Bad Trip
Shrooms director Paddy Breathnach talks to Sheena Sweeney about his influences, the mushrooming Irish film industry and the magic of a little encouragement.

Five American college students arrive in Ireland to go on a camping ‘trip’ with their old college buddy Jack. According to Jack, Ireland has the best magic mushrooms in the world, but in the best horror-flick tradition, psychedelic hallucinations soon turn into premonitions of death and teens start dropping like flies...

Sheena: Paddy, you say you were really keen to make a horror movie – why was that?

Paddy: I think ever since I did Ailsa a long time back, one of the things I was very interested in, even though it’s a long way from horror, was creating an atmosphere and a sense of characters in isolation. Moving with characters on their own, tracking them and having a very close connection with them, that’s something that horrors do all the time and I suppose that’s what I was interested in. It’s one of the genres that the images are often very beautiful and provocative, in a way that you don’t always get in drama. Sometimes drama can be beautiful in a more picturesque way, whereas horrors can have a melancholy about them or have tones that you might not get a chance to explore otherwise.

There hasn’t been a really successful horror movie here yet, although Isolation was one of the best. Why do you think that is?

I haven’t seen Isolation so I can’t really comment on that and whether it cracked it or not, but I suppose, you know, it’s not just horror it’s a wide range of things. In any movie industry anywhere, for any ten or fifteen films that get made, one of them cracks it, one of them is good. And the reality is that still not that many films are made in Ireland – Irish filmmaking is still quite young. In Hollywood you make a film – for better or worse – and you get all that received wisdom. You can react to it and say, ‘I don’t agree with you, I’m going to subvert that and go a different way,’ or else you can accept it and use it, but either way it helps clarify things and it pushes you on. At home I think we’re still at the stage where there isn’t received wisdom – we’re still reaching for those sorts of things. But I think all these things are gradually getting better and better. But why there haven’t been that many successful horrors... I just don’t think there’ve been that many attempts. You had Dead Meat a few years ago and then Isolation...

About the Irish film industry, what do you think of it now, do you think things have begun to change over the last while?

Well, I haven’t seen everything but I think maybe a few things, you know, Lenny Abrahamson’s stuff and John Carney in a funny way maybe, because all those people have been around for a while, they’ve been part of doing stuff for seven, eight, nine years, and now they’ve done a few things, learnt a few things, they’re coming back with a bit of wisdom. There’s some experience being brought to things. And maybe it’s a good time in that sense. I hate the politics of these things... For me the film business is a collaborative thing between writers, directors, producers, actors, with everyone bringing something to the table. Possibly, at the moment directors are bringing a little more to the table or maybe there’s a confidence in the directors.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 119.