When director Alicia Duffy won an award for a short at Cannes in 2001, she probably didn't think it would be 2010 before her feature debut – a sombre French-set Irish co-production about childhood's discontents – was ready to go. She talks glass ceilings with DONALD CLARKE
IT’S THE middle of May and we’re beside the beach at Cannes.
Journalists frolic in the sun. Film-makers chase after them, desperately waving preview DVDs. Alicia Duffy has been here before.
Nine years ago, Crow Stone, one of the English director's first shorts, picked up a major award at the festival. Not surprisingly, she felt that all doors would magically open for her.
“It does give people confidence in you,” she muses. “You have a film that won something significant. And I hadn’t quite expected that. That should help you get funding to make the next.”
As things worked out, it took the guts of a decade for All Good Children, Duffy's very impressive feature debut, to land upon La Croisette. Bumped up in status, she now meets the press in a pagoda outside one of the town's grandest hotels.
The picture played in the Director's Fortnight, the most prestigious of the semi- official side events, and generated rave reviews in all the most respectable places. A sombre study of childhood's discontents, All Good Childrenfinds a group of young people encountering quiet nightmares in a sinisterly attractive area of rural France. The creepy atmosphere is closer to Lord of the Fliesthan The Famous Five.
Quietly spoken, long red hair bouncing in the breeze – what else would you expect from somebody with such an Irish name? – Duffy ponders her pessimistic take on growing up.
“I think maybe there is something that’s scary about me,” she laughs. “The film is cruel, but only in the way that experimenting with feelings can be scary at that age. I felt that way when I was young. I spent my childhood in the woods. The film is an externalisation of those internal feelings. If it’s cruel, it’s because things feel cruel at that age.”
Nonetheless, she admits that she did not have a particularly unhappy childhood. Her father was a professional boxer and, noting the way in which that violent art gestures towards dance, she feels that he passed on an interest in music to her.
“We like to think he was a pretty good boxer,” she says. “It wasn’t too much of a worry though. He’d pretty much stopped fighting by the time I came around.”
Her parents nudged her towards the piano when she was just five and, a gifted cellist and singer, she was sent to a school for musical prodigies. “I did love playing the piano when I was young,” she says. “But I can’t say that particular life really suited me. I am a better film director than I am a musician. Or, at least, I hope I am.”
Clearly a person possessed of staggeringly varied skills, she went on to study mathematics at Cambridge, but changed to art history after a few terms.
Knocking around with pals, she found herself doing odd jobs on low-budget film shoots and – gradually, almost by accident – developed an ambition to become a director.
“On the back of that experience, I started making short films and ended up going to the National Film School in Beaconsfield. Having studied maths, it was great to do something so practical. It sounds like I started late, but actually I was the youngest in my class. I think that’s how things often work out in this business. Films are complex things to get into. I have lived a kind of double life.”
Duffy is keen to mention other female directors as inspirations: Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay and Claire Denis all crop up in conversation. The glass ceiling does look to have taken a few knocks.
And yet. When the programme for Cannes 2010 was announced, films by women were conspicuous by their disgraceful absence. For the first time since 2005, the official competition featured no works from the distaff community.
“Women have been so heavily involved with film since the beginning, it is strange that we still have this problem,” she says. “I don’t really have a good explanation for it. I don’t think anybody does. Look at Catherine Hardwicke. She directed the first Twilight film. It was a huge success and then she was replaced for the second one.”
Oh well. Hard-working female directors such as Duffy may yet break the gender embargo. Certainly, Alicia has proved that she has the guts and determination to wangle money from surprising sources.
As a co-production of the Irish Film Board, All Good Childrenqualifies as a domestic film. The cast are mostly from this country, but the director is English and the action is mostly set in France. This is not what we expect Irish films to look like.
“The film was always going to be set in France,” she says. “Everyone in the picture was supposed to be kind of displaced. It was left open where the two main boys should be from. But they weren’t necessarily supposed to be English. When we realised they could be Irish it made a lot of sense. Co-production with the Film Board really worked.”
She speaks the truth. The picture does not have any of the uneasy, compromised feel you sometimes get from international co- productions. It seems very comfortable in its own clammy skin.
“Some films probably don’t suit co- productions,” she agrees. “Though, to be honest, I didn’t really know what a European co-production was. I learnt a huge amount. As I say, it was always about displacement. So it did make a kind of sense in this case.”
Duffy comes across as a pretty disciplined sort. The critical buzz around All Good Childrensuggests she'll soon be returning to La Croisette. Let's hope that, next time around, the organisers sort themselves out and make sure she's not left alone to fly the flag for women directors.
All Good Childrenis on limited release from Dec 27
