If you go down to the woods today. . .

JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL:. . . you will find Aidan Gillen in a Donegal-set Hammer horror, before he then features in a British drama with hints of another famous Aidan

EVERY YEAR, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival trains its “Irish Spotlight” on certain home professionals. Some are on their way up. Some are still trying to gain attention. Some are in danger of becoming institutions. Aidan Gillen falls into the latter category. Now 42, though blessed with the cheeks of a younger man, Gillen has simmered from a great many prestigious corners. You know him from

The Wire, Queer as Folk

and

Love/Hate.

This year’s honour, however, gives him a chance to talk about two very impressive, very different low-budget pictures.

Tonight he appears in David Keating's Wake Wood,an agreeably deranged folk horror set in and about Donegal. On Friday, you can catch him in a peculiar, original British drama called Treacle Jr.

The first of those two films carries a weight of history on its shoulders. Though Let Me In, the impressive remake o f Let the Right One In, was publicised as the first release from Hammer Films, the famous British horror studio, in over 30 years, Wake Woodwas the first feature to be shotby the recently reconstituted organisation.

“To be honest, I didn’t know about the Hammer connection when I signed,” Gillen says. “I am not super-knowledgeable on it. What I liked about Hammer was the films were like ghost trains. You get on and you know something bad is going to happen to you. They are a bit camp. But I like ghost trains. So, that’s okay.”

Gillen goes on to identify Don't Look Nowas his favourite horror film. There is something of Nic Roeg's great picture, a tale of bereaved parents, in the initial build up of Wake Wood. Gillen and Eva Birthistle (fast becoming an Irish scream queen) retire to a remote village following the death of their daughter. They soon discover that pagan lunatics – led by tweedy Tim Spall – have the power to raise the dead. If you've read WW Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw, you will guess that the subsequent resurrection is not entirely trouble free. "I really wanted to do a horror film. I really wanted to work with Eva Birthistle. Nobody had to talk me into this," he says in his unreconstructed Drumcondra accent.

You could call Wake Wooda folk horror. Could you not? "What's that?" Oh you know. One of those pictures – like The Wicker Manor Straw Dogs– in which urbanites run up against warty pagan maniacs. It's an honourable tradition.

“The slick urban people confront the yokels? I wouldn’t have made that connection. The Wicker Man was a huge influence, I guess.”

Treacle Jris a very different proposition. Directed by Jamie Thraves, best known for Radiohead and Coldplay videos, the picture is a funky, loose-limbed drama set in unfashionable corners of London. The picture follows a middle-class Birmingham man (Tom Fisher) as he abandons his family and makes his way south. Before long, he encounters an eccentric, though endlessly jolly, young man called, yes, Aidan. That name is doubly significant. Listening to the lisp Walsh adopts, examining the character's pathological optimism, one is reminded of the indestructible Dublin eccentric Aidan Walsh. Self-declared music-mogul, occasional urban cowboy, Walsh was recently the subject of a fine documentary, Aidan Walsh: Master of the Universe,by Shimmy Marcus.

"Yes, I was thinking of him," Gillen confirms. "Anyone who knows Aidan will recognise him I think – though the story isn't based on him. He's a friend of mine. He is that sort of character who will go up against everything. He was the first guy in Ireland to be in the business of videoing weddings. Everyone thought he was crazy. I am not playing him, but the character is certainly based on him to some extent." One character in the film appears to have had a particularly lasting affect on Aidan. Glance at the actor's page on the Internet Movie Database and you will see Treacle Jr,the titular kitten, perched upon his shoulder.

“Yeah. Me and that cat got very close,” he says. “I fed him milk, which you’re not supposed to do. It ended up costing the costume designer, who adopted him, a fortune in vet’s bills.”

Next up, Gillen will be starring as Littlefinger, a kind of medieval consigliere, in HBO's TV adaptation of the fantasy Game of Thrones. You can't escape Gillen (not that you'd want to). So is he in danger of becoming an institution? "Oh God I really hope not. I hope not."

Wake Woodscreens tonight at 9.00pm in Cineworld. Treacle Jr screens in Cineworld on Friday, February 25th at 8.40pm.

jdiff.com

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