that on 16. For this film we got some good deals and we just decided, why not? I’m glad we did because I think everyone will agree film has a better quality at the end of the day, especially for shadows and night time shooting. We used Panavision for cameras, lighting Cine-Electirc, Fuji stock, Soho images as the lab and posted at The Farm, they all clicked really well.
Was it hard working with such a tight budget?
The budget was enough. There is always a temptation to get more money but we felt that would just take longer. I think it’s fair to say that any filmmaker working today has a huge economic factor to consider. Your budget does limit and dictate what you can do. Below the line costs of movies are kindof the same, it’s attracting the cast usually that brings it up. We were on very modest equity minimums but I don’t know if I’d do that much different if I had a bigger budget in terms of getting different actors, I’d certainly have made much more money myself!
Is it frustrating for a director to be limited by financial constraints like that?
Not really because you go into it with your eyes open, because you know that getting to make any film is rare enough so if somebody says to you “we can get €600,000”, that sounds great. I could do another movie for that, I’ve no problem there because it’s enough to get the movie done on a professional basis. Budgets do determine a lot of movies, they are so bananas now, like our budget is really the equivalent of the First Aid budget on a Hollywood movie.
So do you count yourself lucky to have had this opportunity?
It’s kinda up-sided that I feel. I don’t know if lucky is the word but I’m glad it happened because it’s touch or go whether you get into film. It’s not terribly hard work but there are a lot of things that still have to happen. You can see at the end of the day there are maybe only a dozen or so movies made every year in Ireland and it’s not necessarily that you will graduate from shorts to features. Also, it’s pretty hard core, we’d all like to think its all art and so on, but there is a pretty hard core commercial aspect of it these days that you have to be aware of. When we made Flick we thought “oh yeah a movie about drugs everybody will be interested in that” but drug movies don’t really sell. There’s ferocious competition, Irish films are competing with the best of the rest of the world, not Hollywood because we don’t really compete with them, it’s a choice between the next Wong Kar-Wai movie or an Irish movie. Everyone is pitted against each other. The American’s dominate but the machine is just so vast now. It’d be nice on the next one to actually have a million bucks (pause) and Sean Penn.
You’ve done a lot of documentary before, do you ever see yourself going back to that?
Features is a tricky business. I think the more practice you get the better and more confident you become. Certainly I’m over the hump and I don’t envy young people coming into it today because it’s very tricky to get up and running. I’d like to make maybe one film every couple of years, and I’d like to make one really good one.
So your next feature ‘Blown In’, how far into development are you with that?
As we were doing the poster for ‘Trouble With Sex’ I got into the whole idea of how to market ‘Blow In’ and the tagline is “they came looking for the good life”. It’s something I’ve been working on and I’d like to get out of Dublin for the next movie and bring in some non Irish characters in. He’s Irish, she’s English and they have a kid. They are doing okay in London but he has a hankering to do something different, write a book, so he returns to a place where he has spent a number of summers when he was a kid and picks up on an old relationship, an old feud and it just goes wrong for them.
It’s a departure in a way and certainly a bigger canvas. It’s an ensemble cast and it would be just great to make, and as everybody is obsessed with genres I suppose its a thriller. It’s quite a trend in Ireland now to live down the country and it’s not all its cracked up to be sometimes. At the moment the script is signed off so it’s out there to raise money, Movie House the ‘Trouble With Sex’ sales agent is going to handle it and meanwhile we will start showing the script to actors. It’d be nice to get it to some people and see what the response is, feel the waters a little bit.
You mentioned before that you want to make one really good film…
I’d like to, yeah.
You don’t think Trouble With Sex is that film?
I don’t think it’s going to be my best one no, but I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just more that I think you can only get better, I think the fourth one is supposed to be your crossover one, if you have that luxury, (speaks louder and closer to the mic) if the Film Board allow me that.
Finally, do you think Conor and Michelle will last?
No, I never thought they’d last, no happy ever after. Originally I was going to have a line at the end saying “it didn’t last” but I thought it was too abrupt because we hadn’t really built it up, but no I don’t think so, does anybody?
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Trouble With Sex is released in the IFI and UGC from the 6th of May 2005 through Eclipse Pictures.
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Check out the Trouble With Sex Trailer in the IFTN Preview Theatre
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Trouble With Sex Official Website www.troublewithsex.com by Tanya Warren
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