Beyond the Blockbuster

With a programme that embraces arthouse movies, Irish film and shorts, UGC Cinemas are out to change the multiplex's popcorn image. Lir Mac Cárthaigh and Esther Terradas talked to Margaret Taylor, Managing Director of UGC for the UK and Ireland.

LIR: You've gone from nine screens to seventeen, it's been a massive undertaking, and now you're ready to open the doors. What do you think of the finished result?

MT: It's terrific. It's an amazing achievement. It's taken forty weeks, we've taken 500 tonnes of concrete and steel out of this building and we have traded throughout. We've completely built a brand-new cinema without shutting the doors.

ET: What capacity are the rooms?

MT: The rooms are variable. The biggest room has 400 seats, plus four seats for the disabled; the smallest has 91 and one seat for the disabled. What's amazing is that the rooms feel very similar in terms of whether you're in one of the smaller ones or one of the bigger ones. The experience feels the same.

LIR: How about the viewing experience itself. You have wall-to-wall screens?

MT: We call them 'fourth-wall' - floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall. There's over a metre of legroom and the best seats money could buy. We believe that those rooms are the heart of the cinema. We want to present films in the best way possible, whether that's sound, vision or comfort. We're also bringing in soft-subtitling and audio-description for the visually-impared and hear of hearing. That technology is developing in leaps and bounds, soft-subtitles aren't embedded in the film, they come separately on a disc, so there's a greater range available.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 96