The glory days of the Irish film industry seem to be over. Can anything but another Michael Higgins-style shake-up rekindle it, asks Hugh Linehan
Seven new Irish feature films will be shown during the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow. On the surface it's an impressive figure, but if you look a little closer it's not quite what it seems. Three of those films, from directors Damien O'Donnell, Thaddeus O'Sullivan and Eoin Moore, have no Irish connection other than the nationality of the film-makers. Three of the remaining four were shot on the sort of shoestring budgets that would have seemed laughable a few years ago. Only one, Jim Sheridan's In America, was made here in Ireland with the sort of budget regarded as the norm in the mid- to late-1990s (although it's actually set in New York).
It's an interesting mix and arguably, from a creative point of view, a promising one. Irish film-makers are working more overseas while, here at home, a space has opened up for the kind of low-budget, independent work that has often been the springboard for the most adventurous and ground-breaking cinema.
But if you work in film production or on the crews that make those films, it's all rather grim. The perception is that Irish film production has gone flat. Fewer films are being made, and those that are going into production are much smaller, employing fewer people and paying them less. At the same time, our high-cost economy makes Ireland less attractive to international producers looking for a location. Add to that the fact that the Irish Film Board suffered a substantial cut in its budget this year, and that the tax incentives that have underpinned the industry for the past decade are due to expire at the end of next year, and the future looks bleaker than it has in years.
It's almost exactly 10 years since the first Arts Minister, Michael D Higgins, took the country's audiovisual industry by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into the modern age. Sheridan and Neil Jordan had shown that Irish film-makers could speak eloquently to the world - with British money - and now we were going to build on that success. The reconstituted Irish Film Board would provide investment for script development and production. Beefed-up tax incentives would guarantee that Irish producers could raise matching funds at home, which would help secure more foreign investment. RTÉ would have to increase its quota of independent productions, which would lead to improvements in infrastructure, and buzzwords such as "critical mass" and "momentum" were bandied about. And, yes, quite a lot of films got made.
Ten years on, Jordan and Sheridan remain the country's best-known and most highly regarded directors. A handful of others - Conor McPherson, Gerard Stembridge, Paddy Breathnach and Johnny Gogan among them - have made two or more features over the course of the decade but have yet to produce a film that makes a big impact internationally. Far more directors are stalled after their debut feature films failed to find audiences. The Oscar-winning exploits of the late 1980s and early 1990s may have raised unrealistic expectations of a world waiting hungrily for an Irish cinematic renaissance, but the reality of what has happened since is still a little dispiriting.
A few years ago, the simplistic stereotype of "Irish films" was of bleak dramas about sexual repression, Catholic guilt and political violence. It was more cliché than truth, but it reflected a widespread feeling that Irish cinema had difficulty engaging with the contemporary. Many of the films of the past five years have tried to address this, shoehorning "modern Ireland" references into genres such as the thriller and the romantic comedy. The results have been mixed, both artistically and commercially. There's a dispiriting literalism about many of these productions; the fact that three films have been made about the Dublin gangster Martin Cahill and two about the murdered journalist Veronica Guerin suggests that the biopic is a suspiciously popular device in contemporary Irish cinema, or that there's a lack of confidence in the power of fiction.
Contemporary romantic comedies such as About Adam and When Brendan Met Trudy have played fairly successfully at home but failed to find substantial audiences internationally.
It may be that international audiences couldn't care less about contemporary Ireland and that they'd rather hear about Catholic guilt and political violence after all. The two most internationally acclaimed Irish films of the past couple of years were Bloody Sunday and The Magdalene Sisters, which won the top awards at the Berlin and Venice film festivals, respectively. Both films received support from the Irish Film Board, both had Irish co-producers and both excavated painful stories from our recent history with passion and cinematic flair. Both films, incidentally, were directed by British film-makers.
Film-making is a collaborative art, and much energy has been expended in recent years in Europe in an attempt to rein in the power of the auteurist director, who, it is believed in some quarters, has driven European cinema down a wilfully obscurantist, uncommercial path that cannot hope to compete with Hollywood.
Equally, in Ireland, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage the development of mid-sized production companies that can achieve the economies of scale and continuity of production that are necessary to develop Irish film-making beyond its cottage-industry status. But, no matter how impressive the business plan, it can't substitute for the spark of creativity at the heart of all great, or even good, cinema.
These companies are now faced with a major difficulty: the decline of the mid-sized films towards which many of them are geared. The middle-range film has not completely disappeared; Conor McPherson's comedy The Actors, due out later this year, falls into that category. But there's a consensus that there will be far fewer of them in years to come. As Robert Quinn says (see panel, right), most films will be made for less than €1 million or more than €10 million.
For those interested in seeing a vibrant film culture in Ireland, this may not turn out to be a bad thing. Caught in the demographic catch-22 of needing to raise most of their finance outside the country, because our population is too small to recoup the costs of a mid-sized feature, too many films have fallen between stools, unsure what audience they are addressing and ending up addressing no audience at all.
The Irish Film Board's new low-budget initiative, the first fruits of which will be seen this week at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, offers the chance to finance a film fully within Ireland, without the drawn-out process of assembling a complex international package, with all the compromises that implies. Another threat is looming, however.
With the Section 481 tax incentive due to draw to a close at the end of next year, producers are starting to lobby for its retention. The omens are not good. The scheme has its roots in the political culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when tax reliefs were a central instrument of Government policy.
The people who benefit most from them are not the film-makers but well-off professionals and businesspeople who reduce their tax liabilities with no real risk. In theory, these people are investing in a film. In practice, the quality or success of the finished product makes no difference to them - they still get their tax breaks. Much of the money the Government forgoes ends up in the pockets of the most well-to-do members of our society; it's a clumsy and regressive way of doing business.
The grim reality, though, is that Ireland is competing with countries that offer similar or better financial incentives for film production. Those in the film industry paint a doomsday scenario if Section 481 disappears as planned. The large-scale international productions that periodically boost the industry here, such as the fantasy adventure Reign of Fire, two years ago, will choose instead to locate in Canada, Australia or the Czech Republic. Smaller-scale films will be deprived of about 10 to 12 per cent of their budgets - a significant portion. Infrastructure will wither and jobs will be lost.
The issue is already urgent; given the long lead-in time in film pre-production, producers will be discussing projects for 2005 in the next few months; without Section 481 their job will be infinitely harder.
The irony is that part of the film industry in Ireland is thriving: cinema receipts are booming and we have one of the most enthusiastic movie-going populations in Europe. The cinema chains, both multinational and local, make huge profits yet put little or nothing back into the indigenous industry. Perhaps it is time for them to do so.
In France, a levy on cinema tickets is used to reward French films that do well at the domestic box office. Success is incentivised and successful film-makers get to make more films. Unlike Section 481, the levy system rewards films that find an audience and penalises those that don't. Maybe, 10 years on, it's time for another Higgins-style shake-up of the rules of the film-making game.
Crisis, What Crisis?, an open discussion on the future of the Irish film industry (Monday, 11am, MacNeill Theatre, Hamilton Building, TCD), is part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (March 6th-13th), www.dubliniff.com
Robert Quinn, above, has spent his adult life in film, working for years as an assistant director on many of the biggest feature films made in Ireland, as well as in Europe and South Africa. Along the way, he also directed several acclaimed short films of his own. His first feature as a director, the contemporary thriller Dead Bodies, has its world premiere at the closing night of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival next week. The 33-year-old has seen both sides of the coin, working in production during what now look like the boom years and now happy to be earning far less as a director, working under the Irish Film Board's new scheme for low-budget feature films, with a budget of less than €1 million.
"I've gone from being a good earner paying a lot of tax to a situation where I'm no use at all to the taxman," he says cheerfully. "But this is one of the best initiatives the film board has come up with - they should have been doing it years ago. Five years ago, I would have needed €5 million to make a film, and I wouldn't have had a chance of getting it.
"There's a lot of work like my film which will happen in the next year," says Quinn. "People will have to get used to that. It's becoming less and less possible to finance films above €1 million and below €10 million. That might make some people consider their positions. They'll wonder if this is the way to continue here."
But he sees some advantages to the new environment. "In most of the film-making of the last few years, there's been a need for excessive trucks, lights, crew, etc. Smaller-scale film-making allows you to shake off that kind of paraphernalia. What you need is something that concentrates on the story."
He is deeply concerned, though, at the threat to infrastructure and jobs posed by the ending of Section 481 tax incentives and is keen to point out how important and helpful a post-production studio such as Tim Morris's Windmill Lane was to completing Dead Bodies.
"I'm standing here in Ardmore Studios and it's completely empty, it's not working," he says, arguing that losing Section 481 would be a body blow to an already ailing industry. "I don't want Section 481 gone just because a civil servant decides to close down tax loopholes. Would the Government stand by if 2,000 jobs were lost in the bloodstock industry? If you look at something like Reign Of Fire" - the big-budget fantasy movie filmed here in 2001 - "it spent around £40 million [€51 million\] here and it cost the Government £3 million [€3.8 million\].
He agrees that the climate for film-making has become more difficult. "There was a period in Ireland towards the end of the 1990s when it was quite fruitful. I'm certainly aware that it's become more barren. But the people who are really attuned to film-making will stick with it. You make films because you love films."
Tomorrow: Aidan Dunne on the coming of age of the visual arts in Ireland
Friday: Karen Fricker on how a changing Ireland is changing Irish theatre
