Studs is acclaimed playright Paul Mercier's first feature film. Paul Farren met with him about the journey from stage to screen and the problems and joys of bringing his play in front of the camera.

Studs, the opening film of this year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, is the tale of a bottom-of-the-league Dublin football team who try to shake off their loser status and win the league. An adaptation of the director's play, which was a big success for The Passion Machine during the mid-Eighties and early Nineties, it features the likes of Brendan Gleeson, David Wilmot, and Liam Carney.

Paul F.: Studs was originally a play you wrote and directed for The Passion Machine [the theatre compnay established in 1984].

Paul M: It was a play in 1986, and it didn't finish its theatre run until the early Nineties, so the story is twenty years old. Some of the people in the film were in the original play in different roles; there was a lot of that when we were doing the stage play. People as they got older started doing older roles, one or two people became captain; it was like it was a football team. Newcomers came and, if they stayed long enough, they might get responsibility of being captain of the team

What were the difficulties you faced adapting a piece that was highly theatrical in its execution?

It was a funny journey; it was the first time I had done an adaptation. I had done two shorts beforehand [Before I Sleep (1997) and Lipservice (1998)]; those shorts were straight screenplays, so what I was doing was writing in film language. I wasn't changing it, transposing or anything like that. But Studs is such a theatrical play, twelve men never leaving the stage, and the language used was a poetic language, you had to use the language to create the game. But when you're going to make the film you don't do that, you're down to trying to create real football. It was a different challenge making a football film; I was looking for the cinematic equivalent of what I was doing on the stage. The initial temptation is to go all special effects, but we avoided that.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.