A bizarre mix of sex, food and Technicolor musicals, Short Order is quite unlike any other Irish film you may have seen. Jamie Hannigan spoke to writer/director Anthony Byrne.

Jamie: Tell me a little about your background.

Anthony: Well, I actually did a course in DIT; it started there. I enjoyed that a lot, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do; it was more of a two-year gap while I figured out what was the best way to get into the film industry. After that I was just writing scripts for short films, and I'd been put in touch with Brian Willis, the producer with Igloo Films. He'd just started up about a year previously, and was doing documentaries. He'd done one short film (or something like that) at the time. We met up and got on really well. We decided to do short films and see if we could get the money and do the Short Cuts route. It took a few years to get up there.

I think when you start you have to spend a few years doing them on the cheap before you build up your street-cred, or whatever it is, with the Film Board, where they sort of take notice of you. And then they became very supportive of the stuff that we were trying to do. And that was pretty much it. I did three short films with Brian. The first one (Clubbing) I thought was really, really good. I thought that was going to happen and go places and it just died a death. And I saw it again – not recently, but recent enough – and still went: (lowers voice) 'You know, that was a fucking good short film, I wonder what happened there?' Because it just didn't take off. And the second one (Freaky Deaky 10 To 1), nothing happened with that and I was going, Jesus!, y'know, I'm really getting a bad run here. Then, with Meeting Ché [Meeting Ché Guevara & the Man from Maybury Hill] as well, it was about a year to the day before that started to happen. And then it just took off, and that sort of delivered a lot of things.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.