“Kneecap” had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it received strong reviews and won the NEXT Audience Award. It has since gone on to be selected as Ireland’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the upcoming Academy Awards. Feature debut writer and director Rich Peppiatt, along with Kneecap members Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó Hannaidh, Naoise “Móglaí Bap” Ó Cairealláin & JJ “DJ Próvaí” Ó Dochartaigh were all kind enough to spend some time talking with us about their experiences making the musical biopic, which you can listen to, read, or watch below. Please be sure to check out the film, which is now playing in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics. Thank you, and enjoy!
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As Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvaí, collectively known as Kneecap, flew to Hollywood earlier this year with their director, Rich Peppiatt, their journey had been years in the making. The Irish rap group Kneecap burst onto the scene in 2017 with their incendiary song “C.E.A.R.T.A.” and have been provoking controversy ever since. They’ve also grown a cult following in their native Ireland, rapping in a mix of English and Irish, with a palpable energy that’s impossible to ignore.
Peppiatt knew the wild story of Kneecap would make a killer movie. “It took him nearly six months to convince us. And a lot of Guinness as well.” Móglaí jokes. But the director did win them over, setting the group on a journey to Sundance and beyond. “I set up a WhatsApp group just to talk about the film and plan things,” Rich explains. “That was set up in December 2019. I called that WhatsApp group “Kneecap Goes to Hollywood” as a little joke. So it was kind of crazy to be flying across to Hollywood with the film.”
The resulting film, “Kneecap,” tells the story of their journey into music. The group had never acted before but embarked on six months of acting classes to prepare them for the ride. “I mean, we’re still playing exaggerated versions of ourselves in the film, you know, because nobody wants fucking boring, mundane day-to-day life,” says Mo Chara. In a world flush with music biopics, “Kneecap” shatters expectations, presenting anything but a boring, mundane story.
In a recent conversation with Next Best Picture, Kneecap and Peppiatt talk about working with Michael Fassbender, the film’s visual style, and the Oscars they’ve already won (according to them).
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*
DANIEL HOWAT: You guys have been making music for a long time now. How did Rich convince you not only to do a film but to turn your own story into a movie?
MÓGLAÍ BAP: It took him nearly six months to convince us. And a lot of Guinness as well.
RICH PEPPIATT: And Beamish.
MÓGLAÍ: And Beamish, of course. We were a bit reluctant at the start to actually believe that he was interested in making an actual movie because we’d had people approach us before, and they wanted to do, like, documentaries or series, and they’d live in their mom’s basement and didn’t really have any plans.
PEPPIATT: I got kicked out of my mom’s basement.
MÓGLAÍ: He did (Laughs). But yeah, eventually, after a while, you know, he warmed up to us. We started to like Rich…after a few more Guinness.
PEPPIATT: That only lasted a brief time, that period (Laughs)
MÓGLAÍ: But, yeah, he came up with an idea. I mean, obviously, Rich has done work before; shout out to “One Rogue Reporter,” and it was all in the same kind of vein as the “Kneecap” movie, pushing boundaries and controversial stuff. So once we saw that there, we opened up to them.
Rich, this is your debut directorial feature. What was the learning curve like for you hopping onto not just any feature but a feature with energy and a kind of wildness like this?
PEPPIATT: Well, in a way, it really helps. You can have the starting point of their music, right? Normally, music is something that you think about, maybe towards the end of the process of making a film. Well, here it was, the very foundation of it. And tone is often the thing that, when you’re writing something, is kind of the hardest thing to nail. What is this film tonally, and what’s it going to look like? And you know from just listening to Kneecap’s music, if you’re making a film, it should be anarchic, punky, fast-cut, and kind of creatively risky. And I think one of the beautiful things about this film was we felt like nothing was off-limits. We could do whatever we wanted creatively, and it would kind of work. Well, at least it wouldn’t feel out of place, you know? So that’s why we have random claymation scenes and things like that. It was like, “You know what? I don’t think I’ll ever do a movie again where you feel so free.” We’d just sit around and come up with mad ideas and go, “Sod it, let’s give it a go.“ And we were prepared for the fact that it might…
(Notices DJ Próvaí mocking him)
PEPPIATT: I’m sorry (Laughs). This is what I had to work with. This sort of behavior.
DJ PRÓVAÍ: We’re just so happy that we were nominated and won the Oscar, you know? So that’s the main thing.
(Laughing)
PEPPIATT: We…we haven’t, we haven’t won any Oscars.
PRÓVAÍ: We have. It just hasn’t happened yet.
Oh, yeah. It’s coming (Laughs). Well, Próvaí, I think we have to start with you. You all have stage names. Próvaí, you wear a mask. So, you have a little bit of a persona for your music. But in the film, obviously, all that is stripped away is not only performing without the stage names but telling your own story. How did it feel in the writing process, finding the way to strip back some of the persona and show your real selves?
PRÓVAÍ: It was like someone pulled all my clothes off in the middle of a dream.
PEPPIATT: You sure it was a dream? (Laughs)
PRÓVAÍ: You feel kind of naked and out there. But it was beautiful. Very freeing. And, you know, for too long, people have been wearing clothes (Laughs). No, you know, it was good. It was class. It’s the roles we were born to play. So, fair play to Rich. He had his work cut out, as you can see. So whenever he wanted us to do something that didn’t feel authentic to us, we would say, “No, I wouldn’t do that.“ And then he couldn’t really argue because we’re the authority on us. We knew what we would do in that situation. So that kind of back and forth with Rich really honed the film…I don’t really know if I’m answering the question.
MO CHARA: Nah, no way.
MÓGLAÍ: I don’t think so at all.
(Laughing)
PEPPIATT: Daniel, it’s going to be thirty minutes long, my friend.
PRÓVAÍ: What was the question? Being naked or something?
MÓGLAÍ: Close enough.
Yeah. No, that was great. Same question for you, Mo Chara and Móglaí: what was it like to sort of peel back the personas of Kneecap and present yourselves authentically in a film?
MO CHARA: I mean, we’re still playing exaggerated versions of ourselves even in the film, you know because nobody wants fucking boring, mundane day-to-day life. We’ve been doing the music for a couple of years now, so it sort of transferred to the camera quite easily for us. We’re used to playing this persona on stage, and then you come off. So it was quite easy. And we enjoyed it quite a bit.
MÓGLAÍ: We did acting classes for like six months to obviously practice acting because, apparently, it’s a “skill“ you have to acquire and practice.
MO CHARA: It’s fucking easy.
PRÓVAÍ: I’m usually acting a bollocks, but that doesn’t work on screen.
MÓGLAÍ: Obviously, we’re on stage with the music and doing concerts for a long time, as opposed to acting, we had to kind of hone in and condense all that energy. When you’re in front of a camera, it’s different than when you’re on stage. It’s all high-tempo energy when you’re on a stage. But being in front of the camera, you had to really just control that, all of the emotions and whatever. So that’s what we did for the acting classes. We’d stare into each other’s eyes for, like, ten minutes during the acting classes.
PRÓVAÍ: Which is weeeeeeird.
MÓGLAÍ: (Laughs) Which is quite an unusual experience, even though we’re quite close. We’re all best friends.
MO CHARA: Aw
MÓGLAÍ: Not him, though (Points to Rich).
PEPPIATT: The thing that gets overlooked sometimes is the fact that if their roles had been to play, I don’t know, sixth-century knights, you can disassociate your personal self and your character, right? And if the audience sees this sixth-century knight and says, “That sixth-century knight’s an asshole,” that’s not a personal reflection on you, right?
But when you’re putting yourself up on the screen and dealing with things that happen in your real life, you’re asking an audience to judge you, to judge your life, to judge the people around you. That’s a tough thing. It’s an act of real vulnerability and bravery to do that. It was a real risk for them. And I think that they should be commended massively for having that bravery.
PRÓVAÍ: Only God can judge us.
MÓGLAÍ: And as Próvaí touched on earlier, that made Rich’s job very hard on set. He would ask us to, like, dance or something strange. And we would just tell him… “no.“ That was that, basically. So I’m sure I made Rich’s life a lot harder. We got there.
PEPPIATT: We got there.
You got there. Like you guys said, you don’t want a boring movie. It’s not going to represent the energy of your guys’ music. Rich, there are so many music biopics and stories of how musicians rise and fall and whatever. Were there specific cliches that you guys really wanted to avoid in your version of a music biopic?
PEPPIATT: Yeah. I mean, the music biopic genre has been run over about a thousand times. I think that often biopics are made about bands and people who are dead or at the end of their careers and their lives. It was kind of an interesting concept about making a biopic in real time, right? That was a starting-off kind of idea. How would that play out? And for us, six years ago, starting out on this journey, I don’t think we could have believed quite how the serendipity of their debut album (“Fine Art”) coming out a few weeks ago and the film coming out at the same time. That real-time biopic has played out exactly like that. That’s kind of a cool thing. In terms of other cliches, I think that there are certain beats within “Kneecap“, which fit within the biopic genre. It’s very hard to completely avoid every sort of cliche. You have to be very conscious of them and try to subvert them any way you can, but it’s very difficult to completely remove yourself from anything involving the biopic genre. But I think that sometimes we overtly nod to it. We have some fun playing with it and doffing our cap a bit. And not just biopic things. Films that influenced the style of “Kneecap.” “Trainspotting,” there’s a very overt reference, JJ (DJ Próvaí) climbing into a bin, and that’s referencing the worst toilet in Scotland. Or “La Haine,“ the famous mirror shot in “La Haine“ with the gun. We do that with JJ again by putting the balaclava on. I enjoy the metaness of referencing films that I liked, and that influenced me. That’s the fun of cinema. Not everyone likes to do that, but nothing’s new under the sun.
PRÓVAÍ: He named his daughter after one of his favorite films as well. She’s called Trainspotting. (Laughs)
PEPPIATT: So, one of my daughters is called Amelie. And, the other one, she got a bit annoyed by that fact. She’s like, “Why did you name her after one of your favorite films, and you didn’t call me after one?” I said, “I don’t think Trainspotting would have been a name that you’d particularly want, to be honest, love. (Laughs)
As you were writing the script and, first of all, being convinced to make the movie, I’m sure conversations over pints only felt so real. They could kind of feel like they all talk at a certain point. Then you flash forward a few years, and you have Michael Fassbender, a crew, and a Sundance premiere. Was there a moment you guys remember feeling like, “Oh, we’re making a real movie. This is for real.”
MO CHARA: Maybe the day before filming. We all arrived because the first bit of filming was in Dundalk, so we had to travel to stay in this hotel. All the cast and crew were in the hotel lobby having a drink before bed to start the film the next day. That’s when it really sunk in that actually, fuck, there’s no escaping this now.
MÓGLAÍ: And we stayed off the drink for about two months, trying to be healthy and to try to look like we’re in good shape. But unfortunately, the night before the first day on set, we were staying in a hotel with a late bar. We drank for the first time in three months, and we were the most hungover we’d ever been on the first day on the set.
MO CHARA: We were so close.
PEPPIATT: I was static about this, obviously. (Laughs)
PRÓVAÍ: It really lent itself to the scene as well because they were supposed to be out of breath after digging this massive hole. So it kind of came across on camera that they were so fucked.
MO CHARA: Yeah, we did it on purpose. (Laughs) It was for the movie. We suffer for our art. Mass had actors.
PRÓVAÍ: Meth-head actors. But Rich has a great story about our WhatsApp group.
PEPPIATT: Yeah. We were flying over to L.A. last week, and I looked at my phone. When we first met, I set up a WhatsApp group just to talk about the film and plan things. That was set up in December 2019, and I called that WhatsApp group “Kneecap Goes to Hollywood“ as a little joke. So it was kind of crazy to be flying across to Hollywood with the film. Life is weird like that. Do you know what I mean?
PRÓVAÍ: Now we’ve won an Oscar and everything. It’s brilliant.
It’s amazing (Laughs) Yeah. And Naoise (Móglaí), you’re not just acting for the first time; you’re acting opposite somebody like Michael Fassbender. In what ways did acting opposite Michael help you up your game?
MÓGLAÍ: Yeah, it was a bit daunting at first to be acting beside Fassbender. I hear he’s quite experienced in the acting world.
HOWAT: He’s an up-and-comer.
MÓGLAÍ: He’s going to be big.
MO CHARA: He got his big break in this film.
MÓGLAÍ: He was absolutely starstruck when he met us. But after that, he got used to seeing us around the place. Our acting coach, Kieran Lagan, was saying the better the actor in front of you, whoever you’re acting with, the easier it is. (Fassbender) was very chilled out in his approach to acting. He would just, like, kind of switch as soon as the scene started. And he was very complimentary as well after it. It was actually easier on me that he was that good. It made it a lot easier for me. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but it worked out. I mean, it was a bit daunting in case it was shit. In case I didn’t come off too well there on the set sitting in front of Fassbender.
MO CHARA: It could’ve been awkward.
MÓGLAÍ: It could’ve been pretty awkward.
MO CHARA: Everybody upped their game when he was on set. Cast, crew, everybody.
MÓGLAÍ: The catering got incredible as soon as Fassbender came on set. We got, like, real forks and knives.
PRÓVAÍ: It wasn’t just beans on toast anymore.
MÓGLAÍ: Real plates. No more spam. It was straight-up gammon.
Well, one thing we haven’t talked about so far is the Irish language. Obviously, that is so deeply important to you as a group. JJ, you’ve talked about how you were so passionate about teaching the Irish language before your music career, before forming Kneecap. Do you feel like you’ve been able to do more for the Irish language through Kneecap than you were as a teacher?
PRÓVAÍ: Yeah. This is something I reflected on in the years after leaving the teaching. Well, not leaving, but being kicked off the sailing ship.
(Laughs)
When I was in the school, I really enjoyed it. Teaching Irish to people was something I was very passionate about. And a lot of the people that I taught went on to become teachers then as well, which is brilliant for me.
MO CHARA: Shows how old he is.
PRÓVAÍ: Now it’s not my job, in the teaching aspect. But now you can see that there are a lot more people being reached, not just people in Ireland, but outside of Ireland as well. And a lot of people are looking introspectively now at their own cultures, their own language, and starting to question their identity and digging into who they are and where they come from.
And a lot of these indigenous languages can be lost. And when they’re lost, they’re gone forever. They’re not coming back. This monolingual society will not serve anybody. This capitalist, globalist thing. It’s just going to make us all fucking wear gray suits and walk off the end of the world into death.
So it’s beautiful to have this tapestry of different languages and indigenous languages. People need to look inwardly and learn their indigenous language and…and all that shit. (Laughs)
Have you been helping Rich learn the Irish language as well?
MÓGLAÍ: It’s very hard to teach him Irish.
PRÓVAÍ: We need to teach him English.
PRÓVAÍ: Can you say the name of our first song (“C.E.A.R.T.A.”)
PEPPIATT: Cearta.
(Laughing)
MO CHARA: Fuck me. We’ve known him for years, and he still can’t say it. Our biggest song.
PEPPIATT: My English accent doesn’t help.
PRÓVAÍ: Rich went to Irish language classes and really upped his game for the film.
MÓGLAÍ: In fairness, Rich did. He went to Irish classes.
PEPPIATT: I got my first-level Irish qualification, I’d call it.
MO CHARA: And he speaks more Irish than most Irish people.
MÓGLAÍ: He made a big effort, and it helped on set. We had a lot of crew members who spoke Irish as well. So it was nice to have that on set. You know, a mix of people who spoke Irish and people who didn’t. Rich made a big effort to learn Irish because he’s from England-
MO CHARA: Don’t hold it against him.
MÓGLAÍ: -so it was very hard for him to learn Irish.
PRÓVAÍ: He’s an English cunt, but he’s our English cunt.
(Laughing)
PRÓVAÍ: I’ll not hear a bad word said about him.
PEPPIATT: I think we might have a record in our film; I’d like someone to check it for most uses of the word “cunt.”
MÓGLAÍ: You can’t say that on American TV.
Don’t worry. This is for the internet. You can say whatever you want.
PEPPIATT: There must be a Guinness Book record out there that’s ours for the claiming.
(Laughing)
MÓGLAÍ: Can someone bring that up on the screen, please? Most “cunts” ever?
I’ll fact-check that.
(Editor’s note: He didn’t fact-check that.)
Rich, the visuals of the movie are incredible. They capture the energy of Kneecap’s music so well. Tell me about working with Ryan Kernaghan, your DP, and crafting the visual style of the movie.
PEPPIATT: Ryan wasn’t someone I’ve worked with before. That was something that worried me at first, having a DP I hadn’t worked with. But I remember the first time I met Ryan to have a coffee and maybe discuss working together. He brought along a George Saunders book with him that he was reading. My favorite author is George Saunders. Instantly, I was like, “This is the man.“ If he likes George Saunders, then we’re going to get on. We spent two months before filming at my kitchen table, planning out everything. There were over a thousand storyboards for the film. We really had a great time trying to one-up each other in every scene. Like, who could come up with the craziest ideas for how we would approach it? Very early on, we knew that with the time and the budget we’ve got, we were not going to have the ability to do what you call your stand shooting, which is shoot a wide, shoot a mid, shoot a close-up, and also have time to do throw in creative shots as well. So we were like, “You know what, let’s take a big gamble here and dispense with some of the safety shots and just throw ourselves into some of the madder stuff.“ That just involves a lot of planning to really feel confident that you can cover a scene only with some of the more creative shots that we chose. It could have been a disaster. But actually, it all worked. We went into the edit and handed over the storyboards. The first cut of the film was just the storyboards, and it worked. So, not a huge amount has changed from the storyboards to the film you see now. And I think that’s not always the case. You know what I mean? Things get ripped apart, and Frankenstein-ed back together to make things work. And I’m very proud that our film hung together as we first envisaged it in the way that it did. It was kind of a cool thing.
And the reception has been phenomenal. I mean, the Oscars already won! What was it like watching this movie with the crowd for the first time? I’d love to hear each of your experiences with that.
MO CHARA: I mean, it changes depending on where you are in the world. Obviously the first time we saw it in front of a crowd was at Sundance in Utah, obviously. So that was the initial one, which was good. But I feel like because we kept it so colloquial, and we wanted it to be as authentically Belfast as possible; there are places like Glasgow that reallyunderstand it, like a lot of the references about the Orange Order and stuff. So I’d say watching it in Glasgow was a great experience. We’ve been to loads of Q&As, and we don’t really sit through the film anymore; we just arrive for the Q&A after. But myself and Móglaí went and sat in the screening in Glasgow, and it was like a fucking concert. They were on the chairs and everything. It’s one of those cities where it really landed well, which we knew it would have. So it was a privilege.
PRÓVAÍ: And in New York, we went to the Tribeca Film Festival. You know, Robert De Niro from “Shark Tale.“ Thank you, Robert. That was an experience. But it’s then that you kind of know that it’s going to be traveling internationally where the people get what’s happening. It’s not just falling on deaf ears. If you were to have a laugh graph between Belfast and America, you would get peaks and troughs at different points. In America, they’re laughing at different points, while in Belfast, they’re laughing at different points.
MO CHARA: Some jokes landed in certain places, like stuff that we didn’t think was even funny, the Americans laughed at. But then again, Americans laugh at anything.
(Laughing)
It’s true.
MÓGLAÍ: It’s a true testament to the movie that I think half the audience actually don’t know what we’re saying for most of the movie. Not just the bits in Irish but also the bits in English. I met a person after the film the other day, and she was like, “I actually needed subtitles for the English bits. I couldn’t understand what you were saying, but I loved it.”
PRÓVAÍ: But, because people don’t understand it the first time around, they go and see it like 4 or 5 times, which is goodfor sales.
MÓGLAÍ: Good for the Oscars.
PEPPIATT: That was the plan all along. Make ’em want to go to the cinema twice.
PRÓVAÍ: We don’t usually talk this quickly and…“ incomprehensibly.”
Awesome. Well, guys, that’s my time. Thank you so much for the movie. I had a great time and a great conversation.
*Mo Chara rips a gnarly burp*
PRÓVAÍ: Thanks Daniel.
MÓGLAÍ: Have a nice day, sir.
“Kneecap” is now playing in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics
You can follow Daniel and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars and Film on Twitter @howatdk
