Answer Me These Question Three #5 Terry McMahon

Terry McMahon (right) is a busy man. Not only is he a member of the Faculty and Screenwriting and Acting Tutor at The Irish Film Academy, he has been a guest lecturer on Acting and Writing at Dublin Institute of Technology, Institute of Art Design and Technology, and at Galway University. On top of that he was commissioned to write the screenplays Soul Cages for Daryl Hannah, Swordland for Paddy Breathnach, Simple Simon for Robert Pejo, Savage for Valerie Red Horse, Slice for Richie Smith and (co-written with Mark O’Rowe) Sisk for Brian O’Malley, while the original screenplays The Dancehall Bitch has been contracted by Robert Pejo, and Oliver Twisted by Damien O’Donnell.

With a First Class Honors Masters Degree in Screenwriting and awarded the RKO Pictures Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Prize in Cannes and the Tiernan McBride Screenwriting Award, Terry has also acted alongside David Carradine in Dangerous Curves, Don Wilson in Moving Target and Jonathan Pryce and Paul Bettany in The Suicide Club, including a stint in Fair City, for which he has written over seventy episodes. He has played the subtle and believable psycho in Fair City a few years back, and turned in a magic performance as Neville in David Caffrey’s (Grand Theft Parsons, Divorcing Jack) short film Bolt. TToH caught up with Terry to ask him a few questions...

1. What are you working on now?

While doing two other commissions, one for Ireland, and the other for America, I’m teaching in the Irish Film Academy, intermittently work on Swordland with Paddy Breathnach and Oliver Twisted with Damien O’Donnell, and, as well as ongoing Fair City scripts, I’m about to enter early stage pre-production on directing a low budget debut feature Charlie Casanova. And, with the imminent birth of my third child, I’m also working on not having a nervous breakdown.

2. What gets you in the mood for writing?

The deadline. I have a missus, kids, mortgages, and all the other real life pain-in-the-ass financial responsibilities every Joe Six-Pack who works for a living understands, which means I’m usually working on multiple projects with ever shortening deadlines. So when it comes to getting in the ‘mood’ I’m amazed when I hear writers talk about writer’s block. I’m permanently blocked, but, because food has to be put on the table for more mouths than my own self indulgent one, I’ve never inherited the luxury of gazing up my own artistic hole for months on end.

Getting through the bullshit block is where the writing begins. Every time I sit at the computer it’s the last place I want to be. The eyelids become heavy, breathing restricted and as all capacity to be creative vanishes you wonder why you were dumb enough to ever consider writing for a living? But precedent has shown if you don’t do it you become a cranky prick so you persevere, you push, you find one sentence to spark another, and when it kicks in you remember once again that writing truly is an addiction; a gloriously painful addiction, and you’re its pathetic servant.

3. Do you write in silence or do you need some background music?

For the unconscious is to be accessed, the conscious has to be distracted so I play music. Loud. And the nature, subject and genre of the screenplay will determine the music. I wrote the screenplay Slice with Richie Smyth. A visionary director Richie makes videos for U2 along with million dollar commercials but his real passion is for the broken souls hiding in the badly lit areas off the main street and one of these days he’s going to make a movie that’ll rip the audience’s heart out. Slice is a harrowing and graphic story about two of those broken souls and, though I knew it was going to be difficult to work on, I also knew there was a heartbeat in it that was worth going right down the line for. To give a sense of the visceral impact he was looking for from the script Richie handed me a stack of speed metal CD’s.

I’m a pussy when it comes to music - my desert island discs would be somewhere along the lines of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue or Billie Holliday’s Verve Anthology - so when I put that music on nothing could have prepare these virgin ears for that ear drum rape. But, when writing, I still insisted on putting it on, full blast, and the velocity of the music drove the narrative at the precise speed Richie was looking for. Right now I’m listening to Bob Dylan doing DJ on his radio show Theme Time Hour but the seductive bastard’s voice is so engaging between tracks that I have to turn him off, otherwise I’d happily sit back, close those heavy eye lids and wonder why I ever...etc.

4. How many features have you written?

Thirteen of the bastards. One original and twelve commissions, yet not one of those thirteen has been produced. I’ve had more green lights than Paris Hilton has had panty changes but they all have a habit of flicking back to amber too damn quick. My debut screenplay The Dancehall Bitch was finished the night before I was due to go to Los Angeles for the first time. It was written on a great little machine called a StarWriter, which was a word processor with an inbuilt printer. Cost two hundred pounds and I was on the dole but I was offered a day’s pay on some dodgy beer ad and went in with the cheque and bought that damned machine.

I’d never written anything before, had no qualifications whatsoever; left school three years before the Leaving Cert at fifteen, been homeless for a year or so, worked in a fish and chip shop, waited to sign on the dole when I was legally entitled to - which I did on my eighteenth birthday – but as I sat there in my one room flat, alone, socially inept, with an inferiority complex the size of Stephen’s Green, I opened that word processing machine and felt a rush of anticipatory anxiety that was the closest thing to hope I’d ever felt.

I’d like to claim I wrote that first screenplay in a matter of weeks – a frenzy of passion resulting in the birth of some masterpiece – but the truth is it took years. Then my son was born and, because I couldn’t do anything else, I got involved in acting. I was always a little embarrassed by being an actor but I got some dodgy jobs in dodgy Roger Corman (left) movies and acquired the lovely taste of the film set but I wanted to be on the other side of the camera. Which is why I wrote my first screenplay - an overwhelming need to make something original; to craft something out of nothing – and the day I finished it I thought the world would change. I stepped out into the street, half a bottle of celebratory cheap wine in my belly and a full tank of naively passionate belief in my heart, expecting passers-by to sense something off me, to recognize that an extraordinary event had just transpired, to understand they were in the presence of a bona fide writer; but the world rightly didn’t give a damn. Nobody stopped. Nobody noticed anything.

I sent the script to everybody and waited for my bed-sit door to be kicked in by hungry contract wielding producers and directors. I must have been out the day they arrived to kick down my door because it was years before anybody responded. Then I got a call from Daryl Hannah’s producer saying Daryl wanted to talk and a few weeks later she had me on a first class flight to Los Angeles to write her screenplay Soul Cages.

5. Advice to budding writers out there?

Write as if your life depends on it. Pretty soon it will.

6. Have you directed?

Apart from theatre, I directed some scenes from The Dancehall Bitch on the Moonstone Filmmakers Lab. Ciaran Tanhan shot it, Breege Rowely edited, Declan Conlon played the lead role, and all three were nothing less than brilliant. Moonstone is one of those organizations that, every time it’s mentioned, I feel I should genuflect. Run by Jean Luc Ormiere it attracts some of the most talented people you could imagine, all giving their time for free to help a bunch of dreamers shoot scenes from their screenplays and it gave me an insatiable hunger to direct again.

7. Gun to your head – acting or writing?

I took acting very seriously - two cracked ribs and a hernia serious - and I got to play central roles alongside some remarkable people like Paul Bettany, Jonathan Pryce and David Carradine. This was during the heyday of the infamous Concorde Studios in Galway. Making low budget American movies with occasional semi-big name international actors while paying hard working crews nothing close to union rates Roger Corman and his company came in for a lot of pseudo-intellectual flack but I did four or five of his films and they were a real pleasure to work on. The crews were committed in a way that many a union member might find intolerable but their hunger to learn and the opportunities for fast track promotion turned them into a powerhouse production unit and not one of those dodgy movies ever lost money.

As an actor on those crews I was given unprecedented opportunity and I did an equally pleasurable stint on Fair City but after awhile being an actor was like being the whore nobody wants to pay for. Horny cheap pimp directors examine you from a distance and decide to invest money in you for their fantasy fulfilment or drive on past in pursuit of some other whore. I was always cast as the bad guy but there are only so many murderers and rapists you can play before you begin to wonder. I was lucky in that I got many of the jobs I went for, but, when every audition becomes the same groundhog-day cattle market where you’re expected to stick your tits out and parade for half-blind, semi-literate, utterly inept lowlifes sitting in judgment, I knew I didn’t have the required mindset. I love working with actors and find in them a fearless and fiercely noble substance but when writing is difficult, it soothes the soul, whereas acting just burns the soul. The last audition I did was for a highly respected famous Irish director and twenty seconds in his company I wanted to smash his teeth in. Rude and maliciously ugly with it, his supposed insight into the vagaries of the human condition was quickly revealed to be just the conceited lie he hides behind. I left the room and made the decision never to put myself in that position again because next time one of us would be swallowing our teeth.

8. Favorite Irish Movie :

I don’t really know what constitutes an Irish movie anymore and I’m sure some of these will offend the purists but a few that spring to mind in no particular order are: Bloody Sunday, Quackser Fortune has a Cousin in the Bronx, Lamb, In the Name of the Father, The Quiet Man

9. What Irish movie deserves more credit?

Bloody Sunday deserves more credit – I understand there are regulations relating to Oscars and television but that should have won the Academy Award for Best Film and Best Director – it’s one of the most remarkable achievements on any stage – Irish or otherwise.