In hindsight, director Rich Peppiatt admits that making a fictionalized biopic about a hip-hop group rapping in Irish Gaelic should’ve been a harder sell. Seated with two-thirds of Belfast’s Kneecap in a room atop San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel last week, Peppiatt described the would-be challenging circumstances of getting such a film greenlit.
“When we first set out to do this, they were a local Irish hip-hop act,” Peppiatt said. “They weren’t signed, hadn’t released an album, and were rapping in a language not that many people speak. It doesn’t scream, ‘Let’s make a movie!’”
And yet, they have.
In a mere five years, Kneecap’s Mo Chara (aka Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh), Móglaí Bap (aka Naoise O Caireallain), and DJ Próvaí (aka JJ Ó Dochartaigh) have earned the best kind of infamy as a rowdy, rebellious rap trio keen on taking the piss while repping their rightful Irish heritage in equal measure. In the flesh, Moglai Bap and DJ Provai —unfortunately, member Mo Chara was under the weather—make it easy to see what the producers of Kneecap clearly saw too: charisma, courage, and cheekiness.
Blending childish jokes and outrageous drug stories with profound observations and proper convictions, the appeal of chatting with Kneecap is such that one even begins to understand how they managed to convince Hollywood to let them play themselves, even though they had no experience as actors. It didn’t matter. With the astute additions of major Irish talents like Josie Walker and Academy Award-nominee Michael Fassbender to round out the cast, Kneecap is already making headlines.
In January, it became the first film in the Irish language to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Audience Award. It’s only one part of what’s become a breakthrough year for the Belfast group, who also released their debut album Fine Art in June. With their gloriously daffy yet ultimately powerful biopic out in Bay Area theaters today, members Moglai Bap, DJ Provai, and film director Rich Peppiatt sat down to chat about making drug scenes look real, casting choices, and the idea of language as a weapon more powerful than bullets.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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48 HILLS Congratulations on the movie opening in the Bay Area last Friday. Are you excited for people to finally see this film?
DJ PRÓVAÍ Yes! It’s been a tsunami. It’s been amazing. We’ve gotten to travel around the world, meet some interesting people, do some interesting shit. It’s been a great crack to travel with the movie and we also did a few tours in the middle. We had a European tour a couple of weeks ago where we went to Denmark, Copenhagen, Madrid, and Lisbon.
MÓGLAÍ BAP It’s pretty satisfying to have a debut album and film out at the same time. I don’t think anyone’s ever tried that before. It was unusual territory for everybody.
RICH PEPPIATT He’s not joking. Lots of bands tend to peak at their local level, if you know what I mean, so there’s a lot of risk, in the sense of whether they can sustain it. It was always the hope that the movie would get as big as it could possibly be, and they would get as big as they could possibly be. That said, for it to have grown as it has and come together as it has over the last five years is more than any of us could have dreamed of.
48 HILLS Language plays a central role in both your music and your film. Was that the starting point for conceiving the story that eventually became this movie?
DJ PRÓVAÍ There’s like this idealized version of the Irish. People think it’s all orange jumpers and bowls of stew and visions of leprechauns dancing, but this gives it a new edge: It’s an urban setting, for the first time, because unfortunately, in the cities, the language is almost wiped out. It was wiped out in a lot of places. This film gives it a whole new edge, and you can see that.
RICH PEPPIATT The language wasn’t something we tacked on. Language is very central to the Kneecap path, and not just at a surface level, like they decided to rap in Irish because it makes it a bit different. The Irish language is their sole domain. It’s what motivates them. Irish is an oral language while English is more of a written language, so it was passed down through poetry, music, and storytelling.
Kneecap are now like a modern extension of that canon because, through their music, they’re telling a very modern story of life today. There really aren’t many artists who are doing that, and I think that’s why they’re having such a huge cultural impact. I think, in fifty or a hundred years, people will look back and see Kneecap as part of the history of the language.
MÓGLAÍ BAP For us, it was just natural to speak Irish together, so that’s obviously why we rap in Irish and why it makes sense that the film would be in Irish. Stylistically, I think this movie stands out from other movies because it represents this constant dance between the Irish and English languages and how it can work for you and against you.
Arlo, my father in the film, refuses to speak Irish to me to intentionally hurt my character because he wants to take his identity away from him. But Arlo does speak Irish to [his wife] Dolores, yet she refuses to speak it to him. There’s just this constant dance around the power of language. I think it also works as a metaphor for language in general, because when a country is colonized, the first thing on the agenda is to get rid of the language.
48 HILLS Was this a hard pitch to sell?
RICH PEPPIATT I could sit here and say we had a thousand doors slammed in our faces, but weirdly, as a man who has had many doors slammed in his face—and many of those as a filmmaker, as many filmmakers have—it had a really blessed path. People really got that this was something potentially different and culturally important from a very early stage. We also adopted a very DIY attitude. It was never: ‘Excuse me, sir, would you allow us to make this film?’ It was: ‘Yo, we’re making this film. Do you want to be part of it?’ We were always going to make it, even if we did it on our iPhones. It didn’t matter. We were making the film.
48 HILLS Fair to assume there was never any consideration of making this with other actors playing the group?
DJ PRÓVAÍ We approached Brad Pitt to play DJ Provaí but he didn’t have my physique. I also asked Morgan Freeman to play Moglai because of the sexy voice, but he wasn’t available, unfortunately.
MÓGLAÍ BAP Even if it was shit, we’re always going to do it because obviously that was the only way it was going to work. That was a risk for Rich and the people making the film, but I feel like it was a more massive risk for us, because if the movie was shit, I’m sure it would have a negative impact on our music careers, so we knew we just had to trust Rich and just give it our all and hope for the best, frankly.
48 HILLS I want to commend your film for its accurate depictions of drug use. Was that a priority for you?
MÓGLAÍ BAP Yeah. A lot of movies don’t hit the mark when it comes to replicating drug use except maybe that scene in Fear and Loathing when he’s on acid.
RICH PEPPIATT I saw a review where someone said, “Finally! A film involving drugs that seems to be made by people who’ve actually taken them.” A lot of times, films will rely on camera effects and filters and lens changes. There’s a little bit of that here but mainly, it’s not in-camera stuff that we do. It’s more like we’re suddenly doing choreography in a weird way or we’re putting people on a bus and dressing them like the bus. That’s just psychological stuff where everything looks normal but there’s actually something weird or slightly off about it.
48 HILLS The film climaxes with a rather infamous concert that you guys actually played at Belfast’s Empire Music Hall back in 2019. What was it like to recreate that moment?
MÓGLAÍ BAP We actually asked our fans to come down as extras. The movie people were too stingy, so we had to get our fans to be extras, which was incredibly fun for us because we could drink backstage but no one in front was allowed to have a drink and they had to listen to us do the same song for six hours. But after we wrapped that shoot, we did a small gig for them in one of the other rooms and it was a lot of fun. We got some extras to fill in as fans in another part but it’s never as good as actual fans because they’re just more authentic.
DJ PRÓVAÍ It was brilliant. It was during the week, and it was fucking morning time. They took a day off work to come and be extras for us.
48 HILLS Were you able to put your friends and family in little roles in the movie too?
RICH PEPPIATT My kids were in the film and my wife was in the film.
MÓGLAÍ BAP My dad is in it, and my cousins, and then loads of our friends are in the movie. It was shot, mostly, in Belfast, so we’ve got loads of shots of the area we’re from. We filmed next door to the school me and Mo Chara went to and all the people in the movie are from the schools that we attended. My drama teacher is in the movie too.
48 HILLS What do you hope people take from this movie?
DJ PRÓVAÍ The people we’ve met at the Q&A’s after these screenings all come up to us and tell us how this has opened up a whole new avenue for them that they’d never explored before. They talk about wanting to look into their own heritage. And this is people from all different countries, from the Philippines to Mexico.
It’s giving people the chance to look introspectively and realize that there are massive benefits to knowing your native language. It connects you to your people and there’s a lot of stuff hidden in languages that you lose with a monolingual society system. The main thing is that people are coming back and learning their own languages because of this, and, as a result, feeling a stronger connection to their own culture.
MÓGLAÍ BAP Obviously, the movie is centered around the Irish language, but it’s an international story. Hopefully, people will check about their own relationship with their culture and language and see the benefits of music or TV or movies or whatever in terms of spreading awareness and building self-confidence so people can feel prouder of where they come from. I think colonization is an international story, because there aren’t many countries that haven’t been colonized.
48 HILLS You’ve already had a banner year. Any idea what comes next?
RICH PEPPIATT To me,at this point, all bets are off. Kneecap has come so far already, so fast, and I expect them to keep pushing to higher levels. I really think that when the film comes out, and people hopefully fall in love with it as much as they have so far at festivals and things like that, that these boys could be playing stadiums. There’s absolutely no reason that that can’t happen. Hopefully, they’ll give me a free ticket when they get paid and still talk to me.
KNEECAP is now playing in Bay Area Theaters. More info here.
