The Oldest Man in the Sea: Finding Pat Murphy on the Coast of Ireland

Sometimes you go into production knowing exactly what you're going to make.

Other times, you go looking for a story.

More than a decade ago, We Are Films traveled to the southern coast of Ireland with a very simple objective: find someone interesting and make a short documentary about them.

There was no client. No script. No casting. And no predetermined subject.

We just wanted to find a great story.

Eventually, we arrived in Castletownbere, a fishing town in West Cork, and started asking around.

Again and again, one name came up:

Pat Murphy.

If we wanted a story about the sea, people told us, we needed to find Pat.

There was only one problem.

Pat wasn't there.

He was out fishing.

Waiting for Pat Murphy

We ended up waiting in Castletownbere for three days.

Pat was already in his 80s, but while we were waiting around town trying to find him, he was exactly where he'd spent much of his life: out at sea.

Eventually, he returned.

We met him, began talking and quickly understood why everyone had sent us in his direction.

Pat had spent a lifetime on the water.

He had left school at a young age to fish with his father and eventually became a pioneering figure in the fishing industry around Berehaven. Decades later, at an age when most people had long since retired, Pat was still going to sea.

Often alone.

That became the foundation of our short documentary, The Oldest Man in the Sea.

Sometimes the Best Documentary Stories Aren't Planned

There's a temptation in documentary production to arrive with everything figured out.

A treatment. A shot list. Interview questions. A narrative structure. An idea of exactly what the finished film is supposed to say.

The Oldest Man in the Sea was almost the opposite.

We had gone to Ireland looking for something we couldn't necessarily describe yet.

Once we met Pat, our job became much simpler:

Listen.

We didn't need to manufacture a story around him. He already had one.

The challenge was capturing enough of it to allow an audience to feel as though they'd spent a few minutes with this remarkable man on the coast of Ireland.

A Lifetime Connected to the Water

What we understood at the time was that Pat had spent an extraordinary amount of his life at sea.

What we've learned since makes his story even richer.

Pat came from a fishing family and left school at 12 to work alongside his father. He later worked with the Commissioners of Irish Lights aboard ships servicing lighthouses before returning to fishing.

He became an important figure in the development of the local seafood industry and was credited as the first skipper to begin fishing for shrimp in Berehaven.

But none of those accomplishments were really why we made the film.

What interested us was the man himself.

Here was someone in his 80s who continued going out onto the Atlantic because fishing wasn't simply what he did.

It was part of who he was.

Filming Small

The production itself was deliberately minimal.

We filmed The Oldest Man in the Sea with Canon 5D cameras, a small set of prime lenses, a slider and a Glidecam.

There wasn't a large crew or elaborate production infrastructure.

That was an advantage.

For a story like Pat's, we didn't want the filmmaking apparatus to overwhelm the subject. We needed to be able to move quickly, observe and allow the environment to dictate what happened.

The harbor.

The boats.

The weather.

Pat.

The simplicity of the production allowed us to concentrate on those things.

It's a philosophy that has stayed with us at We Are Films even as our productions have become substantially larger.

Production value matters.

But production value isn't the same thing as production size.

Sometimes the most cinematic thing you can do is simply put the camera in front of the right person and know when to get out of the way.

Ireland Became Part of the Character

Castletownbere wasn't simply the location for the documentary.

It was part of Pat's story.

The harbor, fishing boats and coastline gave us the visual context for understanding his life. His connection to the place felt inseparable from his connection to the sea.

That's one of the reasons we continue to love international documentary production.

Traveling somewhere with a camera forces you to pay attention differently.

You're not simply looking for a beautiful backdrop. You're trying to understand why a story belongs in that particular place.

With Pat, the answer was everywhere around us.

A Three-Minute Film That Lasted Much Longer

The Oldest Man in the Sea is a very short documentary.

But one of the things we've learned over the years is that the size of a film has very little relationship to the life it can have.

We made the film because we found someone fascinating and wanted to tell his story.

Years passed.

The documentary continued to circulate online and remained part of the We Are Films body of work.

And then, more than a decade after we stood with Pat in Castletownbere, something unexpected happened.

We learned that Pat Murphy had died in 2026 at the age of 97.

In a tribute to his life, Irish maritime publication Afloat wrote about Pat's decades at sea, his contributions to the fishing industry in West Cork and his pioneering role in shrimp fishing in Berehaven.

And it mentioned our little documentary.

A film we had made simply because we'd arrived in an Irish fishing town and kept hearing the same man's name had become a small piece of the historical record of his life.

That's one of the things we love most about documentary filmmaking.

You don't always know what you're preserving when you're filming it.

Why We Still Make Documentaries

Today, We Are Films produces work at a very different scale.

Our crews travel around the world. We produce national commercial campaigns, corporate films, narrative projects and large multi-location productions.

But the fundamental reason we started making films hasn't changed very much.

We're interested in people.

We're interested in places.

And we're interested in the moment when you discover a story that you couldn't have written beforehand.

The Oldest Man in the Sea didn't begin with an agency brief or a creative deck.

It began with us arriving in a small fishing town in Ireland and asking a question:

Who should we talk to?

Everyone gave us the same answer.

Pat Murphy.

They were right.

In Memory of Pat Murphy

Pat Murphy died in 2026 at the age of 97 after a lifetime connected to the sea.

We only spent a small amount of that life with him.

But we're incredibly grateful that he allowed us to point our cameras in his direction and preserve a little piece of his story.

More than a decade later, The Oldest Man in the Sea remains one of those projects that reminds us why we became filmmakers in the first place.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is go somewhere unfamiliar, start asking questions, and listen when people tell you there's someone you need to meet.

We Are Films is a New York-based film and video production company producing documentary, commercial and narrative work throughout the United States and internationally. From small documentary crews to large-scale international productions, our approach begins with the same thing: finding the story worth telling.