Answer Me These Questions Three #4 PADDY BREATHNACH

Paddy Breathnach (right) is a gentleman. It’s official. Chilled and relaxed in The Clarence Hotel, the director of I Went Down, Blow Dry and Man About Dog is prepared to talk about anything: Shrooms, his New Romantic sojourn, writer Pearce Elliot’s one-time desire for all things fungal and where he’d like to see the Irish film industry in five years. Oh, and that the Technicolour Talkies Of Hibernia is the best Irish movie blog in the world. Okay, he didn’t really say that – he didn’t even mention it - but we could tell. It was in his eyes, an unspoken thing between men.

1.When did you first get the goo for film?
I saw A Matter Of Life And Death on television and I thought ‘Why do I think about this film in a different way to all the others?’

2.Was film your first love?
No. An international soccer player. As a teenager I was in bands. I played the bass. I didn’t pursue it. Been in a band takes a lot of work and you’re co-dependent on a lot of people. Trying to keep the band together was hard going. The band I was in broke up and then you have to find a new band. Maybe I just wasn’t into it enough. Music was changing at that time as well. Coming to the end of the new age thing and new romantic was starting off. We had lots of names – they were all terrible: The Edelweiss, The Moral Virtues (his post-punk outfits) and Eureka Stockade - which was named after a rebellion in Australia in 1848 – that was our New Romantic name.

3.What first attracted you to Shrooms?
Pearce told me he was thinking of writing a story about his own nefarious past and he did. I read it, I liked it. I wanted to take the next draft slightly more ‘slashery’ and I wanted to push up the psychological and mystery elements of it. I think the subject matter – shrooms – suggested that.
I was interested in characters in a threatening and hostile environment. Places that have a graphic look to them. I wanted to explore that isolation and loneliness. That idea of uncertainty, creating a world where they’re not certain ... the angst, the dread.

4. Would you let the script dictate the style, or do you come up with sequences to try before there’s a script written?
Sometimes you think up sequences. It’s some things that happen in collaboration. I’d talk to Pearce and say ‘Why don’t we do something here?’ There was this sequence in the script that was set in bogs and we decided to do the sequence in the reeds. That was something I wanted to do, it was something that you’d see in Asian films. (DOP) Nanu Segal was very important when it came to the style. What we’d do is sit down and watch movies and she might come up with a few suggestions; what lenses we’d like to use, we’d use day for night and have a heightened feel. We’d sit down and reference loads of stuff and come up with a pallet for the premonitions.

5. Where do you see the Irish film industry in five years?
There’s clever and talented people out there now. Our relationship to the UK is a funny one. We’re close but not close enough. We’re different but not different enough. It’s our nearest market and it’s a hard market. We either need to connect with them or the States. What I would like to see is a range of different films coming out of Ireland that are going to different audiences – a good art house section, a good commercial section – and I think they’re judged all of the same criteria when really they’re very different and should be treated and judged differently. There’s a very positive energy coming out of the film board in the last couple of years. They’re supporting filmmakers in the right way and they’re interested in films that are engaging. It’s an interesting time.

5.What’s your favourite Irish film?
Once. Adam And Paul. They were great because they had their own style. They had a lightness of touch too, which is probably in Irish conversation is something we value a lot and in Irish story telling generally. I enjoyed those two a lot. I liked Intermission a lot.

6.What’s up next?
I’ve written a script called Swordland, which is about bandits in North Tipp in 1690. It’s like a western basically. In Irish. We’ll have to see about that. I wrote a couple of drafts of Shrooms but I’m not a good writer in the sense of I don’t have the discipline to go back (to the computer) every morning. It takes me a long time to do a draft. Too long. The ideal scenario would be to work with a writer. Re-writing or redrafting is easier.

Shrooms is out on 23rd November. Stay tuned for the review on Monday...