Princeton University Athletics
Monday TigerBlog - Once
August 03, 2026 | Tiger Blog
It's been nearly 20 years ago when Princeton head men's soccer coach Jim Barlow asked TigerBlog if he'd seen the movie "Once."
TB doesn't remember the exact conversation, though he's pretty sure it went something like this:
TB: No.
JB: Watch it. You'll love it.
And so TB did, and he very much did. In fact, he went to Blockbuster and rented the DVD. If that sentence confuses you, then you're way younger than TB.
"Once" is a great movie. If you've never seen it, "Once" is like no other movie TigerBlog has ever seen. It was filmed for $112,000, without permits, using street scenes in Dublin and apartments belonging to the members of the cast and crew. What came of it was a movie that earned more than $30 million, something that doesn't count the Broadway musical adaptation.
The movie won an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The show won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
Here is the scene from the movie where the song that won the Oscar was first heard:
The movie tells the story of two characters who are never named and are simply "Guy" and "Girl" on the final credits. They are struggling through difficult lives in Dublin, and their shared love is music.
TB has now seen the movie dozens of times, he'd guess. He also saw the show on Broadway and saw it at McCarter Theater, where Princeton men's lacrosse player Sam Gravitte — then a senior — played the guy.
The original "Guy" in the movie was Glen Hansard, an Irish singer with the Frames. Hansard played an acoustic guitar and sang with an incredible range, and he performance in the movie was just about perfect.
The news came last week that Hansard had died in a motorcycle crash at the age of just 56, and it was more crushing, at least to TB, than the news of the average celebrity death. It took TB back to when Barlow first mentioned the movie and how certain he was that TB would like it.
The movie was released in 2007. A year later, the Princeton men's lacrosse team did an international trip to Spain and Ireland, staying in Dublin on the back end of the trip.
TB went back yesterday through the file of photos he still has from that trip. They were a reminder of how much TB enjoyed that whole experience, especially when he got to the photos of the magnificent beauty of the Upper Lake at Glendalough.
TB had not yet started doing his daily blog back then. In fact, it was just a few months off, though he had no way to know it at the time.
Instead, he chronicled his experience that afternoon on Grafton Street for a story on goprincetontigers.com, which he shares below.
First, RIP Glen Hansard. That's a loss that really hurts. Go watch "Once," if you haven't already.
For those who don't know, "Once" is the story of an Irishman who works in his father's vacuum repair store during the day and plays his guitar and sings on the streets of Dublin at night. He meets a young woman from the Czech Republic who is also a musician, and the movie is the story of their relationship. It won an Academy Award this past year for Best Original Song for the song "Falling Slowly." The man who plays the lead is Glen Hansard, who sings with the famous Irish group The Frames.
More background on the movie includes the fact that it was filmed on the streets of Dublin, and the entire movie took 17 days to shoot. It was done with next to no money and has gone on to make a fortune. The film's maker had no permits to shoot, so all of the street scenes were done from across the street, and the people on the street at the time had no idea they were in a movie.
With that background, it was off to try to find these locations. How hard could it be? Everyone in Dublin must know where this movie was shot, right? It had to be legend by now. Right?
Wrong.
The first 10 people randomly asked had never heard of the movie, let alone knew where it was filmed. It was only after going to Google that it was learned that the street scenes were on the famous Grafton Street. So off to Grafton Street it was. To get to Grafton Street from the Jury's Inn requires a right turn out of the hotel and then a 10-minute walk down Dame Street to Trinity College. Once at Trinity, go right, and the first street sign tells you that you are now at the intersection of Grafton Street and, ironically enough, Nassau Street.
Grafton Street is a walking street, filled with shops and shoppers. Somewhere on this street, Hansard stood and sang, and much of the story of the movie revolved around that. Certainly now somebody would know where exactly all this happened.
Nope. Not the first four people asked, but at least they had the excuse of being from Toronto. Not the women who worked at the flower stand, not a guy named Adrian who worked in a gift shop, nobody. Not even the four-man singing group from the Czech Republic who performed halfway down the street and hawked their new CD. They were pretty good, too. Could it be a coincidence that they were singing somewhere around where the street musicians in the movie did?
"Yeah, never heard of it," their manager said. "It had a Czech singer in it? Cool."
The first scene of the movie includes a song by Hansard, who is standing outside of one store with his guitar case open as people throw coins in. A young man comes and swipes the case and then sprints under an archway into a park, where Hansard tackles him. The park had to be at the end of Grafton Street, so finding it was simple.
St. Stephen's Green Park was a busy place in the early afternoon. There were people everywhere, including Mark, who buys and sells cars and was born and raised in Dublin. He was sitting on the grass in the exact spot where Hansard made his tackle.
"I saw the film," Mark said. "Loved it. Don't remember that scene, though. It was right here?"
Yes, right there. With the park found, it was time to zero in on the storefront that had been the background for Hansard and the filming spot across the street that was out of sight to passersby.
Crossing back onto Grafton Street, there was Linda, a radio station personality who was doing "man on the street" interviews. Her "man" on this street was actually a 17-year-old named Maude, who became the first Dubliner who actually saw the movie and knew where it was filmed.
"Right over there," she said. "Right in front of the Dunnes store."
Yup. That was it. Dunnes was a short distance away. Inside the entryway stood John Doyle, the store security manager. Surely John knew the reason his store was, uh, famous.
"Right on this spot," John said, poking his head out of the store and pointing straight down as he faced to the right. "He stood right there and sang."
Did John know a movie was being filmed?
"No. There are always people singing out there. I think I was on holiday when they filmed."
As for that filming, there were four large windows opposite the Dunnes, any of which could have hidden a camera.
And that was that. The locations of "Once" had been found, though with very little help from the locals. They had to be kidding, right? When "IQ" or "A Beautiful Mind" were filmed in Princeton, they couldn't record a frame without having the entire town know where it was.
The Dubliners had to have known all the time. Maybe they all got together and decided to mess with the tourists, and maybe they forgot to tell 17-year-old Maude.
