Making a Scene
David Collins, Kirsten Sheridan, Martina Niland, John Carney and Mark O’Halloran get to grips with the Irish film industry. Words by Eamonn Gray.

Martina Niland: John, I came across a quote of yours in a Film Ireland article by Tony Keily. You spoke about the way you like to make films – using a more improvised, free kind of filmmaking, and not being rigid in terms of rules and budgets. You mentioned something in that context saying that you feel there’s a lack of a director culture, or film scene, here in Ireland at the moment. Can you expand on that for us a little?

John Carney: Well, I come from a music background, where you’d walk into Temple Bar and you’d meet musicians and there’d be competition – you know, healthy competition. There was a really active scene, and I like that. I like that whole Andy Warhol kind of thing, decades of time in which a certain thing is happening. But it’s just not happening in film in this country – and it’s never happened. I mean there’s Filmbase here, but it seems to me there’s never been that kind of feeling, that culture of directors or of people who make films. And I love that Danish idea – the culture of filmmakers meeting and talking without a contrived government thing, it’s much more social. I miss that because I’ve just got no one to talk to today except – well, I hang out with actors a lot, which is great, but we seem to produce writers and good actors on a world stage, but in terms of directors... I don’t think we’ve created that thing where it’s ok to quit school and become a film director, or leave your job and become a film director, that it’s a valid thing to do. It should be less about training and more about smoking out directors from different areas of life.

MN: Is it fair to say then that the film culture we have is focused on the individual? To say that, as a director and a writer, it’s about making that product, breaking out, being successful, and that’s the way we define being successful, as opposed to a nurturing of a film culture in Ireland.

Mark O’Halloran: There’s no film industry in Ireland – there’s a group of disparate individuals who make films pretty much locked away from each other. There’s no centre to it, and that’s why it’s become very difficult to market, for instance, because there’s a huge divergence of styles going on... There’s a lot of confusion as to what exactly is trying to be made.

Kirsten Sheridan: It’s interesting, you know, the Danish marketed themselves amazingly with the whole dogme thing. They did an amazing job, whether they were trying to market themselves or it just happened naturally – it doesn’t matter. They did it and they did it well and it would be great to see... But as you say, there are so many different individual styles, it’s very hard to find one and say: this is Irish film, this is the new wave.

MOH: Didn’t the Danish experience come out of their central school of filmmaking, which was massively funded? They also spent huge amounts of money. I met the head of the Danish Film Board at a film festival and he said: ‘Well, what we do is, we make films for the Danish market – that’s what we do – and if it works outside of Denmark that’s fine.’ We don’t do anything like that.

KS: Irish people don’t go to see Irish cinema. If they did, you might try and think: ‘What are our own stories we should tell?’ rather than always trying to pander to Hollywood. Whenever I go to anything – to give a talk or meet students – the only thing I can say to them is stop trying to be the next Tarantino, or the next whatever. The stories that are real and true are the ones in your own backyard.

MOH: It’s incredibly difficult to sell a first or second time film made on 1- or 1.5-million budgets to any market. It’s incredibly difficult. People don’t know... You just can’t get it into cineplexes. It’s incredibly difficult to ask the Irish film industry to do what they’re asked to: to sell small films to a mass market. I think there needs to be a creative approach to how you market Irish films as a package to the home market.

JC: Unions need to take a step back from filmmaking in certain areas. We need to make really cheap films, then I think Irish people will go to see them. Do exactly as the Danes or the French do and make ten or fifteen films a year for ourselves; if one strikes on the international market, that’s great! People would start to go, especially if you’re dealing with the IFI or cineplexes where there’s a season on and it’s an exciting thing.

KS: Or you look at Channel 4. They would give two million to something and you end up getting an amazing film. It doesn’t necessarily get or need a theatrical release, but the support of the broadcaster is huge in that scenario.

MOH: I think there needs to be a big crossover between film and television because it’s the only way to make a sustainable career if you decide to stay in the country.

David Collins: I think it’s really interesting, the Danish experience. Almost every director had a career initially making films for television. There was a huge premium on script and story; a lot of writers were directors themselves and a lot of directors were writers, and it was really immediate. I think that dogme was actually a marketing ploy that’s probably broken down since then, but there’s still sixteen or twenty films made in Denmark every year and they get funding from Denmark and other Scandinavian countries, there’s this kind of crossover. You don’t get that even between Ireland and the UK. If you have an Irish script and you’re trying to pre-sell it to the BBC or Channel 4 you need either a fairly big actor attached or a director that one of these people is interested in for whatever reason. You’re not actually making the story for yourself and hoping it breaks out. It’s really difficult. Recently we made a film where we raised all the money in Ireland: Eden. We didn’t show that script to anyone outside Ireland because nobody would have got it. There’s no point. We need to be making twelve of these low-budget films a year and rté, with the IFB, needs to be putting up half the budget for these films, and these films need to be more spontaneous in their production. I think we’re losing that spontaneity by over-developing, but sometimes it creeps through, like Once was just about as spontaneous as it gets

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 121.