How About Yule
Two years after his feature debut Short Order, Irish director Anthony Byrne has gone in a completely different direction for his follow-up. Jamie Hannigan talks to him about his latest film, How About You.

Jamie: Congratulations on getting another feature out so soon after Short Order. Most young Irish directors wait the better part of a decade before getting around to another film...

Anthony: Well, that’s something that I didn’t want to do. I was actually in the middle of writing something else and I was looking at the prospect of taking three, four, or five years to do another one and just wasn’t interested in the process of going through that again. Having done Short Order, which hadn’t worked out the way I would have liked it to work out... But it still delivered what I was looking for it to deliver, which was to keep going. And in that regard, it worked out well.

You weren’t happy with how the film turned out, or how it was distributed or...

I wasn’t happy with the way the film was distributed or what happened afterwards, you know. But... That situation was a very complex situation, it wasn’t just a simple thing of saying it was one thing or the other, it was a lot of different things that were going on. And it was just really the pitfalls of making independent films, you know?

Especially when the finance and production is spread out across Europe.

Yeah, everybody was involved in the package, I suppose, of putting it together, but it’s just very diffcult to keep going. But it’s not something I’ve been dwelling on, to be honest with you.

And you dropped The Empire of Sleep, the project you had been working on?

Yeah. I just had enough of it and didn’t want to go back to spending the time of raising money and doing all of that. It’s just... Forget it, you want to live and do other things. And I wanted to continue working as well. And that’s when I met up with Noel.

Is that how you became involved with How About You?

Yeah, I hadn’t met Noel Pearson before and I got a call from him and he had seen Short Order and liked it or saw something in it that he liked, or that he responded to. I had an office out in Ardmore at the time and he had an office there. And I just went up and met him. We sat down and he gave me the script straight away, just to read it. I read it and then we were talking for a while and after that he offered me the job. And then, we just began the process there.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 119.