The Dublin-born, Los Angeles-based screenwriter, Carol Doyle, recalls that she was in Baltimore, Maryland where her screenplay of Washington Square was being filmed, when she heard about the murder of Veronica Guerin. "I called home and my uncle answered the phone sounding really upset," she says. "My first thought was that something had happened to one of the family. Then he told me they just killed this woman, this journalist who was the mother of a young child. And then I talked to my mother and she was so upset, too.
"It made me think about what had galvanised these people into such emotional upheaval about someone they didn't know. It struck me that the murder changed the way people felt about their city. It changed the way people felt about being a Dubliner. Although we deal with huge amounts of crime in Dublin, you don't expect someone to be killed in circumstances like that."
When Washington Square finished shooting Doyle returned to her West Hollywood home and talked to her agent about future screenwriting projects. "He started telling me about all these projects which had been submitted," she says, "and one of them was a Jerry Bruckheimer production about Guerin. I said I have to do that. "I felt I had to do it because Jerry Bruckheimer is such a big, powerful Hollywood producer - the movies he makes, he knows how to make, and I felt I could be of service here. It is a global story, but it's also a specific Dublin story. Veronica Guerin was just a few years older than me - a northsider, convent-educated. There was so much we had in common. I said I wanted to do it and that was it."
Doyle was born in the Rotunda in Dublin in the mid-1960s and grew up in Dorset Street in the inner city. As a schoolgirl who received her primary and secondary education at St Joseph's in Cathal Brugha Street, she says she always wanted to be an actress. "I wonder, if I hadn't met so much opposition to the idea, if the urge to act would have grown like it did," she said on one of her regular visits to Dublin recently. "But those were the days of mass unemployment in Ireland. We were getting career-days at school when we were 13 and 14 because so many people were leaving after the Inter Cert."
She recalls one career-day when the Reverend Mother sat at the podium with a copy of the Yellow Pages in front of her, asking each of the students what they wanted to be when they left school. Carol, who was about 15 at the time, said she wanted to go to Hollywood and be an actress. The Reverend Mother responded by flinging the Yellow Pages at her and asking her to find "actress" in there, to grow up and get out of her pipe dream.
"It was unrealistic to my family, too," she says. "I come from a working-class family, and I was raised by my grandmother. For her, the idea of getting a job in a bank, for example, was something with a future in it. But I always knew I wanted to leave."
From very early on, Doyle says she knew she was different, growing up black in an almost exclusively white Dublin. "I am the only product of my mother and father," she says. "So I am the only black child in the family - my father was black. But I was brought up to believe that difference meant special. I felt there was nothing I couldn't do, nowhere I couldn't go, that I had unlimited possibilities."
She remembers seeing the late rock star Phil Lynott on The Late Late Show when she was young. "He said being black in Dublin is like having big ears. People stare for a while but then they get used to it. It's funny, the first time I had a racial epithet hurled at me was after the series Roots was shown on television here. Then there was something identifiable, something people understood. It's always interesting when I tell this story in America because they think Roots raised so many people's consciousness. But no, it wasn't like that. Then again, kids are different - kids are mean."
After finishing her Leaving Cert in Dublin, Doyle moved to New York, studied acting and worked in theatre before moving to Los Angeles where she went to college and took English literature, sociology and political science. She actively pursued her acting career and supported herself by working as a telephone operator or a receptionist.
She never felt like giving up, she says, even though acting is one of the most precarious of professions, and she had few role models. "Back then there were very few Irish actors who were in movies and there were very few black female actors in movies either. I remember clearly when Lady Sings The Blues came out. I was about 12 and this was the first time after Carmen Jones that a movie showed me this black world. OK, it was Billie Holiday and it had drugs in it, but there were these beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes and living relationships where they loved each other. And they were all black. I thought `there's a possible life here'."
The conversation turns to Diana Ross, who never built on her Oscar-nominated performance as Billie Holiday in that movie. "There was just no opportunity for her," Doyle believes. "I know what it's like. When I was going for auditions I kept being offered roles I would be too embarrassed to take. They were that bad. That's when I started to write."
She wrote her first screenplay, Dance With The Divil three years ago. "It's set in Dublin. It's a love story and a thriller, and the protagonist is a black female," she says. "I thought nobody would be interested in it, but the script went out and immediately six or seven directors - and I'm talking big directors - wanted to do the movie. It was astounding to me."
When several directors, among them Mark Rydell and Philip Noyce, failed to get the project off the ground, a couple of Hollywood studios tried to buy it. "I realised I would have no control over the choice of director if a studio acquired it and it would take a director with the right sensibility to make a movie about a woman who's black and who's Irish. So I just pulled it off the market."
She now intends to direct Dance With The Divil herself and to shoot it in Dublin next year. First, though, there's Comfort Zone, a feature she has written and will direct in the summer. "We start shooting on August 15th in Wilmington, South Carolina," she says proudly. "It's about a black father and son who never got along. It highlights how the two different generations of black men are now. The ones who fought for civil rights and got stunted and bitter about the strides that weren't made, and their children, who don't give a damn about it and don't want to fight the fight."
Will Smith, who is one of the hottest actors in Hollywood after starring in Independence Day and Men In Black, will play the son, and he will produce the film through his company, Will Smith Enterprises. Smith usually earns more than $20 million a picture, but this is the kind of personal project he wants to do in between blockbusters, and the entire film will be made for under $10 million. The father will be played by Harry Belafonte.
Is Doyle nervous about directing her first film? "Yeah, but I've directed actors in theatre, in small plays in Los Angeles," she says. "The joy is working with actors because I have so much training myself as an actor." And she will have an acting role in her film. "It's not a lead role," she says. "I have five scenes and I'll be very prepared."
Meanwhile, her screen adaptation of the Henry James novel, Washington Square, will be released in Ireland on May 29th. The film is directed by Agnieska Holland and features Jennifer Jason Leigh in the central role of Catherine Sloper, with Ben Chaplin, Albert Finney and Maggie Smith. "I love Henry James's work and I would have killed to adapt Portrait Of A Lady, but it had just been made," she says. "I had read Washington Square when I was young and I read it again. I was fascinated by it, by this dance these two men do and this woman is being thrown around and they can only make points through her. Catherine Sloper is very simple-minded. She's not Isabel Archer. But on the other hand I realised the story would only work if she gained strength from that abuse."
Doyle feels at ease within and is philosophical about the Hollywood scene. Isn't it all so phoney and cut-throat? "Well, that's what I hear all the time and I've yet to see it," she responds. "I don't know any business that doesn't have a certain amount of back-stabbing. Yes, there are things that happen and there definitely is some ungentlemanly behaviour, especially to writers, but it's the nature of the beast. It's always disappointing when it happens, but it's not life-threatening. The thing is to try to be without fear, and Hollywood is rampant with fear."
One of the most powerful producers in Hollywood is Jerry Bruckheimer, whose big-budget blockbusters have included Top Gun, Crimson Tide, The Rock and Con Air. Bruckheimer is developing Doyle's Veronica Guerin screenplay for the Disney offshoot, Touchstone Pictures, and she believes he will not be deterred by the prospect of rival projects on the same subject.
Michael Sheridan plans to direct a film this summer based on a screenplay for which he collaborated with Guerin, and which has Joan Allen (the American actress who was so impressive in Nixon, The Crucible and The Ice Storm), attached to play the leading role of a Dublin crime reporter. And it is understood that a Hollywood studio has expressed an interest in buying the rights to Emily O'Reilly's book, Veronica Guerin: The Life And Death Of A Crime Reporter, which is published on May 7th.
"Nothing deters Jerry Bruckheimer," says Doyle. "That's why he is what he is. I really believe at some point that Bruckheimer will become a word to describe how you knock someone out of a race if you are determined to get something done. It just won't apply to the man himself, but to the effort to get something done if you want to get it done. He's incredibly tenacious and if he wants to make a project he's going to make that project. And who's going to say no? His track record speaks for itself."
To research her Veronica Guerin screenplay, Doyle returned home to Dublin for three months. "Being from the inner city I was aware how we are all so concerned about crime and how careful we are when we go out," she says. "But then I realised that we, the Irish, have this tremendous facility for shutting out what we don't want to see.
"I went to see Tony Gregory and said I wanted to go around his constituency. Well, I'm from there, and I asked him would he take me around. I realised that doors from where I lived kids were mainlining and I had chosen not to see it. For someone who doesn't live here any more, you can romanticise it quite a lot, but now that's not possible for me any more.
"It took a certain type of person to do what Veronica did, but at the same time she was this woman who was working as a journalist and she had this life with her husband and her child. But there was also this alter-ego, this celebrity posted up on boards and on the front of newspapers. And one of them took off and the other had to catch up. And when you're on the poster for something like crime-fighting, how can you admit they've frightened you when they've so publicly challenged you?
"There is no way to go except continue down the road, and that was the saddest thing for me. She had no choice after a while. If a group of criminals come up and say they'll break your leg and the next time they'll break your arm, can you stand up in front of the nation and say, `I, who have been shown to be fearless, am now afraid there's no hope for us?'."
Doyle says she tried "very hard, long and often" to speak to Veronica Guerin's husband, Graham Turley. "But he wasn't interested. I totally respect that. It's a very difficult thing. It would have been a much better situation to have had everybody involved. But how can you continue with your life if you continue to re-live the sorrow? I understand that totally. I also understand that movies are not fact all the time and there's a lot of fear to putting your name to something which you may not want your name on at some point."