Sweet Fifteen
Michael Open interviews Simon Perry, CEO of BSÉ/IFB, as the Board reaches its fifteenth year.

This April Bord Scannán na hÉireann/Irish Film Board, in its current manifestation, is fifteen years old. We thought it would be interesting to ask where it has come from and where it is going, so we took a trip to its elegant but not excessively opulent office in Galway to hear from the horse’s mouth. In this case that means Simon Perry, its Chief Executive, who took over at the Board a couple of years ago. His background is in the uk film industry where, in the ’80s, he was a producer (1984, amongst others). More significantly, he was head of British Screen, the UK ’s film industry promotion body during the ’90s, where he was responsible for backing, amongst other fine films, The Crying Game.

Michael: What sort of image of Irish cinema did you have before you took up your post here?

Simon: When Rod Stoneman leaned on me hard to think about the job, which he did, I started to look at a lot of Irish films – all of the filmmakers other than those I knew – and that came down to just two that I really knew. And then I realised that there was quite a difference between those two and everybody else, in terms of what they were trying to do. Those two [Neil Jordan & Jim Sheridan] – I guess I’ve seen all of their films over the years – I have followed them strongly, and to me they were always Irish cinema. I was wondering when other voices would appear. Well, one voice had already appeared, and that was Lenny Abrahamson, who had made Adam & Paul. He was not altogether unfamiliar to me, coming from Britain, but at that time other Irish filmmakers seemed to be trying to work in the genre groove. You know, they were making romantic comedies, they were making horror films, and they were not very interesting. The values with which they were being made – the cinema values, or mise-en-scène values – the direction of them seemed to strongly belong to TV and have no sense of the visual.

When I arrived, to return to the question, I perceived that filmmakers were being overled by producers to compete in what was perceived as ‘where proper grown-up films belonged’. In other words, they were trying to go head-to-head with Hollywood. I suppose when I came here I wanted to start talking up what seems to me is valuable, which is an author cinema we can be proud of. I was sure that there were filmmakers here who had a strong signature and something to say, who had a way of looking at the world that they could transmit visually and could create their own cinema vocabulary that would be striking and would stay in people’s minds. Works that people would want to see, and would be entirely Irish.

To talk about Lenny, for a moment, his second film [Garage] is a wonderful film and I am sure he will make more great films, but I hope that the next twenty years of Irish cinema is not going to just be Lenny Abrahamson. I think and hope there is an understanding that to go head-to-head with Hollywood in genre cinema isn’t going to get Ireland anywhere.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 121.