Twenty-five years ago, I and some friends from school piled into a faded blue Ford Sierra. We cranked The Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication as high as it would go, and we drove off into rural Ireland, looking for Johnny Depp. 

Depp had come to Ireland to make Divine Rapture, a gentle, 1950s-set comedy with Marlon Brando and Debra Winger, about a woman who comes back from the dead and brings with her a season of miracles. They were filming in Ballycotton, a fishing village in East Cork that looked out over a picturesque island where a lonely lighthouse stood.

There was much excitement in the locality. Even in East Cork, Ballycotton felt out-of-the-way. But now Hollywood was knocking; paparazzi were staking out Brando; Depp and his girlfriend, Kate Moss, had been sighted nearby. Ballycotton – Ballycotton! – was on front pages everywhere. 

Fifteen miles away, in my home town of Midleton, a pal caught wind that Johnny Depp was living inconspicuously five minutes down the road. The rumour was that Depp was propping up the bar in Castlemartyr, where he was going by “Johnny O’Connor”. You may wonder how Johnny Depp could get away with this, but if you saw the inside of a Castlemartyr pub in 1995, you’d understand. Depp could have entered dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow or Hunter S Thompson, and the old men quietly sipping their Beamish wouldn’t have given him a second thought.

Unfortunately, wherever Depp was drinking, he soon made himself scarce. We searched the village high and low – it took about 10 minutes – but never had our “here’s Johnny” moment. This would soon come to feel like foreshadowing. Within the fortnight, Brando, Winger, John Hurt and the entirety of Divine Rapture would likewise disappear within a trace. 

After just two weeks of filming that July, the production ran out of money. The Los Angeles financiers who had promised to foot the $12 million budget failed to make good on their commitment. A few days later, the circus had left town and locals were referring, rather darkly, to “Divine Rupture”. A headstone was later erected on the main street: it reads “Divine Rapture, born July 10 1995, died July 23 1995, RIP”.

Brando, who’d dyed his hair bright red in order to play a small-town Irish priest, and was being paid $1 million a week, was the only one to see any money. All Johnny Depp got was a two-week holiday in Castlemartyr (where, in a surreal postscript, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian would honeymoon 19 years later). Only 20 minutes of footage was shot.

The biggest losers of all, however, were the people of Ballycotton, for whom the opportunity of a lifetime had gone up in holy smoke. As Hollywood exited stage left, bills were left unpaid. Many local businesses struggled for years to clear the debts. What should have been a moment of grace instead became another dark hour for a village which, as the regional lifeboat station, had seen its share of tragedies across the decades. 

“It was just two weeks, but we never thought it would come to an end,” says Peter O’Shea, a Ballycotton historian whose books include Well Here I Am in Ballycotton: A History Through Postcards. He was 18 when the Hollywood jamboree rolled in. 

“It was absolutely mad. I remember one day a busload of hairdressers were driven in. It was like trying to fit a city into a small village. After it all ended, it took a few years for Ballycotton to come back. A lot of the hotels and businesses took a knock. It wasn’t talked about for a couple of years.” 

“You have only to look at the effect of the Star Wars series when Skellig Michael in Kerry was used as part of the story of that series.” says Tony Harpur, another East Cork historian. “Ballycotton, and its surrounding area, would certainly have been highlighted by Divine Rapture had the film been completed. 

“Oddly, there was a Paul Newman connection to the area. His widow, Jean Woodward, is a descendant of the 18th-century Protestant bishop, Richard Woodward of Cloyne, and Jean brought Newman to Cloyne back in the 1970s to search for her ancestor’s memorial.”

The idea for Divine Rapture had come to Los Angeles screenwriter Glenda Ganis, when she read a 1977 LA Times article about a villager in Sicily who had “come back to life”. In fact, the woman had suffered catalepsy – “a medical condition characterised by a trance or seizure with a loss of sensation and consciousness accompanied by rigidity of the body”.

“Within an hour I had the basic outline,” she would say. “And these crazy, quirky characters.”

As is the way, her script pinged around Hollywood for years. Isabella Rossellini and Ben Kingsley were lined up to star at one point. Then Miranda Richardson and Michael Caine. Telly Savalas wanted to do it, with the backdrop switched from Sicily to Greece, whence his family hailed. But the eureka moment for London-based producer Barry Navidi came when it was suggested that he change the setting from Sicily to Ireland. 

This would allow him take advantage of generous tax breaks introduced by the then Arts Minister Michael D Higgins (today Ireland’s President), the man who lured Mel Gibson’s Braveheart to Co Kildare. To paraphrase BallyBrando, Brendan Byrne’s 2009 documentary about the fiasco: if Navidi supplied the Blarney, Ireland would bring the pot of gold. 

The final piece of the puzzle – the only piece of the puzzle, really – clicked into place shortly afterwards, when Navidi got talking to an individual who turned out to be Brando’s lawyer. 

“Marlon loves Ireland,” the producer was told. “He’s waited a lifetime to visit the Ireland of his dreams.” 

The biggest movie star of his generation was on board. More than that, he was happy to serve as an ambassador for the production. He worked his contacts book. Suddenly Depp – with whom Brando had struck up a friendship while making the 1995 rom-com Don Juan DeMarco – was interested, too. 

Soon Winger, John Hurt and Angeline Ball from The Commitments (1991) had signed up. Bankrolling the project was a mysterious production company, CineFin, which had pledged to deposit $12 million into an escrow account. (Later, when the promised fee failed to manifest, Winger’s agent in LA went to the escrow deposit company to collect her money. The address was an empty car-park.)

Meanwhile, very much not on board was the local Catholic bishop, John Magee. The Catholic church in Ballycotton stands on a hill looking down over the town, and its cinematic potential was obvious. “It was perfect, like an art director laid it out,” the director Thom Eberhardt said in the BallyBrando documentary. (He was a B-movie veteran who had suddenly found himself working with Brando.)

But filming at the church would require Magee’s permission. He was notoriously hardline, and had been a high flyer at John Paul II’s Vatican – and the private secretary to three Popes – before his surprise redeployment to East Cork.

In 1990s Ireland, the Catholic Church, was pivoting, albeit slowly, towards a more softly-softly approach, sensing that its position of prominence in society was under threat. In 1992 came the revelation that the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, had fathered a love child with an American woman, and had for many years refused to see the boy; this caused national outrage. A deluge of child-abuse scandals were to follow. The Church’s foundations were crumbling. 

Magee, however, wasn’t one for going quietly into the night. After a tense meeting at the Bishop’s Palace in Cobh, he vetoed the use of the Star of the Sea Church. This forced Navidi to look elsewhere. Fortunately, a Church of Ireland church on the outskirts of Ballycotton provided a perfect replacement. 

Magee wasn’t especially beloved in the diocese. Still, it was possible to empathise with his objections to a script which would have portrayed Ireland as a shillelagh-shaking backwater, brimming with credulous peasants. The hope had been that Divine Rapture would do for Ballycotton what David Lean and Ryan’s Daughter (1970) had done for Dingle in Kerry. In reality, though, the film would have become a Shamrock orgy in the later vein of Waking Ned (1999), or the toe-curling Amy Adams “comedy” Leap Year (2010). 

Divine Rapture’s big gag was that Winger’s character passes away having sex with her husband (who fails to notice in the moment). There is, however, a further hilarious twist. She isn’t really dead; she’s merely suffering from a rare genetic condition that makes it seem as if she has gone. A few days later, she snaps back to consciousness. She is in her coffin, and the parish priest – Brando – is saying Mass. 

Enter Johnny Depp as a journalist sent to investigate the incident, and John Hurt as the local doctor. Following Winger’s resurrection, the miracles continue. One of the few scenes actually filmed has Brando’s priest starring agog as mackerel rain down. In the first take, locals recall, Brando was wide-eyed and open-mouthed – only for a mackerel to dive straight into his mouth. 

“We used to sit on a wall watching them act. Some of the younger actors would need 20 takes or so,” says Peter O’Shea. “The director would be telling them what to do. Then Brando would get out of his Mercedes. He wouldn’t do a rehearsal. The director wouldn’t say a word. Brando would say his lines, get back in his car and away he went. 

“He truly was the person running the show. We were always talking in the background, and the crew would have to tell us to shut up. When Brando came along, nobody had to tell us to be quiet. He had that presence.”

The true miracle may have been that Brando was there in the first place. Six weeks before production was due to begin, his 25 year-old daughter Cheyenne had died by suicide. But he put his grief behind him and travelled to East Cork. He stayed at Shanagarry House, a late Georgian manor standing on nine acres and a former residence of local boy-done-good William Penn (after whom the State of Pennsylvania is named).

The unravelling of Divine Rapture, when it happened, was quick and brutal. “I felt… am I dreaming, is this a nightmare? What is this?” said Navidi, when Winger’s agent called from the empty parking lot. He gave the producer 24 hours to come up with her fee. 

“The escrow account was fake. There never was an escrow account,” Thom Eberhardt said in BallyBrando. “The people who were supposed to come through on this movie and deliver the financing had not only failed but had committed fraud. There was just no way it was going to come back.” 

“Nobody would pick it up,” John Hurt agreed. “There was Marlon, there was Johnny Depp, there was myself, there was Debra, there was Angeline – who was very hot at that time. You’d think anybody would pick up a $10 million picture. Even then it was not expensive – very reasonable. But nobody would touch it.”

Because of paparazzi, Brando couldn’t leave the house, which he lamented, as he was keen to have a moment with locals. The rest of the crew, however, mingled freely. O’Shea remembers house parties with John Hurt and Angeline Ball. But Depp, who was dating Kate Moss at the time, was rarely seen around Ballycotton. He preferred instead to live it up in Cork City.

“At the time, Marlon Brando probably wasn’t such a big star for a young person,” says O’Shea. “He hadn’t been in a big film for a while. But Johnny Depp drew the crowds. Crowd and crowds, whenever he stepped out.”

Wherever Depp was stepping out on the night we went looking for him, he proved elusive. But I should say at this point that when I checked my notes with my friends, their recollections were different. 

One has it that Depp was actually drinking in a pub in Midleton but had left by the time we got there. Another recalls us tracking down the house at which he was staying and, consulting an old phone book, locating a number. Obviously we rang it. A man with a weird accent answered. It wasn’t Depp. Unless it was Depp, and he was putting on a voice. It’s not unthinkable, is it? 

After driving around in our fruitless search for Johnny, we went to Ballycotton itself. It had been window-dressed for Divine Rapture to look like a twee village from the 1950s. Old shop signs had been put up, street-signs redone to look stereotypically “Irish”. A phone-box on the main street had been made period-appropriate. Shooting had stopped for the day. As is the way with fishing villages at dusk, the streets had a forlorn air, like a stage without any actors.

Years would elapse before I again set foot in Ballycotton. Brando was long dead; Depp had found a new calling portraying a cartoon buccaneer in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. With its hip restaurants, coffee shops and craft-beer pubs, the village was nothing like what I remembered. There was no quaint signage, no 1950s phone booth. It was as if they’d never been there at all.