Stone: "Eve Hewson Will Blow You Away in 'Flora and Son.'"

Though U2 nearly contributed music to Sing Street, Carney’s semi-autobiographical look at a teen band in 1980s Dublin (Bono did end up giving the film a ringing endorsement), Hewson didn’t come to the project via her famous father. Her agent pitched her to the director.

“I thought surely she's too poised and too kind of beautiful. I saw her in some Victorian thing, very high collar, and she looked very elegant, and Flora is a little bit more street and tough,” Carney says. “And then we had a Zoom and she started to talk about the character from this very funny place, this darkly comic [place]. She thought I’d written a comedy, and she was like, ‘I’m going to play it really funny.’ And I thought it was brilliant… Within 30 minutes into Zoom I thought, ‘There’s no one else who can play this role.’”

Still, Hewson is an actor, not a musician like her father, and though she’d be singing in the role, she had some cautionary words for Carney.

“From the very beginning she was like, ‘I'm not going to be singing like my dad, you know that, don't you?’ And I was like, ‘Perfect,'" the filmmaker says. "Because she's not supposed to be. I never wanted this to be about, ‘Oh, little Flora from the flats sings and [suddenly] she's Aretha Franklin. I don't want to do that story. We've seen that story a million times… [This] is about what she's writing and the journey she's going through and how she hears her son. So she has a songwriter facility maybe in time, but I wanted to ground the character, make it feel very real and not have her suddenly clutching a bunch of awards saying, ‘Oh, thank you.’

“So I think Eve sensed that this part needed that humor and that reality, and she told me from the word go, ‘I don't really play the guitar. I don't sing like my dad, and is that OK?’ Of course people are going to be watching it going, ‘Oh, let's see. It's Bono's daughter. Let's see.’ But she distracted you from it. She was like, ‘Don't look at that. Look over here. Look at me acting.’ And I think that's brilliant the way she does that. You never go, ‘Oh, she's not really singing very well.' You go, ‘This is great.’”

Flora and Son premieres on Friday, Sept. 22 on Apple TV+.