In Conversation: ‘The Boat’ Filmmaking Duo Luke and Jake Morgan
by Rohan Connolly
Based on a heartbreaking true story, The Boat (2024) is an intimate look at the decisions a father must make when his youngest daughter contracts leprosy. I got the chance to sit down with Director Luke Morgan and composer Jake Morgan who worked alongside the Mission to End Leprosy to speak about their latest short film.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you talk about why this was a story you wanted to tell and one you wanted to work on?
LUKE: So the CEO of the Mission to End Leprosy, which is a charity headquartered here in Ireland, is a man called Ken Gibson. And Ken Gibson, when he was beginning his journey as a philanthropist, met Dhuckia—the real-life Dhuckia—and Dhuckia had been cured of leprosy. She was a grown woman and she told him this heartbreaking story—her story which was that her dad when she was younger brought her to a leprosy hospital, told her he would return the next day, and then never did. So she had lost all contact with him, she had no idea where he was or if he was still alive.
So this film stops precisely at the point of our knowledge and it’s an act of creative interrogation or emotional resonance surrounding our feelings at having heard the story and the shock and sorrow we felt at there being leprosy in the world still today. Especially given that it’s so curable and it’s so cheap to cure. So it was born of our motivation to create a compelling emotional narrative that would reach people’s hearts.
We never met the real Dhuckia and I think her identity is still being protected because there’s still a taboo around leprosy in certain parts of the world where it’s prevalent, you know? It’s looked upon like a curse so people who present themselves or who are known to have had leprosy find it very difficult to rejoin society. So the film is based on Dhuckia’s story but unfortunately, it’s the story of many people in parts of the world today that still live under the thumb of the oldest known communicable disease.
Most of your films and other projects take place in Ireland or tell Irish stories so I wanted to ask what it was like taking on this project that was in a completely different language, takes place in a completely different landscape, and what that process was like and if there were any significant challenges or special memories that stick out to you from working on the project.
JAKE: Yes, our stories generally are Irish-related and I think the connection with leprosy is that the headquarters of the Mission to End Leprosy is situated in Dublin, here. But also the cure for leprosy was founded in Ireland as well. So that was the Irish connection with this story that we latched onto but it was definitely out of our comfort zone to go to another country that’s a totally different climate and different language altogether. Those were challenges for sure.
I’m sure Luke, being the director and directing the cast who didn’t have any English and Luke didn’t have any Nepali and we didn’t always have a translator on set, he had to rely on hand gestures and looks. I think it boiled all of this direction down to just the essence of what he was trying to communicate and—just knowing from doing these interviews with him over the past couple of weeks—he says it’s made him a better director because he wasn’t allowed to embellish his direction with language or anything so it boils down to the essence and gets the point across as efficiently as possible.
LUKE: It was also thrilling to be able to showcase a lesser-known language in Nepali. Jake and I are very passionate about the Irish language. We do a lot of work through the Irish language and Nepali is not a language that we see often on screen. So you talk about differences but there were actually quite a lot of similarities. There was also the weather that was very similar.
JAKE: Well, it was very hot so it was kind of tricky to lug equipment from location to location . . . but the rain was certainly—we tried to avoid monsoon season with the scheduling of this and so we kept it tight towards the end of monsoon season but that year they had an extended season so we just got stuck in rain. For the most part, the shoot went smoothly but there was one scene in particular we had to reschedule three times and it was nearly at the point where we were like, “Are we gonna get this scene? Do we have to figure out another solution?” And that was the bonfire scene in the film.
The other similarity that I noticed just from being a composer and being the composer of this short film was the music in Nepal and the Irish traditional music—there’s a lot of similarities and I went to town with that in the score, trying to fuse them together and use some Nepali traditional instruments but also use Irish traditional instruments as well. Like . . . we’ve got bodhráns but they’ve got a percussion instrument called a madal and it’s kind of similar, it’s hand percussion. So there was loads of similarities and that was really exciting for me as a composer.
What was the process of figuring out how to fully develop the relationships [Dhuckia with her sisters and father] and show those small moments and decide what to show and what not to?
LUKE: You have to be very efficient in a short film with the relationships that you show and it’s more often about what you choose to leave out than what you choose to put in. So we wanted the focus of this film to revolve around Dhuckia and her father but we also needed to show the stakes from Raoul’s point of view—the father—and to show that he had a family to think about. And although Dhuckia was his favorite, when it came down to it he needed to make the choice that he needed to make in the context of having other daughters that needed his priority as a father and as a parent. So we thought about the other characters in how it was going to embellish the storylines of both Dhuckia and the father. That was where we came from because if you get into the territory of showing the story from multiple different perspectives you start to confuse or lessen the power of the single narrative so that’s not to say that the characters are two-dimensional—of the mother and the sister—but it was more that they were being used as pawns in order to properly represent Dhuckia in the story and Raoul.
JAKE: They had the best time—all the “sisters” I suppose—they were best friends by the end of the shoot which was really exciting and I don’t know if you know but Dhuckia and Raoul, Tejuswee and Shree, are father and daughter in real life. That was a great start for us connection-wise and for casting.
LUKE: When you’re younger as a filmmaker, you kind of think—I did, anyway—I thought a good enough director can get an amazing performance out of anybody. It doesn’t matter who they are but the older I get and the more experience I have, the more I realize that actually so much of it has to come down to casting. Casting is literally like 80% of it. If you cast the characters properly with the right actors—because the audience are going to make up their mind about whether they believe a certain actor in a role in an instant. Whether they consciously realize it or not. That’s why I think Shree, in particular—the father character—he has such a happy, jolly face and demeanor about him that, initially when we wrote the script, the dad character was very dour and was a forlorn character but casting Shree with this very happy face made all the difference because it just makes it so much more heartbreaking at the end when you see this man’s heart being wrenched from his chest. We feel for him and we cry for him as much as we cry for her.
JAKE: It’s like what they say—in the orchestra, the bassoon is the clown of the orchestra but it’s also the saddest instrument. So it’s like this dual role. That’s kind of how I see Shree in this film.
LUKE: I don’t want to discredit the film or Tejuswee’s performance because her performance is incredible but telling a story about a cute young girl who gets into trouble and something bad happens to her and she becomes a victim—it’s very easy to pull on the audience’s heartstrings with that. But telling the story from Shree’s point of view, that requires a huge depth of skill as an actor to win an audience over. There’s a lot more nuance involved with creating that emotional connection with an audience and luckily for us, we just had an amazing artist on our team in Shree. He was just an incredible actor and so was Tejuswee and the two of them together just really made that relationship very vivid and memorable.
One of the most poignant scenes for me was when they were on the boat discussing the wish Dhuckia made and how she brings up the wish later in the film as well. That childlike kindness of wishing for this man that they find to get better, how did emphasizing that wish—her kindness and selflessness—seem so necessary in the film?
LUKE: Well, there’s a lot of imagery around myth and wish-making in the film in the form of the paper boat. The burial costumes of eastern cultures—particularly Indo-culture and religion in parts of Nepal—would be, when somebody dies, their body is burned and they are set on the water. So this imagery was already very present in the film so wishing and wish making—that’s a very Irish thing as well, the spiritual idea of giving something to a well, a holy well—pre-Christian even—in order to receive luck or healing.
I think it is very heartbreaking—especially the scene that you speak of, but also a later scene where he’s holding her and they’re both talking about something that isn’t their situation, but there’s an awareness that what they’re actually talking about is closer to home. She’s saying, “Will the man get better?” and he says, “I hope.” What is actually going on there is there’s an acknowledgment happening between Dhuckia and her dad that, okay, she’s now aware that there’s something wrong with her—by talking with the proxy of this old man, that’s her way of expressing her hopes that she will get better and that’s also quite Irish, too because in Ireland, we never really like to speak about things or emote on things directly.. We find it much easier to speak in metaphor or to something that is further away from ourselves in order to get through a truth that is sometimes in front of our eyes. This is all speaking to the unique blend of Irish culture and Nepali culture that exists in the film. Obviously, Nepali culture more prominently but the Irish culture in the influence of the storytelling and the fact that we are Irish and that’s what we were bringing to the table—that sort of cultural inheritance and those ideas and the symbiotic ways that those were meeting.
But to get back to the scene in the boat, we wanted to show that Dhuckia wasn’t a selfish person, she was very selfless, whereas some children might have looked at the man with leprosy, and be horrified or be off-put or disturbed by this man, Dhuckia felt an inclination to help or to make him better. When you see a child that’s that selfless, it really does bring a kind of purity to their character that makes it all the more devastating when the end of the film comes along and she gets taken away from Raoul.
You worked with the Mission to End Leprosy, so what do you want audiences to take away from the viewing experience as a call to action or what they can do?
JAKE: There’s a couple of takeaways we want—first of all, we want to spread awareness for the issue because this [was] our experience when we first brought up to people that we were making a film about leprosy. They’d ask us, “Does leprosy still exist?” Because people view it as kind of a condition of Bible times but it is still prevalent throughout the world in various countries. The other one would be hopefully to direct people to the Mission to End Leprosy’s mission which is to end leprosy [because] there is a cure available and it’s relatively cheap and easily accessible. It’s just that a lot of people don’t know how to get it or don’t know that there’s a cure, even. And we also would like for the film to spread awareness among communities where leprosy is present that it’s not a curse, it’s a condition that isn’t as contagious as one would think. Just to reduce the stigma or even end the stigma seen upon leprosy in those communities.
LUKE: A different set of filmmakers possibly would have made a documentary or promotional video with stats and figures and stuff, but we were more concerned with using our skillset. As narrative filmmakers, we wanted to try and speak to people’s hearts rather than their heads and we do believe that cinema can change the world in that regard. Cinema . . . gives the audience an opportunity to step into the shoes and step behind the eyes of characters and for the first five minutes you might see subtitles and you might see a skin color that’s different to yours or you might see a culture that you’re not familiar with, but after five minutes passes, you’re reaffirmed of the inalienable truth about humanity—we just all want the same things and we all need and crave the same things . . . It’s an inherently emotional medium and that’s where we felt the power of The Boat lay and the potential of The Boat lay.
Finally, I’d like to open the floor for what audiences can expect to see from you next or what you might have in the works or hope to have in the works.
LUKE: The project that has the most momentum behind it at the moment that we’re involved in is one called Augusto, Augusto! and it’s a co-production between Brazil, Portugal, and Ireland. We’re the majority partner on the film so it’s our idea and we’ve started the ball rolling with this. We’ve gotten EU funding to basically pay for the development of the project and Screen Ireland are now on board as well so we’re working with a Brazilian screenwriter called Bruna Trindade and that’s just a hugely exciting project because it kind of brings all the elements of other projects we have worked on in the past. The kind of sentimentality, the comedy of those pieces, and marries that with the epic internationalism of The Boat. The Boat is a lot more of a tragic story than what we are used to telling or associating ourselves with. So, that’s our next project in earnest but there’s other projects as well that we have in development. We do a lot of theatre as well. We’re working with a composer in Portland, Oregon called Kurt Rosenberg and his magnum opus is a musical called For the Lack of Laura so we’re currently organizing a tour for that in the UK and Ireland so that’s really exciting as well.