Glen Hansard on the Making of Once

“So we made a few basic decisions, and one of the basic decisions that worked best was to keep the cameras on a long lens, so you’d have two cameras about 70 yards away from the acting. For two reasons: One, the people who were watching us busk, and the people who were just passing by, wouldn’t know there was a film being made. And two, it meant that I didn’t have the camera up in my face, and neither did Mar… So for me and her, basically what it ended up being was almost documentary-style filmmaking where we just improvised a lot of scenes. He never really shouted, “Action!” Because you were doing it on the street, you had to do it in kind of a stealth way.”

— Glen Hansard in the Q&A with The Frames