We have come to expect the unexpected from Roddy Doyle. After depicting the gritty contemporary drama of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors from a woman's point of view and beginning an excursion into 20th-century Irish history with Henry Smart in A Star Called Henry, Doyle once again has done something completely different. This time it's a romantic comedy, When Brendan Met Trudy, which he wrote specifically for the cinema and which finished shooting in Dublin last week. The idea came to him five years ago while he was researching A Star Called Henry.
"I was listening to John McCormack," he says. "He was singing Three O'Clock in the Morning and there was this crackle on the record which sounded like rainfall. And I began to picture this guy lying down on the street in the rain with the song in the background. It reminded me of the opening of Sunset Boulevard where William Holden is lying face down in the swimming pool. And it grew from there."
It's a bright, sunny December morning and Doyle is sitting with the film's producer, Lynda Myles, in the lounge of Kavanagh's bar in Stoneybatter on the northside of Dublin. The cast and crew are working in the adjacent main bar where the film's young Irish director, Kieron J. Walsh, appears remarkably relaxed for someone making his first cinema film. Every time Walsh calls for a take, a silence dutifully falls over the regular customers who are in the lounge for a morning drink.
From the bar next door comes the sound of a traditional ballad striking up. "Fuck off to the sea," begins the singer of Flow River Flow, but Roddy Doyle assures me that there are few F-words in this screenplay. "This is a light comedy," he insists. "I didn't envisage it as turning out as light a comedy as it is, nor as a love story, but it just grew into this romantic comedy."
The movie's two principal characters, Brendan and Trudy, are drawn, in the classical tradition of romantic comedy, as complete opposites. "There are a lot of Brendans in my work," says Doyle over a cup of tea. "There's something about the name that I've always found quite comical. But in the film when Trudy asks him his name, he tells her and she says, 'Sexy!' ".
Although the film was halfway through its sixth of seven weeks' shooting on the day I visited the set, this was the day they shot the scene where Brendan first meets Trudy. Brendan is played by Peter McDonald, who made such an impressive film debut as Brendan Gleeson's sidekick, Git, in I Went Down and who is unrecognisable at first glance on the Stoneybatter set - perfectly clean-shaven for once, with his hair slicked back, and dressed in a dark corduroy jacket over neatly pressed trousers and a roundnecked jumper almost covering his shirt and neatly knotted tie.
Brendan is an introvert whose life revolves around movies, music and books. "There are very few references to anything modern," adds Doyle. "I decided that Brendan wouldn't have too much time for that. He keeps up with what's going on, but he prefers European cinema that comes from as far east as possible." By day Brendan works as a teacher, a job Doyle himself held before turning to writing full-time. "I wanted to write something that required no research whatsoever," he explains. "That's the honest answer. It's one of the few jobs I ever had, so I knew about it, and I had done so much research for Henry and The Woman Who Walked Into Doors."
At night Brendan sings tenor with a choir. Peter McDonald "isn't Caruso", says Doyle, "but he has a very good singing voice. He's had some coaching, but that's been more to protect his voice. Peter is hugely impressive in terms of acting and professionalism. So much water has been poured on him for this film and he's been lying in the gutter for hours and there hasn't been a whinge out of him. His comic timing is superb, but he never strays away from being human. It's very demanding for him, because he's in every scene."
In the three years since between starting out in I Went Down and starring in When Brendan Met Trudy, McDonald has moved from one film set to another. He worked with Bob Hoskins on Captain Jack and played the sweet-talking young man who makes Felicia pregnant in Felicia's Journey, which also starred Hoskins. In the year ahead he will be seen in Conor McPherson's Saltwater, Pat Murphy's Nora, Myles Connell's The Opportunists, Simon CellanJones's Silent Voices and Paddy Breathnach's Blowdry.
For McDonald's latest co-star, Flora Montgomery, who comes from a village outside Belfast, When Brendan Met Trudy marks her cinema debut. She took the best actress award in the 1998 Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards for her performance in Miss Julie, winning out over fellow nominees Frances McDormand, Sinead Cusack and Olwen Fouere. Her only other film role was a minor part in Kieron J. Walsh's television film, The Perfect Blue.
"We started out with a long, long list of actresses who might be suitable for the role," says Lynda Myles. "Flora called to my flat in London and she read this scene with Kieron. She had enormous confidence. We saw everybody for the role. Days and days of auditions, but we couldn't shake Flora from our minds. She had made such an impact. She had never done a film before, but we feel completely vindicated about casting her. She photographs brilliantly and she and Peter play off each other so well."
Roddy Doyle says that he wanted the Trudy character to have an air of mystery. "She just drops out of nowhere into Brendan's life," he says. "I wanted someone whose vocabulary was uncluttered by what's fashionable. She doesn't say things like `cool'. She has a lot of qualities which Brendan doesn't have - self-confidence, the childlike nature he has lost if he ever had it in the first place, the sense of adventure he doesn't know he has. She's very passionate, unabashed and throws herself into things, whereas he's a loner living in this world of movies and music."
In the main bar of Kavanagh's pub the crew and the extras are in place as Brendan enters for a drink after choir practice. He goes to the bar and is quietly ordering a pint when the vivacious Trudy sidles up next to him and asks, "Where's the party?" With Trudy leading all the way, they introduce themselves.
When Brendan tells her what he does for a living, she also claims to be a teacher. Then he tells her about the choir and she asks him to sing. He shyly directs her towards a corner of the bar where he begins a rendition of Panus Angelicus.
Marie Mullen plays Brendan's mother in the film, with Pauline McLynn playing his sister in a performance which, Roddy Doyle says, "well and truly gets Mrs Doyle in Father Ted out of her system". There are 56 speaking parts in When Brendan Met Trudy, although few of the characters feature in more than one or two scenes.
The film also features the Nigerian actor, Maynard Eziashi, who memorably played the title role in Bruce Beresford's 1990 film of the Joyce Cary novel, Mister Johnson. Doyle explains: "Brendan asks him, `Are you one of those medical students?', and Maynard says, `No, I'm one of those refugees'. I wanted to reflect contemporary Dublin by having his character in the film, but it's not a film about refugees or their plight."
The film's production company is Collins Avenue Films - so named, says Doyle, because that street is around the corner from where he lives - in association with Deadly Films 2, the company he and Lynda Myles set up after their original Deadly Films produced the movie of The Van. She is the producer of When Brendan Met Trudy. "I'm that vague thing known as co-producer," says Doyle. Doyle met Myles in the spring of 1988, at the Groucho Club in London shortly after The Commitments was published in Britain. "Roddy had lots of other offers at the time," she recalls. "One producer said the fuck quotient was too high," Doyle adds. "Other producers wanted to move the story to America." Myles went on to co-produce the film, which was directed by Alan Parker, and to produce the movies based on Doyle's The Snapper and The Van, both directed by Stephen Frears.
Despite no shortage of offers and many misleading media stories, Doyle says he never had any interest in writing a movie sequel to The Commitments, and is relieved now those stories finally have stopped. "I still get calls every year from people wanting to turn it into a stage musical," he says, "but it's time to wave goodbye to that story. It would be like flogging a dead horse to do anything else with it now, and I wouldn't enjoy that experience at all."
Because they had secured directors of the stature of Parker and Frears for the first three Doyle screen adaptations, Myles says there were expectations from financiers that another name director would be involved with When Brendan Met Trudy. Instead they got Kieron J. Walsh, an experienced director of television drama, short films and commercials, but someone who had not yet made a cinema film.
"There was an assumption that someone like Stephen Frears would walk into the room at any minute," she says. "So, a lot of responses were very unimaginative when we suggested Kieron. It was like refusing to let a short story writer write a novel. But we always wanted an Irish director, so it made sense to have Kieron direct the film." Doyle adds that Walsh was his first choice to direct it. "I got to know him when he directed that half-hour TV film I wrote, Hell For Leather, and we've a lot in common in terms of sense of humour and interest in music."
When Brendan Met Trudy is "modestly budgeted", Myles says. The first financing source to come on board was BBC Films, which responded positively within three days of getting the screenplay, she says, followed by Bord Scannan na hEireann and RTE, and Section 481 finance.
Although clearing the rights to clips from old movies is notoriously difficult and expensive, the producers managed to secure clips from several John Ford films (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man) and Godard's A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), among others, for use in the scenes where Brendan goes to the cinema.
The Ormonde cinema in Stillorgan, Co Dublin, was used for the scene where Brendan goes to see Once Upon a Time in the West, and the Savoy and the Ambassador on O'Connell Street served as cinema exteriors. Doyle devised fake film titles for display on the Savoy's canopy, one of which is The Usual Shite.
The film's production designer, Fiona Daly, created such a convincing exterior for an arthouse cinema in Temple Bar - complete with posters proclaiming the first film in colour from a fictional Polish director - that the crew had to turn away many members of the public who wanted to pay in to see this opus.
The school where Brendan teaches was played by Blackrock College. "There is no evidence of Blackrock's illustrious past in the film," says Doyle. "I was just very keen to get away from the school I taught in." The film's costume designer, Consolata Boyle, devised special uniforms for the schoolchildren in the film, complete with their own crest.
While writing the screenplay last year, Doyle was already at work on his next book which will, yet again, be something completely different - it's a story for children called The Giggler Treatment which will be published next autumn.
"They've just found the illustrator and he is very good," he says. "The book is for children the same age as my two boys, who are six and 10. I wrote a page a day and read it to them, and then changed it according to their response."
Because he has been travelling the world promoting A Star Called Henry and he has been on set for most of the new film's shooting, Doyle says that he hasn't sat down at his desk for the past five months. "So, it will be another three or four years before my next novel," he says.
He has also completed his screenplay adaptation of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine, for which producer Andrew Eaton is now seeking production finance. "I've got no other screenplays written," says Doyle, "though I have a lot of ideas."
And will When Brendan Met Trudy have a happy ending? "It is a romantic comedy," he says with a smile.