THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: JOHN KELLEHER:LAST WEEK, a function was held in Dublin's Light House Cinema to acknowledge the retirement of our outgoing Director of Film Classification. You'd have thought that the honouree, John Kelleher, would have been delighted to see the back of the post. After all, the Irish film censor – as that civil servant was previously identified as – has generally found himself dragged deep into the bloody, sexy maelstrom of his era's social conflicts.
It’s not as if Kelleher, also a respected producer and broadcasting administrator, did not institute any significant changes. Surely the most liberal person to occupy the post, he saw no films banned during his six-year tenure and frequently granted movies less severe certificates than they received in the UK.
"I think I might have been seen as the most liberal," he replies. "Certainly as regards sexual content. I would welcome that description. That related to when I was growing up. I was 16 when the 1960s started and 35 when the 1970s ended. What happened during the 1960s and 1970s here was disgraceful: people were denied the right to see hundreds of films. When they did eventually appear, as was the case with Casablancaand The Graduate, significant sections of plot were often excised."
Sheamus Smith, Kelleher's distinguished predecessor, did forward the process of liberalisation, but Kelleher seemed to reach for a new gear when he took over the office. "I think Sheamus banned nine in his time," John says. "I suspect I wouldn't have done that. But it's easy to say that with hindsight." So we might expect to find Kelleher sighing with relief as he shakes off his bloody ermine. In our history, such cultural realignments rarely come without denunciations from the pulpit and traumatic appearances on The Late Late Show.
Having received treatment for prostate cancer last year – during which he refused to take a day off – Kelleher could be forgiven for bolting from the Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) and making his way to the nearest plush cabin cruiser. Yet, at the jolly gathering in the Light House, he confirmed that he was nudged into mandatory retirement after reaching, ahem, a certain age, and that he would happily have stayed for a few years.
I’m surprised the cancer diagnosis didn’t cause him to slow down. “I didn’t see any reason to not work,” he says. “It was less debilitating than you might imagine. People confuse radiation, which I had, with chemotherapy. I didn’t have chemotherapy at all. I had a very stringent radiation regime for eight weeks. I was fortunate that it didn’t have any side effects aside from a fatigue that was actually quite pleasant.”
We, perhaps sentimentally, assume that a diagnosis of cancer – even one, as in John’s case, that appears to have worked out well – changes a person psychologically. “Oh, I think it does,” Kelleher agrees. “I remember distinctly the whole sequence of events that led up to it – the hearing of the news. I felt that I was in a drama myself. The call that elicited the word that I had a tumour did – not to over-dramatise – lead to very severe intimations of mortality. I was scared and I don’t mind admitting it.”
Mind you, as he explains it, his time at the IFCO appears to have been surprisingly free of stress. When he did find himself on the Late Lateit wasn't the trial by fire his predecessors might have experienced. Anybody old enough to remember the 1970s would have watched his gentle grilling by Pat Kenny in 2004 with interest and (if the viewer happened to abhor censorship) with a degree of relief. Kelleher was there to defend his decision to allow Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs, a film featuring visible sexual intercourse, to play uncut in Irish cinemas. In previous decades, half the audience would have been baying for his blood. In 2004, however, though there were objections from the crowd, most punters seemed happy to remain contentedly uninterested and allow others to see the squalid picture if they wished.
One can’t help wondering to what extent the censor’s decisions – Kelleher was responsible for changing the title to the less finger- waggy Director of Classification – are moulded by public opinion. No previous incumbent would have been allowed to pass 9 Songs.
"I think to a great degree there is truth in that," he says. "I have to be honest and say my decisions were facilitated." He goes on to refer to Kevin Rockett's book Irish Film Censorship, the key text on the subject.
“Kevin Rockett says in his book that screen censorship reflects the cultural and social history of a society. That is certainly true. I would say the censors were much slower to respond to what was happening than might have been desirable. I hope that, had I been in the job 20 years ago, I might have been closer to the zeitgeist. Maybe I would have been ahead of it.”
About four decades too late, Kelleher brought the ethos of the 1960s to the film classifier’s post. He is of that generation.
After graduating in law from UCD, he made for the US to take a masters in drama. He arrived in Kentucky during the turbulent, patchouli Götterdämmerung that was 1968.
His experiences during the period influenced his subsequent approach to film certification. “I saw Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, the presidential candidates, speak within three weeks of landing in Kentucky. There was Nixon speaking on a paddle steamer and Humphrey speaking at the state fairground. I remember that very clearly.”
Even before he arrived in America, Kelleher had become a man of the world. His father, a doctor from Cork, was in the British army and the family grew up in a selection of political hotspots and Cold War frontier points. It’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that his warm liberalism is connected to the peripatetic nature of his upbringing. Remaining a bigot is tricky if you’ve grown up playing with kids from a kaleidoscope of nations.
“I think that was a fantastic opportunity,” he says. “I am really glad I lived that life. I went to school in Austria. I went to school in Germany. It was amazing in Egypt. I remember going to school in a truck at six or seven with a machine gunner – which I thought was fantastic. You are not scared when you’re that age.” After his return to Ireland, Kelleher dabbled in journalism with (who else?) Vincent Browne, before getting sucked into RTÉ as a producer.
Still a relatively young man, he demonstrated a breadth of ambition that was, then, far from common in Irish broadcasting circles.
Kelleher was one of the driving forces behind the impressively starry adaptation of James Plunkett's Strumpet Citythat sprawled across RTÉ's schedules in 1980. Closer in scope to an American mini-series, such as the contemporaneous Roots, than to the slightly stagey BBC adaptations, such as The Forsyte Sagaor The Pallisers,the production, written by Hugh Leonard, managed to drag Peter O'Toole back to Ireland and made fine use of the great David Kelly. Another favourite achievement was the Spanish Civil War documentary Even the Olives are Bleeding.
"There were no models in Ireland for Strumpet. We didn't sit down and say: how did they do Forsyte? We just knew there was a feeling that we needed to do a series that dealt with serious social themes." Later, as controller of programmes at the corporation, he was responsible for the creation of the current affairs series Today Tonight.
"I enjoyed my time at RTÉ as a producer and as an executive," he says. "Obviously you have a lot more people involved when you are at RTÉ than when you are in a small operation like the IFCO. There is a lot of power in an executive job. There is, however, also a bigger system of checks and balances. In the IFCO you have a tiny agency and all the power is invested in one person. Concomitantly, you have more power invested in one person. With Today Tonight, however, I feel I have to share the credit with all the other people involved on the show."
It would be unjust to attempt any analysis of Kelleher's many achievements – he also had a spell as managing director of the Sunday Tribune– without addressing the issue of his near-universally accepted niceness. Despite having swum with plenty of sharks in his time, he has accumulated surprisingly few enemies. In the years following his unsuccessful efforts – in collaboration with such éminence grises as Paul McGuinness – to establish an embryonic version of TV3, he did, it is true, find himself blackballed by RTÉ, but there was never any sense that the snub was personal. That's just life in a small media pond.
“I genuinely don’t hold a grudge about that,” he says with characteristic cheeriness. “I was airbrushed out, despite what I had achieved there. That was understandable. For seven or eight years I was in purdah.”
Despite experiences such as this, he was happy to see his children go into film and television production. Recently separated from his wife of 33 years – reasonably amicably it seems – John is proud that both Macdara, producer of the excellent Irish film Kisses, and Róisín, who works at BBC Northern Ireland, have taken up the family business.
“I tried neither to encourage or discourage them,” he says. “But I always said: ‘Decide what you like and make that your career.’ We are now in recession. If you are into food make that your business. If you are into travel make that your career. I certainly never said: ‘Don’t go there.’ Anyway, they knew the stresses of the job from living with me.”
His popularity offers proof that you don't have to be jerk to be a successful enabler. Yet there must be some sort of rampaging energy lurking inside his amiable frame. This is, remember, the man who managed to produce a mainstream feature film in Ireland during the mid-1980s. Eat the Peachturned out to be a fine piece of work, but its key distinction was simply its existence. Producing an Irish feature in those days was about as difficult as building an Irish aircraft carrier.
“It was against the odds,” he laughs. “This may sound fatuous, but I love the notion of building something that hasn’t previously existed, whether it’s building a wall or making a film. I suppose that is the producer’s gene. That’s what it does to you.”
He has, I guess, done that with the IFCO which now has an effective website, consults frequently with parents and specialist bodies and generally exhibits a more open face to the nation. Indeed, Kelleher's going-away do incorporated a screening of Up in the Air, George Clooney's new flick, for the purposes of its certification.
He must, for all his experience, have had reservations about taking the post. Archbishop McQuaid met his maker long ago but Kelleher must have been aware that there was still a possibility that he could quickly have found himself being burnt in effigy by the reactionary tendency. “I was pretty aware of what it entailed,” he says. “I wasn’t afraid of controversy. I had already been in a very controversial role in RTÉ. I was quite looking forward to that side of things. I just felt there was stuff to be done. Of course, the prospect of looking at movies all day long was desirable as well. But there were things to be changed. We had to start listening to people. I would never have been interested if it didn’t involve changing things.”
Kelleher remains admirably frank about the few controversies in his tenure. He is, for example, happy to discuss his initial decision to refuse a certificate to an obscure film called Spun. “Oh, this is such boring technical stuff. I knew that it would be granted an 18 certificate on appeal, but I did it to highlight an anomaly that meant that films had to get the same cert by law on video as they did on theatrical release. It worked. We got that changed.”
WHAT ABOUT THE 9 Songsbusiness? Many see "actual sex" as the final taboo for a censor (before the next one comes along). "It was a borderline one," he remembers. "But I thought: this is a film, however poor, with characters and story. It is not pornography. It would be wrong to stop consenting adults from watching it. I was also aware that the British were agonising over it at that very time. I wanted to get our decision in first because I knew it might have influence. If tiny Ireland said it was okay then Perfidious Albion could hardly refuse."
One controversial ban did stand during his reign. In 2007, acting in his role as video game monitor, Kelleher banned a hugely violent action-adventure title named Manhunt 2. (The notion of the softly spoken, urbane Kelleher hunched over a console trying to butcher virtual bystanders is a delicious one). There seems to be a contradiction here. He has always maintained he does not feel that films corrupt the viewer, but this decision suggests that he thinks differently about these modern video game thingummies.
“I can fully understand that there is an implied contradiction,” he says. “You can have a principle and stick to it, but still reach a point where that principle is challenged. I received about 500 email hits after that from outraged gamers. ‘F*** you!’ ‘What are you, a priest?’ ‘Are you a communist Nazi?’ They really were very disappointed.”
Aha! So it is still possible to enrage large parts of the populace. You can, perhaps, defy the curtain-twitching conservatives without endangering your wellbeing, but don’t cross the Xbox junkies. I can understand why he might want to retire to a cabin cruiser and paint watercolours.
“Oh, no. I think the werewolf gene – the producing gene – always bursts to get out and you just can’t get away from it. It’s always there. I won’t be doing that.”
So he’s going back to producing? “Yes, I have one particularly exciting project that may come to fruition soon which, again, is to do with making something happen. The last thing I will be doing is retiring to the golf course.”
He has one more task to accomplish before he moves on: Up in the Airended up with a 15A cert. That sounds about right.
BORNIn Dublin, although his childhood involved following his army father's postings in various countries
CAREERA lengthy spell in media included becoming a producer and executive at RTÉ, being a driving force behind Strumpet City, and as a managing director of the Sunday Tribune
FAMOUS FORBecoming the first film classifier, as opposed to film censor, he brought a liberal attitude to the job. However, one controversy involved his banning of the violent computer game, Manhunt 2
