Glen Hansard knows all about art imitating life and vice versa -- during filming of the romantic musical Once, he fell in love with co-star Marketa Irglova.

Hansard and Irglova (he calls her "Mar") are really the only characters in the delightful film, which concerns an Irish busker and a Czech immigrant who get together to write songs. Hansard and writer/director John Carney visited Toronto recently to promote Once, a film project which seems to be very much a family affair. Besides the relationship between the leads, the movie incorporates home movie footage of Carney's real-life girlfriend and includes a cameo from Hansard's mom.

Hansard and Carney have been friends for years and used to be bandmates. Hansard is the frontman for The Frames, and years ago Carney was the bass player.

"Then I got obsessed with making films, so I left the band," says Carney, "and for a long time I really felt like the fifth Beatle. They were doing really well and I wasn't making any money. I had to move back into my parent's house." Then Carney made a few award-winning short films in Ireland and a hugely successful TV series, and he was on his way. Hansard, meanwhile, was busy with music and The Frames and hoping people would stop asking him about his role in the 1991 movie, The Commitments.

He laughs about it now.

"It was a touchy subject because I was in a band. I didn't even audition, I was just a red-haired guy from the north end of the city, and I went along with my friend -- a red-haired actor who doesn't play the guitar -- to the audition and I got the part. I'm happy I did it, but what upset me later was that it was a month of my life, and I spent 10 years talking about it. Every interview I did for my band, that's all they asked about. I wondered if I'd ever crawl out from under the shadow of the thing."

Initially, Hansard wasn't going to be in Once, either. Carney had an actor along the lines of Cillian Murphy or Damien Rice in mind for the busker role. Hansard says, "Once is the absolute polar opposite of The Commitments. We made the story with two of my best friends, Mar and John, it was very intimate and simple and I'm very proud of it... The fact I was falling in love with Mar during the shoot, that adds some feeling," he says, a bit shyly.

The romance between Hansard and Irglova is new, but their musical relationship has existed for years. She has played with The Frames whenever they toured in the Czech Republic and she and Hansard recorded music together for another movie. They also have a CD together called The Swell Season.

But at the Sundance film festival, where Once won an important audience award, the guys discovered that nobody really wanted to know about the past or their previous work. Anyone who saw the movie wanted Glen Hansard to be some unknown guy and John Carney to be a first-time filmmaker, and we'd guess that's because a movie this good makes people want to believe they've discovered something brand new.

"People didn't want to know that I was in The Frames," says Hansard, "or that John had done other films. They kind of wanted this movie to be his first. They wanted us to be just two friends from Dublin. You could tell from the questions -- they'd ask, 'So you made this movie for nothing?' and, 'You never did anything before?' And we were saying, 'yeah,' because that's what they wanted to hear."