Where music takes him

When John Carney abandoned his gig as bassist for the Irish rock group the Frames to become a filmmaker in the early ‘90s, it was an agonizing decision. So there was a certain bittersweet quality to finding himself, 15 years later, once again riding on a red tour bus and cramming into hotel rooms with the band’s longtime lead singer-songwriter-leader, Glen Hansard.

The Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tenn., was stop seven on Carney and Hansard’s American mini-tour promoting their new film collaboration, “Once.” Billed as a kind of modern musical, “Once” unfolds mostly as a series of stripped-down performances between a self-doubting, brokenhearted busker and an Eastern European immigrant single mother (known only as “Guy” and “Girl”) as they develop a budding emotional connection through their yearning musical relationship.

The leads, Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who’ve collaborated musically in real life as the Swell Season, have been driving around screening the film and performing songs from the soundtrack. “We’re like an old vaudeville group of comedians like the Marx Brothers in the 1920s,” Carney jokes.

At first, Carney was simply asking his old bandmate for permission to use a few of his songs for a new romantic screenplay he was writing inspired by the loneliness of his long-distance relationship with a London girlfriend. Hansard still runs the Frames, who released their most recent album in February and are nearly as big as U2 in their homeland, and two of the songs he had written for their latest album ended up in “Once.”

But then Carney and Hansard’s enthusiastic back and forth led to Hansard’s writing original material for the soundtrack with Irglova, until an actor dropped out of the film and Carney finally had the palm-to-the-forehead moment when he realized that Hansard and Irglova should simply transfer their relationship to the screen. (Hansard wasn’t without film experience -- he costarred as a guitarist in “The Commitments.”)

There was a script, but for the most part Carney gave Hansard permission to ignore the specifics of the storyline and write purely from an emotional place; Carney would later use whichever songs fit the narrative he was trying to tell.

“ ‘If you can break that two pages of dialogue down to one line, or if you can blow that one line out to two pages of dialogue, just do whatever you have to do,’ ” Hansard recalls Carney telling him about the script’s scenes. “ ‘And I’ll be here to preside over it.’ ”

“It was more about tone than specifics,” Carney says of what he was looking for from Hansard’s songwriting. “The less direct those things are, the better. If it’s too specific a link between the song and what’s happening, it becomes more like a tacky musical.”

Even though many elements of his character echo his literal history -- he was a teenage busker and got a small bank loan to fund a demo -- Hansard says that on only two songs did he try to write from the character’s perspective.

“It has to be a pure expression,” Hansard says. “When I write songs, I’m only ever really singing about where I’m at. It’s the weirdest thing: The more you reveal your true deeper inner self, the more people relate to it.”

Indeed. The film won the audience award for world cinema, dramatic, at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and listeners on their current promotional excursion are responding positively.

“We’ll do something down the line together again, I hope,” says Carney. “If this tour doesn’t completely break us apart.”

A writer who always relates to the little guy

“I have a feeling for the underdog,” says Kelley Sane. “I always have. I relate to that powerlessness. I like looking at it and shining a light on it.”

In his timely storytelling, that connection with the little guy is coupled with a compulsion to place his underdogs at the center of raging national debates. As a prime example, Sane is about to deliver his first draft of an original untitled drama that addresses the intertwined issues of outsourcing and workplace violence.

Set in Indiana, the script follows a married American woman at a call center who is assigned to train three Indian men in her job. She begins to fall in love with one of them as rumors leak that the Americans’ jobs are in jeopardy of being shipped to India. As a result, the office roils with more tension than a Dunder Mifflin company retreat.

An exploration of “the illusion of power” also sustains the thematic thread in “Rendition,” an original script Sane wrote about a CIA operative who becomes entangled in the story of a man being harshly interrogated in Cairo.

These are issue-oriented stories that Sane hopes are told realistically, through their struggling characters. “I feel like we used to get a lot more of these stories -- maybe it’s just nostalgia, I don’t know -- back in the ‘70s or ‘80s,” Sane says, citing “Norma Rae” and “Silkwood.” “These stories that dealt with the middle class and issues that the masses have to deal with. We kind of left those people behind.”

When he rolls up to a Santa Monica restaurant on a Triumph Speed Triple motorcycle, Sane is sporting dreadlocks, a black T-shirt and jeans. A red-and-black, leather Fieldsheer biker jacket hugs his 6-foot-3 1/2 -inch frame.

Sane grew up in Baldwin Hills the youngest of six kids, and after graduating from Pepperdine he traveled around Europe playing competitive tennis. “I was more determined than I was good,” he says. “Which has actually helped me in writing. Because if you’re not determined in this business you are in the wrong business.”

While lounging in Paris, Sane began modeling and eventually taught himself photography. He moved to Milan, New York and Miami during the ‘90s to shoot men’s fashion for magazines, agencies and other clients, crossing paths with Charlize Theron and Justin Chambers (Dr. Alex Karev on “Grey’s Anatomy”) during their modeling years.

Although he had written seven previous screenplays, “Rendition” was Sane’s first official studio sale, for just under $1 million to New Line in May 2006. It was filmed in South Africa and Morocco this year and will be released in October. Shortly after “Rendition” went into production at the end of last year, Sane pitched Imagine Entertainment successfully on his outsourcing drama and then picked up an assignment to turn David Wise’s Vanity Fair article on the CIA into a feature called “The Shop” for Lorenzo di Bonaventura at Paramount. He’ll start writing that next month, as soon as he turns in the screenplay for Imagine.

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.