Drive, He Said

Originally printed in Issue 75 - April/May 2000

With his film Accelerator, director Vinny Murphy is almost unique inbeing a working Irish actor who has directed a feature film. He began his acting career in Dublin in the early Eighties in a YEA (Youth Employment Agency) scheme drama workshop run by Peter Sheridan and Maggie Byrne. The first film he appeared in was Pat Murphy's Anne Devlin in 1984, and subsequently he took the lead in Fergus Tighe's Clash of the Ash in 1986. He has always preferred the screen to the stage and, to date, has appeared in almost forty films, from no-budget shorts to John Boorman's The General.

He has been directing for several years, a natural progression from his drama work with a group of youngsters in Jobstown, an area on the outskirts of Dublin marked by social and economic marginalisation. With this group he directed a version of Hamlet, H For Hamlet and three pieces back to back - Football, Trouble and Hairspray. Several of the young actors in Accelerator have been developing their skills with Murphy over the years and have recently begun to forge their own independent careers as screen actors.

Murphy spoke with Ted Sheehy on his return from France where Accelerator won two prizes at the Valenciennes Film Festival. The film can be seen by Irish audiences at the Dublin Film Festival on April 8 and when it goes on release nationwide later in the month.

Recalling his early curiosity about filmmaking while acting in Clash of the Ash Murphy says, 'It was fantastic, I learned loads on it, because I knew nearly everyone. Whereas on Anne Devlin I was terrified, I didn't know what was going on. I remember going to the launch of Clash, the first screening of it. I was convinced I was going to be awful in it, that I wasn't going to be acting again. When I saw it, that's where I got my respect for editors.'

Murphy had started out with an interest in music, an interest which had led him initially to take part in the drama workshop (City Workshop) run by Sheridan and Byrne. He continued with music, teaching drumming, while acting gradually took over as a career. In time he found himself teaching drama as well. 'Coming towards the end of City Workshop I ended up doing some of the teaching myself.' After similar work in Darndale he got the call to Jobstown, 'A nun called Marie Hughes organised it, out of school hours, for kids who were maybe going to get chucked out of school, and it grew from that. As it built, a load of people wanted to do it and I ended up having to have auditions for it. When Gavin Kelty [Whacker in Accelerator] started he was ten years of age and he's 22 now.'

At the same time he was working professionally as an actor and found a dislike for the stage. 'I did three plays, there was a Macbeth schools' tour, Stephen Ukridge in the Peacock, and The Rock and Roll Show by Mick Sheridan. After that I didn't do theatre again, I didn't like it. In City Workshop we were involved in devising the shows and it was the same group of people for a long time. But then the same thing every night? Not being able to change the words? You'd get a script and that'd be it, that's what you'd have to say...? I didn't like it. By that stage I was mad into the screen thing anyway.'

The introduction of a video camera to the work in Jobstown came when they devised a stage version of The Wizard of Oz. 'We shot a thing on video, the beginning of it, on the streets of Tallaght - because Dorothy comes from Tallaght instead of Kansas, and she walks into a hall, and then we cut to the play, that we shot. So, I was going to do another project with them and they turned around and said, "We want to do something serious this time," and I said ok, I'll give you something serious, and we did Hamlet. I was going to do it for the stage and then I thought, why not shoot it?

'So H For Hamlet started out as being a very small thing, on s-vhs with just a few crew, but it became huge. It was a total freebie but we had forty-odd people on set at times. It was a huge art department job, we changed a brand new school... Then the year after that I decided... I was hanging around with a load of filmmakers who were not making films and I used say to them, why aren't you making something... shoot it on video, whatever (there was this thing, "It's only video"!)... so I swore after H For Hamlet that the following year we'd do more. I had three different groups out in Jobstown and I thought I'd do a short film with each. So that's when we did Football, Trouble and Hairspray. He makes the point that his work in Jobstown wasn't a form of socially developmental group leadership. 'It was never like social work or anything like that. All my stuff out in Jobstown I just said to them, and I always do say it, "As far as I'm concerned you're the same as professional actors and that's the way I'm going to treat you and it's how I expect you to treat this."

'But they were incredible doing Football, Trouble and Hairspray. Somebody, looking at the actors' call sheets said, "You don't have the addresses for the kids, what if they don't turn up?" And I said, "If one of those kids doesn't turn up or is late, during the entire shoot, I'll buy you a drink for the rest of your life." We arrived out the first day, about six o'clock in the morning, and every single one of the kids was standing there saying, "And where the fuck were yous, we've been here for ages." And it was like that all the time. And the ones that are still going, working in films, people are amazed at how professional they are. Even if they've done an audition they didn't get, the directors will still say how professional they are and how giving of ideas they are. They're brilliant workers.'

Speaking of the tenacity of some of the group in staying with the process and with acting Murphy cites Gavin Kelty's faltering first steps to the screen. 'At first he used to survive literally just five minutes in the class. He'd come in, I'd say, "Shut up!" to somebody or, "Stop messin'!", whatever, and he'd turn around and go, "What're you lookin' at me for, it wasn't me!", and I'd say, "I'm not lookin' at you, what're you on about?" and he'd be gone, he'd run out. Then it got to be ten minutes, then fifteen, and so on. They always felt though they were good at it. There were kids who got one job or two jobs and it went to their heads but the ones that are still doing it now, it didn't, they learned from it.

'I remember we brought them out for a meal after H For Hamlet, a few weeks after the shoot, and Tiernan MacBride was there because he was involved in it, and one of them said to me, "I bet, any one of your mates, if you told them what you're doing they must have said, you fuckin eejit, what are you doing that for, you'll never get anything out of them out there." They were just so proud that they'd done it, that they'd done a good job. And that's a lot to do with what keeps them going.'

Aside from his own firm belief in them and an ability to see the 'good stuff as it emerged, Murphy doesn't find it easy to articulate his way of working. 'I get very involved...', he says, and struggles with further explanation. I ask if it's a kind of instinctual rapport, a directness, that mightn't be possible with middle class kids who'd be more reserved. 'They'd more to prove,' he suggests. 'They'd come into class and be seen as "headcases", whatever. And when they'd get someone saying, "That's good, lets do that again now", they'd realise they could express themselves this way and that it's a good thing.

"The way I work?, to me it's very simple. I just... if someone's doing nonsense I'll tell him. In the early days I tolerated a lot, stuff maybe that other people wouldn't have, but I stuck with it. The other thing is that they're very good, do you know what I mean, they're very good actors. The kids watch a lot of television and films and it comes to them very naturally, to do screen performing as opposed to theatre. After four or five years the new kids were coming into a way of working so they picked it up very fast from the older ones. So as the years went on it was much easier for people to come in and show they had talent. It was a terrible thing it wasn't able to keep going. One of the girls out there, Kate Cleary, she was teaching two classes and she's brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but she couldn't teach in the school because of insurance. Unless you're a properly, fully qualified teacher you can't get insurance.'

While on FilmBase's writer/producer/director CE Scheme Murphy's first directing work shot on film - the short film Late - came as a job out of the blue. 'This guy rang me up [from the UK] just ten days before shooting and said the director's dropped out and it has to be shot on these days. So I went over to this crew and I'd met none of them before, and it was great, just great. It happened in such a short time. It was incredible. It was a great movie to do because there was no dialogue at all, the story's told visually. I did the opening music and there's a David Holmes track, and I did the post production sound on it because there was no money, just myself, Eoin Kilfeather and a computer.'

Accelerator came out of an initial contact with co-writer Mark Stewart who Murphy met at a Dublin Film Festival about seven years ago. Stewart's interest was, initially, in Murphy as an actor but it developed further when he asked him to work with him on the script of what became Accelerator. The project started out as a sort of 'exploitation' film, say like Death Race 2000, with a Dublin-Belfast angle to the story but it changed over time. 'To me now,' says Murphy, 'I don't see it like that at all. It's about growing up, it's about thinking that always everything will be ok, that you're going to get away with everything, and then you realise that you can't. But it's about different things to different people.'

And is it about affinities between working class kids anywhere on the island? 'That's not something I was thinking of as I was making it. Although it is about... you know, the kids themselves, when we were doing auditions it was always workshops we didn't do any readings. So you'd Northern kids coming down to Dublin and of course when they walked into the room there'd be a bit of a face off, sizing each other up, and the Dublin lads are so good at improvising it was a case of throwing the Northern kids in and seeing if they could survive. But they'd hit it off and after some of the auditions/workshops they'd be really close and there was a huge bond while we were
making it.'

I put it to him that Gavin Kelty's character, Whacker, could have come to the same end without a gun but that his having a gun diluted the political issues around the shooting of joyriders. 'For me, I think in Irish films we hold back so much and we go, "Oh no, we'd better not do that", because that might seem we're trying to be like Hollywood or something. There's so much censoring going on. Mark would be the same on this, we just wanted to throw stuff in there. A lot of what drove the film for me was kicking against other Irish films. The 1950's thing?... I'm not a fan. All that sexual guilt, it doesn't exist in that form any more. I just think it's crazy that we're looking back to that all the time. And a fear of dealing with the city, though that's certainly started happening now. 'So having the gun is part of wanting to be as opposite as possible. To me it's sad to see a kid with a gun in that he's obviously not able to handle it. It's a crazy notion, him bringing it, and he doesn't need it either. There's no way the gun's going to help him. It's bravado and it goes to far. And I liked the idea that it was to do with the North, some of it set in the North, but it almost bypasses the political situation. And I remember a lot of the kids who came down for auditions said, whether they were getting a part or not, that it's great to read a script that's set in the North that isn't about the Troubles. And going back, a while ago, if you had an idea for a film that wasn't dealing with the North you were a bad person. Like it wasn't a proper Irish film, that kind of stuff. So part of it for me is kicking against that.'

I wondered whether, in the area of performance and dialogue, he had concerns about stereotypes and the space allowed working class characters for variation and development. 'Yeah, it's a very important thing. One of my favourite bits of the film is where Crunchie turns around on the train and asks, "Have you got that face cream?", and she says, "You only have to use a little." It's got nothing to do with the story, whatsoever. Basically, if you've got a tough guy it's only interesting if you see some kind of soft side to him. I do have a big problem with the way the Dublin working class has been portrayed. There is no variation. The whole thing with representation has been so bad for so long that it's a real problem because you're kicking against so much stuff. So when these kids do a film where the director won't let them change the words, they don't like it.'

He laughs when I suggest the characters Spock and Ripley could almost come back, since their North - South trip has an easy let down. 'All the cast,' he says, 'have Accelerator 2 and 3 worked out.'

Vinny Murphy is currently directing a half hour project with Fairview Productions for RTE. Titled Couch it is devised by writer Mark Kilroy with a group of young people from Rialto in Dublin.