In our continuing series – in which Irish Times writers consider their alternative lives – Donald Clarke reflects on creating movies instead of critiquing them
UNLIKE MOST film critics, I have directed a movie that played to packed houses in several of the nation’s largest auditoria. No, really. A little less than a decade ago, I had the odd experience of sitting in the heart of the Savoy Screen 1, while 1,000 paying punters peered suspiciously at Un Film de Donald Clarke.
Remember that story Steven Spielberg tells about watching the popcorn kernels hit the ceiling during an early test screening of Jaws? Well, this was not in any way like that.
Still unzipping their anoraks and folding away their mufflers, most cinemagoers reacted with a combination of irritation and bemusement.
“Is this an advertisement?”
“Oh Christ, it’s something Irish.”
“I think you’ve got my Fanta. This tastes like 7-Up.”
It is only fair to explain that the cinemagoers had not paid to see my pocket opus. In early 2001, much to my surprise, I found myself directing a short (very short) film entitled Pitch ’n’ Putt with Beckett ’n’ Joyce. Made with money from the Irish Film Board, the picture had Arthur Riordan and Martin Murphy – two proper actors – playing absurd versions of our most distinguished modern writers. On a windy day in Zurich, the two men argued as they waited (get it?) for WB Yeats to join them for a round of the People’s Game.
The film was really little more than an extended sketch, but, thanks to fine work from Martin, Arthur and other folk who knew what they were doing, it impressed enough people to secure a supporting slot with a mainstream Hollywood release. If you caught Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others – that suave ghost story with Nicole Kidman – on its theatrical run, then you either saw, or arrived too late for, the only film directed by this writer.
As things worked out, the offer to make Pitch ’n’ Putt came at about the same time I began writing about film for The Irish Times. I would endure a morning screening of the latest teen atrocity and then learn humility as I watched a talented editor try to impose order on my own ham-fisted handiwork.
If my life were a novel, then those few months would constitute a conspicuous fork in the road. Progress down one path and I might, after much effort, get to give direction to Cate Blanchett. Take the other road and, if all went well, I might get to ask Cate Blanchett what it was like to work with Russell Crowe.
The supposed dilemma was expressed well by a friend of mine: “Jesus, do you want to direct films or do you want to spend your life making sarcastic remarks about Melanie Griffith’s brain?” he said with a sniff.
He thought the answer was self-evident and he was absolutely correct.
Erm . . . She knocks her skull on the male star’s chin and a hollow clang rings about the soundstage. How’s that? The cast falls into the water and, desperate for a flotation device, look towards the leading lady’s inviting head.
This is the best job in the world.
Try as I might, I can’t quite make that brief period of double-jobbing into the fulcrum of my professional life. Growing up, I had always been addicted to motion pictures. I sat through any film, however ancient, on the television and felt queasy with excitement when standing in the queue for, say, A Bridge Too Far, The Towering Inferno or The Spy Who Loved Me.
Yet I never seriously felt the urge to become a film director. If I had an early role model it was, probably, an only modestly well-known writer named Denis Gifford. This unsung hero was the author of a wonderful – though rather reactionary – book entitled A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Now, there was an achievement I dearly sought to emulate.
That noted, recalling my friend’s supposedly rhetorical question and considering the title of this feature series, it is hard not to drift into the sort of reverie that came upon Willem Defoe at the close of Martin Scorsese’s underrated The Last Temptation of Christ. You remember. Nailed to the cross, he imagined himself swilling buckets of wine, frolicking with his family and rolling around the sheets with a lubricious Barbara Hershey.
THE SCREEN goes hazy. The Aquarium section from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals (look it up) builds over the soundtrack.
My Other Life . . .
My Other Life . . .
My Other Life . . .
The alarm bullies me into bleary wakefulness. Half past four in the morning? This can’t be right. Surely only postmen, bus drivers and sparrows rise at such an unholy hour.
A car drives me to some rain-soaked field in one of the less fashionable corners of Bulgaria’s notorious plague-lands. Before I have time to force a cup of volcanically hot, implausibly rancid coffee down my sorry throat, the first assistant director presents me with a long list of almost comically insoluble problems.
Mandy Fakebreast, the movie’s psychotically fragile star, has decided that, having essayed a terrible English accent for the first few days of shooting, she now wants to complete the film with a terrible German accent.
Helmut von Always-Foreign, the talented director of photography, has discovered that his hugely expensive, quasi-experimental digital camera can’t operate in middle-European conditions.
Rick Ponytail, the make-up artist, having heard that the werewolf transformation is to be handled by the digital effects boys, is threatening to pack up his horsehair and return to Venice Beach. We haven’t even started shooting yet.
After 10 hours of furious fire fighting, during which the caustic realisation that I am responsible for everything and nothing steadily erodes my self-worth, I notice a polite lady with a clipboard lurking in the shadows. She is the set publicist and she wants me to talk to a few visiting journalists.
I am led onto a bus where a Northern Irish man in glasses – his face daubed with remains of the surprisingly decent dinner I didn’t have time to eat – sits comfortably before a voice recorder and a note pad (with no notes upon it). He burps and reaches for another mini Mars Bar. “What’s it like working with Russell Crowe?” he says.
Argh!
My Other Life . . .
My Other Life . . .
My Other Life . . .
Directing films is, of course, not always so ghastly and writing decently about them is (honest) rarely as easy as the imagined story suggests.
The point is that the two jobs require the use of entirely different parts of the brain. To be a successful director, you must have the capacity to exude manic confidence even when you know the money is running out, a hurricane is looming and the local police are preparing arrest warrants. I get panicky when the electricity bill is overdue by more than a month.
The early directors of the French New Wave, many of whom started as film critics, made a great many masterpieces, but they also caused a lot of trouble for their successors in the field of screen journalism. Unlike Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut or Claude Chabrol, a great deal of us would rather try and interpret the great directors than emulate them. Of course, we also enjoy making the odd joke about Melanie Griffith’s brain.
The male lead whispered in her ear and heard his own words echo back in reply. No, that’s not quite right.
