April 2012
1 post
February 2012
2 posts
January 2012
1 post
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
4 posts
August 2011
2 posts
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
1 post
March 2011
4 posts
Domhnall Gleeson in Berlin interview →
WatchTT TV: ANTIGEL FESTIVAL Interview with James, includes clips with me on visuals
TT TV: ANTIGEL FESTIVAL →
Interview with James, includes clips with me on visuals
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
3 posts
Pete Postlethwaite: a career in clips →
December 2010
2 posts
November 2010
2 posts
James Yuill and Silver Columns. UK Tour
Last week I toured the UK with James Yuill and Silver Columns. We managed to do London, Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol. Fun Times
Silver Columns @ Fence Halloween Party - Glasgow. Lighting by me
October 2010
1 post
Ben Affleck and Rebecca Hall interview for Yahoo!... →
September 2010
4 posts
FD4W International Film Festival Team
I have spent the last nine months contributing to this festival, first in organisation, then as senior programmer and finally 10 hour stints in the projection room! The grassroots festival is a forum for the celebration of women directors in the skill of the craft and the joy of their stories.
By offering another opportunity for women directors to share their work and discuss the obstacles they...
July 2010
2 posts
'Inception' review
Inception managed to be the worst pop-psychology since the Matrix 2/3. It delves layers deep into dreams where rules of time, which they continue to calculate for us, don’t even add up. The mission is motivated by Cobb (DiCaprio) in his desire to over come demons in his subconscious that affect his reality which then threaten to wreck the job until Ariadne (Page) forces him to face up to...
June 2010
2 posts
“Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said”
– Louise Bourgeois
May 2010
3 posts
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot exhibition at the...
This week is your last chance to experience the brilliant Céleste Boursier-Mougenot exhibition at the Barbican. Having visited on a recommendation I hadn’t realised the birds would be interacting with the spectators, I say interacting but really it was a case of them carrying on regardless.
Boursier-Mougenot has created a large aviary for a flock of Zebra Finches, their feeding tables are...
April 2010
4 posts
In a follow up to recent coverage of Conor...
You originally trained as a photographer but you were approached by an 'ad man' and then started as a director with very rudimentary skills. This surely was a great kick-start, did you feel you had something to prove as the newbie?
Sure, although I did have some photographic skills, which helped, and I'd made a few pop promos so had an idea about how film worked. Having said that, for the first good number of ads I was largely winging it. I seemed to get away with it.
You eventually wrote a hilarious but scathing article of your experiences in the advertising world, was this your get out card?
Yes - the article was called "Never Work In This Town Again" and became a self- fulfilling prophecy.
Continuing on from that was the success of 'The Last Time'. How were you received by the film world after this?
The film world appeared to like the film, as much as can be ascertained by awards and nominations. I was offered a few feature projects and a TV series on the strength of it, none of which happened for one reason or another, and I spent a very enjoyable year trucking around various European festivals with the film instead of writing my next script.
A lot of your work has an immediate cross over with the art world, is this a theme that you will continue?
I've made two art documentaries and a short dance film - I'm interested in lots of artists and forms of art, but it's not necessarily an ongoing theme.
'One Hundred Mornings', your latest project is currently doing the festival circuit as official selection at many and has won at the IFTA's. What defines a successful 'Irish film' do you think?
I think a successful film is one that achieves most of what it sets out to achieve in terms of story, themes, ideas and execution, and in those terms I consider OHM to be a successful film. We haven't had a cinema release yet, so I won't know about other possible kinds of success until that happens.
Although dynamic the Irish film industry relies heavily on funding, how will productions develop over the next few years as funding is cut?
There's one school of thought that maintains we should concentrate on Arthouse type films, as they're more achievable with the resources available. My hope is that we continue to make good films here, of any and every genre, and subsequently that the proportionally large cinema audience in this country becomes more used to attending and appreciating the best of Irish films. In this event, there will be real money to be made by local production companies at the Irish box office, and this will go a long way towards bridging the gap between state funding and private equity.
There is a great presence of Irish film at festivals across the globe, why do you think the 'Irish voice' travels so well?
We're very lucky that our former oppressor left their language behind, otherwise Irish cinema would be like that of Iceland in terms of its global reach. Having said that, taking our population base into account, I believe we punch well above our weight compared to other English-speaking countries when it comes to the quality of our films - our best ones are easily as good as ones coming from much bigger, better resourced countries. It's also worth noting that our indigenous film industry has only really existed since the 80's, so compared to more established centres of film we're doing pretty well. I think our prospects are great - there's a whole generation of amazingly talented technicians now starting to make their mark, and the quality of scripts is improving -there's a particular level of ambiguity in Irish speech patterns that lends itself well to the subtext of the best film dialogue.
And finally... what's is next for you?
I've just finished a short dance film, in which a man dances underwater with his 76 year old mother, and for the next while I'll be writing - I intend to have a number of drama projects in the works within the next few months.
“Most female characters have limited aspirations. Their goals are romance, and...”
– Geena Davis
March 2010
16 posts
'Junior' at the Birds Eye View Film Festival
The Birds Eye View Film Festival played host to the latest intimate documentary from Jenna Rosher, at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, called ‘Junior’. We follow the lives of Junior, Eddie Belasco, a 75-year old San Francisco native who epitomises the old school Italian. Eddie’s childhood was straight out of a Martin Scorsese film. And like most young Italian-American boys he...
6 tags
Mall Girls UK premiere as part of Birds Eye View...
‘Mall girls’ had its UK premiere last night as a joint screening collaboration from the Birds Eye View Film Festival and Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in the BFI’s NFT1. It kicked off loud and bright with us following three edgy teenage girls around the mall as they attract the attention of men to prostitute themselves to in the hope they will bestow gifts on them. The girls fool...
3 tags
“This really is… There’s no other way to describe it, it’s the...”
– Kathryn Bigelow on winning Best Director for The Hurt Locker at the Oscars
3 tags
London Word Festival: The Chip Shop
The London Word Festival runs from the 7th of March to the 1st of April and has several events running across the north east of the city, they include story telling to screen printing. I visited ‘The Chip Shop’ today at Toynbee Studios* Cafe. ‘The Chip Shop’ is a fully functioning screen printing workshop, built and manned by the Henningham Family Press. “Through...