Bloom's Odyssey

Lir Mac Cárthaigh talks to Sean Walsh about Bloom, his adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses.

Lir Mac Cárthaigh: This is your first feature film as a director, why chose to adapt Ulysses, which is notorious for its difficulty?

Sean Walsh: In '93 the IPU at RTÉ, God love them and bless them, were looking for ideas for a television series based on books. I was driving home and I thought "Jesus, no one has ever read Ulysses." I think it's especially true in Ireland, you know. We all have the book at home, we get to page fifteen or something like that and we give up. Then we're in pubs saying how wonderful Joyce is, greatest writer of all time, but we haven't read the damn thing! That idea has driven me and having thought of it I just couldn't stop.

It's ten years since you originally began the project?

I began when I was thirty two and finished it when I was forty two so, yeah, ten years. I'm still working on it! That's eleven years work on it at least. Given that I'm forty three that's a quarter of my life. We've had so many set backs. I mean set back after set back after setback. Every time we got a set back we would just take a deep breath and keep going, because that's the only way you're going to get it done.

I couldn't find a script or adaptation credit on the film itself or on any printed list credits. Was that deliberate?

That's because it was me! And you know having produced it and directed it I actually didn't want to put down "and written by" too. The adaptation is mine, albeit that James Joyce wrote the words. All I had to do, though it was difficult, was extract what I wanted. But the original genius is Joyce's.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 96