William Sinclair's Tell it to the Fishes is a conspicuous short film; not only is it rather good, it also stars Gerard McSorley and Dylan Moran. The film's producer Carol Murphy talks to Moran about his film career to date, and his decision to work in this short in particular.

Picture it. A typical day on the Tell it to the Fishes film shoot: Wind, rain, bad food, bad moods, weeks of 5 hours' sleep a night, safety boats, crews in waders, and a celebrity cast in concrete blocks with the Atlantic sea doing its best to drown the lot of us!

Fishmongering
After four years of hawking the script of Tell it to the Fishes around award schemes it would be easy to think that it was virtually un-filmable. The story set on a beach with rising tides and actors up to their necks in sea water and up to their ankles in concrete. A pair of less foolhardy producers might turn a blind eye and ignore the clever and absurd humour of it when sense tells them that it will be tough in the making. But when you get that call from Dylan Moran saying that he loves the script and is on board you realise – at the end of a long stubborn journey – that it was worth the wait.

Halfway through his TV dinner (and our casting process) screenwriter and director William Sinclair received such a call, only to find himself agreeing with Moran on the aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities of plays by Samuel Beckett, which he had never read, whilst sounding more and more like Minnie Mouse as his voice raised several octaves in shock.

Up to that point, in our tenacious drive to get the film made, I suggested Sinclair send the script in for the Filmbase Short Film Award, which indeed he won. In the meantime, I had approached Laika Pictures Ltd in London, run by Canadian producer and director Chloë Mercier. Mercer loved the script, and had the nerve and unflinching drive to take on the behemoth and produce the film with me. We made an application for an NIFTC MINI award, and started casting proper, taking a dual-pronged approach in Northern Ireland and London. We had been given a shortlist of actors drawn up by our London-based casting director, Laura Dickens, and on that list sat Dylan Moran. Why would the Perrier Award-winning comedian, writer and lead performer in Black Books, want to work with a small unknown team of short filmmakers after having worked with the likes of Michael Winterbottom on A Cock and Bull Story and Michael Caine on The Actors? The answer was all in the script.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 111.