Writer/director David Gleeson made his feature debut with coming-of-age comedy/drama Cowboys & Angels. His follow-up couldn't be more different. Paula Shields talks to him about the challenges of bringing an African/Irish story to the screen in The Front Line.

Paula: Fans of Cowboys & Angels will find The Front Line a very different movie. Do you think they have any points in common?

David: Yeah, well, the attraction initially of this film for me was that it was very different. It would have been relatively easy, I think, to do another colourful teeny film, but after your first film, if you're planning to build a career, you want to move on to do different things and not be immediately pigeonholed. I did ask myself the same question as we got deeper into it: what is the attraction with this film for me? I realized very soon that the themes are pretty similar. It's about an outsider once again who it is struggling to belong, struggling to fit in, but failing miserably.

How did your experience as director of the two films compare?

Both were very tight shoots and budgets – even though The Front Line was double the budget of Cowboys & Angels, which was produced for just over one million euro. This was about two and a half million euro, but a much bigger film.

Speaking of finances, your wife raised the finances in a pretty short time?

Yes, in about seven months, and she was pregnant for most of it! Cowboys was tough but it was still a very happy shoot. It was down in Limerick - I'm from Co. Limerick – and the city was very proud to have this upbeat teen movie being made by a local boy, you know? So there was a lot of support and the city bent over backwards. We got permission to do all kinds of crazy stuff like close down the city centre and fly a helicopter up along O'Connell Street. The city really opened its doors to us. We were allowed to do things in Limerick that we would never have been able to do in Dublin.

Everyone had warned me that shooting in Dublin is a different story; it's quite jaded with film production, even traffic is a nightmare. Limerick is a small self-contained city but it's still got a big city feel, and that was all part of the attraction. Even with simple things like moving locations; some days we were able to move locations five times in Limerick, but you move location in Dublin and that's your day gone.

Ultimately it was about being meticulously prepared. I storyboard everything. When we go into planning I'm able to produce shot lists, never more than 25 shots a day because chances are you won't do any more than that. It was a very tough shoot and I could never quite figure out why, because the actual physical production went quite smoothly, but every day I was very much on edge. Shooting on a low budget meant the margin for error was very small, but that pressure was there for both films. Cowboys was quite a happy movie; young actors who aren't big stars yet, although I'm sure they will be. On this film we were dealing with very heavy subject matter, very intense performances. The whole film was quite intense, quite edgy, so that was always reflected in the shoot so it wasn't a laugh a minute. But we got through it.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 112.