It's a light thing. Irish whizz-kid director, Declan Lowney (the Eurovision, Father Ted, Cold Feet) is looking out the window of an imposing building in the middle of a Bauhaus-meets-Orwell business park in London's Chiswick. He's here directing a commercial for a new brand of biscuit - "great money" - and waiting for the sun to set before he can turn his cameras on. "This place is weird," he says, "there's all these signs around saying `Enjoy Work' - what a load of bollocks," he giggles in a Wexford accent untainted by 15 years of living in London.
Funny, because in talking about his various high-profile directorial jobs over the years, Lowney displays a real sense of work being enjoyed. Utterly down-to-earth, immensely likeable and as thoughtful as he is off-the-cuff, its little wonder he's so in demand. After years working on the small screen, he's just directed his first cinema film, Wild About Harry, and is now harbouring plans that include the words "great", "Irish" and "comedy".
Since the age of 12, when he used to use his uncle's Super 8, he's been picking up awards - from local Wexford amateur film awards to a BAFTA for Father Ted in 1997. A product of former ANCO courses, he ignored parental advice to pursue a career in law and got "the start" in RTE aged 18. Flying up through the ranks, he was a producer/director by 24 and a few short years later he was given the job of doing Eurovision in 1988 - "I know it's bloody awful but it's a great gig to get and really puts you on the map". Following some incautious remarks to a reporter though, the gig almost fell through: "I did this interview just before the show went out and basically said Eurovision was just an excuse for a load of TV executives to go on the piss on expenses. I got into loads of trouble for that, although fortunately it was too late in the day to take me off the show".
Nevertheless, he soon found himself out of RTE and in London. He immediately picked up work on music programmes and his CV includes directing U2's PopMart tour in 1997, live concert performances of everyone from Prince to the Velvet Underground and, for the past eight years, looking after the BBC's Glastonbury coverage - "I love it, I do it just so I can get in free and get into the vibe once the cameras stop rolling".
Somewhere along the line though, and he's still not quite sure how, the man who wanted to do "drama", ended up as being a bit of a comedy director mavin. "I started off doing stuff with Jo Brand and then with Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith and lots of one-off pilot type stuff, then along came Father Ted." This got his name around in comedy circles and he went on to direct the first episodes of Cold Feet, The Grimleys and the current Paul Whitehouse show, Happiness.
"Directing comedy is just an intuitive thing," he says. "You have to keep the atmosphere nice and light, as opposed to drama, and you really have to go with the spontaneity of the scene. You can't be doing things like working on the lighting for an hour, or using sophisticated camera work, you just go with it. You always have some idea of how the script is going to play or not by whether the crew laugh during the first take or not."
It was Lowney's work on Father Ted that got him his first cinema directorial job on Wild About Harry, described by all concerned as a "light comedy". "Declan's work on Ted was rightly acclaimed" says the film's producer, Robert Cooper, "and I had also been lucky enough to watch two pilots he had just directed for Granada. His talent shone out - particularly in the area of humour. I felt here was someone who was a remarkable and fresh talent and immediately sent him a copy of the draft script."
Northern Irish writer Colin Bateman (Divorcing Jack) did the screenplay for the film, which is about an obnoxious Belfast chat-show host (Brendan Gleeson) who is about to be divorced by his wife (Amanda Donohoe). Gleeson collapses at the divorce hearing and goes into a coma. When he regains consciousness, he finds he has forgotten everything that has happened in the previous 25 years of his life.
"What really attracted me to it was that idea of starting again, of someone who's become a really horrible person, being able to go back to a time when he wasn't one and seeing if he will still take the same route," says Lowney. "I spent a lot of time talking with Colin Bateman about the script, days on our own just talking and me asking about the characters: `What does this mean?', `Why do they act in a particular way?'. I found Colin very open and willing to listen."
Lowney had a hand in the casting as well. He always wanted Brendan Gleeson in the lead role and having worked with actor James Nesbitt on Cold Feet, he "wanted him in there somewhere - the role of the politician in the film suited him perfectly. The politician is revealed on Brendan's chat show as a criminal and unaware of the fact that Brendan has lost his memory, is intent on destroying him. The role could have been played by a much older person but we tweaked the part to suit Jimmy".
Lowney was also responsible for getting Cheers star George ("Norm") Wendt on board. "We needed someone to play Brendan's television producer. I was always a huge fan of Cheers and by coincidence, George Wendt was in London starring in the play, Art. I immediately realised I had found the right person for the part and after reading the script he was totally on board."
The film was made in Ireland and Lowney is proud it represents another step away from the cliched cinematography of old, portraying the country in its real light - "and we didn't even mention the Troubles!" he says.
Lowney found surprisingly little differences in directing for cinema as opposed to television: "the only thing really is that everything is magnified on the big screen and attention to detail is so important. On film, if something is in a shot, it's for a specific reason. That was completely new to me, on television you can get away with so much more. The other thing is that if a film gets two million people in to see it, it's described as a `blockbuster' but, for example, I'm working on a `small' television production on Happiness and we regularly get two and a half million people watching. The scales are totally different."
Excited by his first foray into cinema, he says he would love to next get involved with a "great Irish comedy film". "I'm talking about something which would be recognisably Irish but could also play out in the US. I really believe the talent is out there - look at all the comic names around at the moment. It just takes someone to get them all together. It can't be that hard . . ."
Wild About Harry opened the Dublin Film Festival last night and will go on general relase in June. Dublin Film Festival box office: 01-677 2866/credit card bookings: 01-677 2838
