Conor McPherson’s a natural at the supernatural

There’s an early scene in Conor McPherson’s “The Eclipse,” which opens Friday, that will bend your mind while making your hair stand on end.

Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds), a widower with two young children living in an old port town in Ireland, is sleeping one night when he hears a noise. As he goes down the stairs into the darkened living room, he sees sudden movement and a human shape. It’s the ghost of his father-in-law (Jim Norton), who, oddly, is still very much alive.

“I wanted it to be supernatural,” said McPherson, the award-winning Irish writer-director of such acclaimed plays as “The Seafarer,” of his new movie. “But I wanted it to be something I hadn’t seen before, and the ghost of someone who still is alive is something I hadn’t seen.”

While it may seem strange that an acclaimed playwright would employ genre elements that usually star in far less cerebral movies, it’s worth keeping in mind that Ireland is, of course, a country steeped in storytelling about ghosts, haunted homes and banshees.

McPherson, who also directed “The Eclipse,” follows in the footsteps of such famous playwrights as Clifford Odets, David Mamet and John Patrick Shanley who have written and directed for the big screen.

Born in 1971 in Dublin, McPherson began working in theater while attending University College Dublin. A three-time Tony nominee, he’s best known for his plays “The Weir,” a chilling drama set in a pub where the denizens relate ghost stories, and “The Seafarer,” about a booze-filled card game at the Dublin home of two brothers. His latest theatrical work, “The Birds,” is based on the Daphne du Maurier classic story.

McPherson had directed a few films earlier in his career, but without the “high degree of technical accomplishment” he tried to achieve in “The Eclipse.” “The films that really inspired me visually were Stanley Kubrick’s . . . ‘The Shining’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ Visually, I tried to emulate those films. What I noticed about his filmmaking is that he would often shoot a scene in one continuous take and allow the character movement.”

Ironically, there wasn’t a specter in sight in McPherson’s original draft of “The Eclipse.”

“A friend of mine who is also a playwright, Billy Roche, was writing a book of short stories,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “He was e-mailing me each story as he finished them.”

There was one story that piqued McPherson’s interest and that became the basis for “The Eclipse.”

“It was set against the background of a literary festival,” he said. “It concerned a teacher who is assigned to drive a writer around for a few days at the festival and he becomes obsessed with her. Billy’s story was how his life unraveled over the next few days. In the story, he’s married and has two kids.”

McPherson decided to let his wife, artist Fionnuala Ní Chiosáin, who composed the movie’s score, read his early adaptation of the story. Call it women’s intuition, but she soon realized it wouldn’t work as a film. “She said in a story, you can get inside a character’s head, but in a film, if people are just watching this guy become obsessed with this other woman and he’s married and has kids, women won’t like this guy. You need to get rid of his wife somehow.”

Not long after that, the character of Michael became a widower.

“The story took on this strange dynamic then and went off in a whole other direction,” McPherson said.

In the final version, Michael teaches woodwork at the local school and dabbles in writing himself. Volunteering for the festival, he is assigned to help escort a writer named Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), who just happens to write about ghosts and the supernatural. Michael begins to feel guilt when he finds himself attracted to the writer. Aidan Quinn plays a successful married novelist who has had an affair with Lena and tries to rekindle their romance at the festival.

“It’s this strange love triangle,” McPherson said. “The skeleton of the original story is still there, but this whole other supernatural aspect changed the tenor of the story.”

Michael’s ghostly visions, said McPherson, may actually be “his manifestations of his own guilty feelings.”

“He is locked in and not processing his life,” McPherson adds. “He is looking after his kids and he’s pretending everything is OK. But all of this [grief] has got to be realized.”

McPherson wanted the audience to be genuinely scared during Michael’s encounters with the ghost of his father-in-law, which become increasingly threatening and violent throughout the film.

“It’s [about] making us feel what Michael is feeling at the moment -- absolute shock and terror,” he said. “He doesn’t really seem to be able to explain it to anybody. We sort of really sympathize with him.”

Anchoring the film is Hinds’ touching portrayal of Michael, which earned him the best actor award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival. The Irish actor is generally cast in period pieces such as “Persuasion” or playing dark characters in films such as “Munich,” “Amazing Grace” and “The Nativity Story.” But he is probably most familiar to American audiences for his performance as Julius Caesar in HBO’s series “Rome.”

McPherson got to know the man behind the villain when they did “The Seafarer” on Broadway. “He has this tremendous striking appearance which often gets him cast as playing domineering and evil,” McPherson said. “But he is a really lovely person who has a warm heart. He’s an everyman in this.”

Hinds said he felt an instant connection to the character. “I sort of knew this man,” the actor said. “He is much more like me in real life. He’s an ordinary guy.”

Clearly referring to his role as the mercurial emperor in “Rome,” Hinds said he was thrilled to play a character of more manageable ambitions, someone who wasn’t “trying to run the world.”

“I’ve got to say, working with Conor, I get taken on a journey, some of which is very scary,” he adds.

“The Eclipse” was shot in the seaside down to Cobh, in County Cork. Its medieval architecture adds to the unsettling atmosphere of the film. “It’s one of the world’s most deep natural harbors,” McPherson said. “I shot it there because there are a lot of old period buildings that gives it that nice, spooky, gothic kind of feeling I was looking for.”

And there could be a few ghosts roaming around Cobh. “It was actually the last town the Titanic sailed from on its journey [to America]. It was built up in Belfast and sailed down and around the coast of Ireland and stopped at Cobh. It has a kind of ghostly feeling there.”

susan.king@latimes.com