To Every Song Its Soul: A Conversation with ‘Power Ballad’ Co-Writer and Filmmaker John Carney

Before John Carney made films, he made music. He played bass in The Frames alongside Glen Hansard, toured, recorded, and eventually faced the fork in the road that every artist knows: go further down this path, or start over. He chose filmmaking, and somewhere in that choice, he found his subject. Not music as a topic, but music as a way of understanding what people carry inside them when the world stops paying attention.

Once. Begin Again. Sing Street. Flora and Son. And now Power Ballad. Each one is unmistakably his, not because they look the same, but because they feel the same. Films about ordinary people for whom music is not an aesthetic preference but something closer to a survival mechanism. Songs that function as confessions. Performances that stand in for conversations nobody could quite bring themselves to have. And always, the emotional payoff arrives through music rather than dialogue, because Carney understands that some feelings only exist in the space between words.

I have been following his work for close to two decades, and I am not the least bit ashamed to admit that every single one of his films has made me cry. That is John Carney's track record with me, and I suspect with a lot of people who have spent any real time with his films. Power Ballad is his most pointed yet: a film explicitly about who owns a song, who gets credit for a feeling put into words, and what it costs to be the person in the room that nobody thinks to credit.

I spoke with John about music as a driving force in his storytelling, ordinary people doing extraordinary things through song, where music-based films sit in the industry right now, and why Power Ballad is ultimately a film about every artist who has ever felt invisible.

This interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

Rahul Menon: John, I just have to say this upfront: you are probably the only filmmaker who has successfully made me cry at movies for close to two decades now, so congratulations and my deepest respects for that.

John Carney: I’m so sorry about that. [laughs]

Rahul Menon: That is a good thing, I promise.

Rahul Menon: I have seen Power Ballad twice and I absolutely loved it. I have been waiting years to tell you how much your writing and your films have shaped me as a writer. And I should also mention that among my small cinephile friend group back in India, Sing Street has a wildly devoted cult following.

John Carney: Hmm… I am curious, why do you think that is? The India connection to Sing Street?

Rahul Menon: I think it is because Indian films also carry that musical DNA in almost everything we make. And then on top of that, we love the emotion. We love the melodrama. We love the family relationships that run through all of your films. The brother in Sing Street, we all just fell in love with him immediately.

John Carney: That actually makes complete sense when you say it out loud. Please pass on my deepest gratitude to your cinephile friends. That means a lot, genuinely.

Rahul Menon: You have described yourself as always keeping your eyes open for music stories that go beyond the familiar boy-meets-girl-and-they-put-on-a-show structure. Power Ballad grew out of watching a 40-something dad in a Dublin suburb, and then you dovetailed that image with the wave of high-profile song copyright lawsuits. How did those two things click together for you into a story?

John Carney: There are a lot of musicians in Ireland. Every Irish person probably dabbles with music for a little while and tries to figure out if they are any good or if it does anything for them. And there simply is not enough room for all of them to be Riverdance or The Commitments or U2. There are a lot of musicians who do not know what to do with themselves, and that really appeals to me.

The idea of a man getting to a point where he is no longer young, but he is in a young man's game, and wants to do right by his family but also does not want to give up, that is a funny place to be. It has tension and drama and humor and pathos all at once. And then the idea of bumping into a version of yourself that you thought you should have been, or could have been, and the sparks that come off that meeting, that just seemed like a really fun and interesting way into this world. It is not boy meets girl. They are crushed together by this chance encounter, they have one really good night, and it starts a plate spinning in a genuinely interesting way.

Rahul Menon: Every John Carney film has this quality where music is not just backdrop, it is the emotional truth of the scene. Power Ballad is also fundamentally a film about who owns a song, who gets credit for a feeling put into words. Do you think songwriting is different from other art forms in terms of how personal ownership feels, and how much of Rick's pain is about the song versus simply being seen?

John Carney: That is a really interesting question. The very beginnings of copyright are connected to monks who would make these beautiful illuminated prints of the Bible. Someone would copy it and say: well, I am just writing what was in the Bible. But eventually somebody said: no, you are copying my work. There was a saying: to every cow its calf, and to every book its copy. The idea being that every copy of a book is the child of the original, and that relationship has to be recognized.

But copyright actually began with books, not with music. So, every artist in any field, whether it is poetry, painting, dancing, acting, feels that pain when they have not been acknowledged. A song does feel more personal, though. You are singing it. It is more of your heart. And if you think about how much blues music was simply looted by English and American artists who borrowed freely and never paid it back, something clearly had to be done. What we have now is not a perfect solution, but it does acknowledge that if you create something, people who borrow too liberally should be accountable. It is a tricky area, which is exactly what makes it such a rich story to tell. It just keeps going.

That answer, the monk and the manuscript, the calf and the book, reveals something essential about how Carney's mind works. He does not go to the obvious place. He goes back to the origin of the idea, to the medieval Irish principle that creation carries a relationship inside it. That relationship is what Power Ballad is actually about. Not the song. Not the fame. The bond between a thing made and the person who made it.

Rahul Menon: Paul Rudd is doing something genuinely special here. There is a quiet ache underneath all the warmth and the charm, every compromise Rick ever made living just beneath the surface. How did you find your way to him for this role, and what did he bring to Rick that you had not written or fully anticipated?

John Carney: There are lots of reasons you cast somebody, but in the end, it comes down to faces. There is no other face like Paul Rudd's. There is no other face like Nick Jonas's. The question for me was: can Paul's face register that particular kind of ambivalence? That much pain of having your family not fully see what is going on, of people not knowing he wrote this song? And likewise, Nick has this extraordinary poker face. I still meet Nick today and genuinely cannot tell what he is thinking. I am not sure he even likes me. Whereas Paul is an open book. So, you get these two brilliant faces in the film that both hide so much and reveal so much, and they brought nuances I never wrote. They brought things Peter never wrote.

Rahul Menon: And Paul is so inherently likable, just as a person, that it makes the whole thing hurt even more.

John Carney: That is exactly what I was trying to articulate. You put it perfectly! You look at him and you just think: no, not him! Exactly, what we were going for.

Rahul Menon: You co-wrote the screenplay with Peter McDonald, who also plays Sandy in the film. You have described the two of you as musicians who gave up music to do something else but still carry it with you. How much of Rick and Danny are the two of you quietly working something out?

John Carney: He is a musician, I am a musician. Music is something we gave up to do something else, but we still carry music with us. That is probably the most honest way to put it. We both know what it is to have music be the thing you thought you were going to do, and then find yourself somewhere adjacent to it, still reaching back. That shared experience gave us a lot of material. I am not going to pretend that Rick and Sandy are not somewhere in there.

Carney has spoken about viewing his films almost like albums, each one with its own sound and emotional key. With Power Ballad, he found a co-writer who shares the same unfinished musical biography, and the result is a screenplay where the grief of almost-made-it feels genuinely personal because, for both of them in different measures, it is.

Rahul Menon: There is a sequence in the film that absolutely wrecked me. We see Danny performing in a packed stadium with Rick standing right alongside him. You hear Danny singing the song, but when the camera pans to Rick, he becomes voiceless. Nothing comes out of his mouth. No dialogue, no explanation needed. That image says everything. How did that sequence come together, and how do you know when a visual idea like that is doing the work better than any scene could?

John Carney: We were negotiating in the script over what should happen in that moment. If he has this fantasy of singing and he goes to the mic, what is the worst thing that could happen? The mic could feedback terribly. His voice could come out completely off-key. A nightmare. I have had that nightmare myself.

But then we kept thinking it through and it became obvious: the worst thing that can happen is that nothing comes out at all. That he has been rendered voiceless. By Nick, by Danny in the film. It is the ultimate insult. It is like: he has cut out my tongue. I cannot sing. Not being heard is as bad as saying the wrong thing and being heard. People crave to be heard so desperately. That is why there are so many people online performing extreme behavior just to get a single like, a fragment of attention. There is nothing worse than not being taken seriously, and that felt like the greatest possible insult to the character Paul is playing.

Rahul Menon: You have spoken about being ambivalent about movies, and yet you keep coming back to this very specific kind of story: ordinary people carrying music inside them, trying to make something real out of dreams that did not quite go the way they planned. What keeps pulling you back to that territory?

John Carney: I genuinely have no mission statement. I like music and I like films. That is as far as my great plan goes. But music does things for me as a filmmaker that I cannot always do with words alone. It fills the gaps. It bridges the scenes I struggle with as a writer, the feelings that are too interior to dramatize. And these characters, the ones for whom music was the path not taken, they fascinate me because I know that road. I stepped off it to make films, and I have been making films about stepping off it ever since.

That admission, no mission statement, just music and films, is the most candid thing Carney says in this entire conversation. He has spent twenty years building a body of work that looks, in retrospect, like a coherent artistic statement. And his response to that observation is essentially: I was just following what I knew. That honesty, that refusal to mythologize his own career, is itself very Carney.

Rahul Menon: You have spoken openly about the journey of getting Power Ballad made, and how much changed once Paul Rudd came on board. Given your track record with Once, Sing Street, and Begin Again, what does that kind of journey tell you about where music films sit in the industry right now?

John Carney: No film is ever a sure thing. A lot of my friends assume I just call someone and the money appears. I really do not. This one took a long time to get financing for. We had all the ingredients we still have in the film. We just did not have the actors yet. It is very hard to get a film made. It is harder than ever to get financing for anything original.

Part of it is post-Covid. People are now wary of going to things they are not already fairly certain they will enjoy. I understand that. When I was young, I was prepared to have a bad night at an arthouse cinema, to be confounded and confused. I am not anymore. It is partly my age, partly having small kids and less free time, but it is partly Covid too.

And yet I am still amazed at how much I have to hustle and convince people. I am working in a very simple wheelhouse here. I am not promising explosions or everyone dies at the end. I am generally saying there is a song at the end and everyone is happy. And it is still hard. I genuinely do not know what to make of that.

Carney's final answer in this conversation is that he genuinely does not know what to make of the fact that a film promising a song and a happy ending is still a hard sell. He says it with the bafflement of someone who has had this conversation many times and never quite made peace with the answer. And sitting across from him, as a writer who has had his own versions of that conversation, I found myself nodding in a way that had nothing to do with politeness.

What Power Ballad understands, and what this conversation confirms, is that the work of being an artist is not just the making of the thing. It is the arguing for the thing. The proving of the thing. Carney has spent years making films about that negotiation, dressed in different genres and different cities, but always asking the same question: what do you do with a passion the world does not quite know where to put?

His answer, across every film, is the same. You make it into a song. You sing it in a small room for an audience of twelve. You play it like the twelve people matter, because they do.

For the last two decades, John Carney has been one of the most emotionally generous filmmakers working. Power Ballad earns its finale because he has earned the right to make it. The rooms keep getting bigger. And somehow, every time, the song still sounds like it was written for you personally.

Power Ballad releases in Theaters worldwide on June 5.