They're shootin' this and shootin' that. Some are cuttin', some are castin'. This is film talk at the launch of the 15th Dublin Film Festival. With side-burns to die for, Paul Taylor, the festival's programme director, meets Sheamus Smith, Irish film censor, for the first time. They shake hands and the film talk continues.
The festival's line-up "has the stamp of some of my tastes," says Taylor. His tastes are "eclectic", ranging from a Lithuanian documentary set in a borstal to Scream 3.
Vinny Murphy is director of Accelerator, an award-winning film about joyriding, which is to feature in the festival. He has just finished shootin' a short film for television. Two girls in shiny, black, PVC bodysuits go by carrying trays of the festival's sponsor, Miller Genuine Draft. Under the black wigs and the Cat-Woman costumes, are Dubliners Emma Lyons and Lisa Vaughan. More film talk: the actor, Eanna Macliam, is in a new film in Dublin with Robbie Coltrane and Dan Ackroyd, with the working title Shiney's Head. He plays a janitor in a medical college, a mad-cap character, he says. His girlfriend Ciara O'Callaghan, who plays Yvonne in Fair City, says her character got married last week. "They eloped. Now, they're changing me into a mega-bitch," she says. "Now that I've got my man." Oh, and in real life? No, she says, she and Eanna have no plans to elope.
Stylish Seamus Farrell, from Ballintubber, Co Roscommon and a teacher at Dublin's Dorset College, is the most impressively-dressed gentleman at the launch, in a black fedora and a silver-striped jacket. He's a season-ticket holder who's been attending the film festival with his friends since it started 15 years ago.
Film-maker Alan Gilsenan is checking out the programme, hoping to find some challenging offerings. He's planning a feature film in the autumn, to be called Timbucktoo. Martin Mahon, director of the festival from 1992 to 1997, has just made a six-part series for RTE called Straight to Video, starring Anna Manahan, Milo O'Shea and Pat Shortt of D'Unbelievables. It'll be screened soon, he believes.
Jazz impresario, Ben Jackson, wearing the fattest, whitest shoelaces in the room, is enjoying the gig too. But Alf Smiddy, managing director of Beamish & Crawford, has to dash. He's got to return home on the commuter flight to Cork to be in time for the night-feed of the newest addition to the Smiddy family - Gearoid Brian, who is one week old today. Go maire se an cead.
The woman in the taupe and fawn ensemble at the door turns out to be Pauline McLynn. She's working on her second novel - to be called Better Than a Rest. She chats to two fellow actors in a corner near the door - one is young Michael Colgan, from Keady, Co Armagh, who is in a BBC drama series called Rebel Heart, being shot in Dublin as we speak. And his friend, Dawn Bradfield, the actor from Co Cork, plays the lead - "I'm a snipper, I'm a gun-to-tin' young one," she explains. And she gets to marry Frank Laverty too, she says, disclosing part of the plot. Romance, guns, young men. Be still, my beating heart.