The costs of filming in Ireland are often prohibitive. An Irish crew is far more expensive and less experienced than their counterparts in Ireland. Stephen Whooley talks to Seamas McSwiney about the Irish film industry, his work as a producer and his long association with Neil Jordan.

You've worked with Neil Jordan since the beginning really?

Well, no. I released Angel and that's where I met Neil. He suffered a bit with Angel. A lot of the Irish film-makers were upset with him because John Boorman gave him lots of money from the Film Board and everyone thought it was unfair and they picketted the film.

I saw it in Cannes and thought it was fabulous and I bought it for the UK. In fact it was made for Channel Four but they had no plans for releasing it in cinemas. I forced them to give it to me and released it in my own cinema, the Scala. Neil stayed with me in London for the release of Angel and we got to know each other. The first project we talked about doing in fact turned out to be The Crying Game ten years later. It was called 'The Soldiers Story' then.

At the time Jeremy Thomas and John Boorman encouraged me to consider producing and I saw the way Jeremy worked and had a go at doing that. With Neil, we made Company of Wolves together which was quite a complicated film as a first production, and a very complicated film for Neil, dealing with things that were more fantastic, more imaginative.

Then there was Mona Lisa. Later we came a cropper with High Spirits and then he went off and made We're No Angels in America from somebody else's work which didn't quite work out, not in terms of a commercial property.

It stalled his climb a little bit, didn't it?

Well I think after We're No Angels and High Spirits, Neil needed to kind of come back to earth and we came back and patched up our differences and made The Miracle and then The Crying Game.

...differences?

Well no, I think after High Spirits, Neil felt very dejected about making films in Europe. I think he was very attracted to making films in the States.

Do you think that he wanted to start afresh?

I think the whole thing was for him to move on to Hollywood to work with real producers and real stars, all that sort of stuff the way you think the grass is always greener on the other side and then you realise.

I'd gone through the same process. I set up an office and made Shag out there and kind of thought that I'd wind up working and living in Los Angeles but after a year I couldn't take it. I came back with my tail between my legs aswell, because there are just too many producers there. You're better off being in Europe making films than you are trying to compete with a thousand and one producers out there.

Wasn't High Spirits already a Hollywood movie of sorts with Steve Guttenberg and Darryl Hannah and Peter O'Toole?

Well, it was our attempt. I think what happened with High Spirits was that it was a classic case of a producer-director team making two different movies. I always thought the film was about the Americans coming to Ireland and falling in love with a ghost, about those characters. For Neil it became more about the Irish people in the castle and their problems. In the end it had too many characters and was trying to satisfy all the demands of those characters. I think that during the shooting it became a burden for Neil to deliver a comedy. For instance, people saying the lights must be bright for a comedy. You know conforming to conventions. That's the thing about comedy, it's much more of a strait-jacket than anything else because you really can't fool around with the rule book too much. Neither of us felt very comfortable with that, so it ended up a bit of a pig's ear in terms of where it's coming from. But kids love it. It was a huge hit on video. It's a lot of fun. Mad crazy things in it but... I'm not very good at comedy...

But when you say you're not very good at comedy, being a producer, how does that apply?

Understanding it, reading a script and saying this is hilariously funny, looking at dailies, you know, making your contribution to the film which can be nothing if you choose for it to be nothing or can be enormous if you choose for it to be enormous.

You make it sound as if you see yourself as a creative producer?

I think that's what Jeremy kind of said really because of the way I was acquiring films. I bought Diva and Evil Dead and Hector Babenco's films, where people thought they were rubbish. Everyone saw Diva and said it won't take a penny. I saw it and didn't know anybody had said that and bought the film very cockily and said I think this one is going to do really really well. And it did. With Evil Dead, people said horror films don't work anymore and it became the biggest video that year. I think I just have a knack, partly from having seen so many films, of being able to spot material and spot talent.

If you spot something that you love but think it won't work, you still go for it?

I remember seeing a rough cut of Paris, Texas. I happened to be in Germany and they said we're not sure what to do with it. And I thought it was fantabulous. I cried at the end. I said maybe you're right, maybe nobody else will like it, but I think it's great. I'll buy it for the UK.

While I think I'm not mainstream, my instincts are probably pretty mainstream in a way. It's one of those strange things and so, I tend to be a good touchstone for a movie because, directors always need to be told they're going in the right direction and that this is good and this is bad or whatever and I'm stupid and foolish enough to actually speak my mind.

I sit and watch the dailies and I imagine I'm watching them having paid £7.50 or whatever it costs to see the movie.

The producer-director relationship is a very 'couple' relationship with you and a director, especially with Neil Jordan because you've had seven babies now

Both Neil and I proved what we could do with Interview with the Vampire and again with Michael Collins. We can deal with a big picture in terms of money and the extras, a certain budget level... You know, as well as making films with Neil, I've made quite a few other films like Backbeat and Scandal and the notorious Absolute Beginners. I've moonlighted between films in a way. That's how Neil might see it.

When you call that moonlighting it makes it sound like...

I think from Neil's perspective it's kind of like moonlighting, because we make a film together and I go off to make something else. What's been good with Neil as well is that we've never had a contract. Never. A producer might say they've got this very talented director that they're about to work with but they know how it happens the way people get snapped up by Hollywood. So they should do a two picture deal with him. I've never done that with Neil. We've never signed a piece of paper saying we're going to make films together.I think that's also created a very honest and open relationship really.

You had a sort of a split after High Spirits and then came back together again...

Neil came back from America and we talked about doing The Miracle. At that time, I was making Rage in Harlem in Cincinatti and I needed somebody else to help me so I brought Redmond Morris in to produce it with me and I spent time between Bray and Cincinatti, juggling between the two films. The Miracle is a lovely film, but it didn't do anything at all, it was a huge flop. That was the time Palace was going down as well. I made some bad judgements, I made a film called The Big Man, (starring Liam Neeson) which I loved. Up until then anything I had produced had made money, I was very lucky. Even Absolute Beginners, though a lot of people didn't like it, made a lot of money. Then both The Big Man and The Miracle were huge flops. It was a rude awakening really. And Neil had three commercially unsuccessful films under his belt so The Crying Game was difficult for us.

Was The Crying Game made on a bridge between Palace and Scala?

No, it was the last Palace film. It's well documented actually in the Palace book.

After The Miracle screening in Berlin, Neil said why don't we do that story I was working on, that we were going to make before Company of Wolves. He could never crack it, he got half way through the script. He just couldn't work out what happened when the guy found the wife and he said "what if?" -the twist! and I said God, that's a great idea!. That the wife's a man! Get it written now. It was February or March, get it ready for Cannes and I'll raise the money in Cannes and we'll make it in September. Unfortunately he wrote the script, which I loved, and no one liked it at all. I was in Cannes trying to raise the money for it and we met Forrest because I had made Rage in Harlem. It was actually in competition in Cannes, so I introduced Forrest to Neil and they got on. But I was failing him, I wasn't getting the money together. He was incredibly pissed off saying I'm going to go back to Hollywood to make another movie if you don't get this money. I've got to make it by the end of the year. So, in fact the last time I was in Venice was to persuade the Euro-trustees to give us the money, which was a sort of organisation we put together to acquire films for Europe. They had no idea Palace was going down and I said look we should all put in x amount because we'd been having these dinners, these meetings with three other distributors, an Italian distributor, a French distributor and a German distributor and we all got on really well but what would happen is we'd all go out and get drunk every night and we wouldn't do any work and I said finally "Do some work, back this film! It's Neil and Forrest is going to be in it". And they did. We came up with around about £700,000 of a £2.3m budget. It was a good deal. It was here in Venice, I remember there were no rooms in the hotel. I ended up sleeping in a camp bed in the Hotel des Bains in the meeting room, the very room that we negotiated the deal in. They set up the little camp bed and I slept there. That was the last time I was in Venice.

We also had money from British Screen and Channel 4. Channel 4 didn't want to back it and that was awful, the series of letters I had to write them it was just... it was weird. Because of the success of Mona Lisa and the success of Scandal, I just thought they're bound to like this, this is such a great story... Simon Perry was one of the few people who genuinely liked the script.

So it was a very patchwork kind of deal. It was a very hard shoot, Neil was very impatient on the shoot itself and we had a lot of run-ins, sort of fights but we made a good film. People liked the movie, especially in America... I was developing another project called Jonathan Wild which is a period piece set in London in the early 1700s and we were out sort of Oscar-time at Miramax's expense and Neil had been asked to write a script for Interview with the Vampire and then he went to see David Geffen...

What made them seek him out for that?

A combination of The Crying Game and Company of Wolves. They asked him to write the script and at a script meeting, David said would you consider directing it and Neil said I'm doing a film Jonathan Wild with Stephen producing so he said maybe Stephen will produce this. They approached me to produce it and, to be honest, it was a life-line because all the films I'd made with Neil up until then, I'd not taken fees for them. The fees had gone back into Palace, so I really didn't have any money to speak of because all my money was in Palace. When Palace went down, that was it. This was an opportunity for the first time to get a fee. That was my reward for The Crying Game, to be able to produce Interview with the Vampire with Neil.

After 'Vampire', they asked Neil what he wanted to do. Between every film we've made he was always bringing out Michael Collins. While we were making Company of Wolves, I shared a flat with Neil in Maida Vale and we used to get back every night and he'd knock out a few more pages of Michael Collins which had been commissioned by Warner Brothers, just purely as a writer. Because of his work on Excalibur he had a good reputation as a writer and he'd won the young Guardian prize for his novel. I'd read the pages and talk about them. He had all the books so I started reading them. I got into the whole Collins thing which for me, coming from Britain, was fascinating.

Did your knowledge of Ireland come through your contact with Neil Jordan?

I had the same general knowledge of Ireland that left wing people had at that time in the early 80s. Not more nor less. The Guardian readers view of Ireland. And I was a regular visitor to Dublin.

To get back to writing, do you sometimes feel that you're a script consultant in residence because you're a producer?

One of the things that's difficult about talking about this is, the role of a producer is a diplomat really. You're behind the scenes. Your head's got to stay under water all the time. You can't really talk about what you do or don't do because in a way you do everything and nothing and you really are a diplomat, I mean I've got to deal with eighty people a movie whether they're from runners up to the director. I make myself open to everyone and I'll talk to every single person on the film. There's a certain trust that people invest in you on a film and the problem about talking about what you do as a producer is that you kind of expose that trust. Just before Michael Collins, this woman from the Daily Telegraph came in. She wanted to do a profile of me and she wrote this piece and it made it seem as if I'd written some of Neil's scripts.

I think it would be wrong of me to say I'm a script editor. The way I would always generically describe myself is as a sounding board for Neil. The way we created Mona Lisa was I became a catalyst by simply pushing Neil into that situation. I would say to Neil "what if we did this?" he'd generally say "no, we shouldn't do that, what we should do is this". So, if I hadn't said "what if we do this?" in the first place it wouldn't have happened. So I've always been a sounding board for his ideas. Certainly I get very heavily involved in casting, I get very heavily involved in trying to get the script to a shooting stage, to a financable stage.

I always see the dailies, that's a thing I always make sure I do and I obviously get involved in the music and the editing. And, because of my experience in distribution, I am very heavily involved in the release of the film, the pattern of release, you know how it's released, where it's released along with everything else. They're the important areas for me. I've never, ever walked on to a film set and told him what to do about the camera. That's his priority. The only time it ever occurs to me to talk about how the director's going to shoot a particular scene is if we run out of time. If you've got an hour to shoot to complete the scene and there's seventeen set-ups then I will talk to the director about cutting down some of the set-ups because there isn't the time to shoot it. So where Neil puts the camera and what he does with the camera and with the actors, that's directing. That's his job. I mean being a creative producer doesn't mean talking to the actors and the director....

The remainder of this article appears in Film West 27