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On the Cutting Edge
16 Sep 1999 :
Jim Colgan is Managing Director of Editline. I caught up with him working on a trailer for the new John Hurt and Brenda Blethan film, Night Train.

Jim Colgan knows his job. In the business for thirty years, he has worked with the biggest names in the industry and watched most of the key Irish films this decade pass through his edit suite. After training on-the-job in the now defunct Silverpine Studios in Bray, he went on to work for the BBC in London, the Abbey Theatre, and scuba-diving while recording and filming Eamonn de Buitler on his underwater wildlife programme.

His diverse career experience has taught him one thing in particular about filmmaking in Ireland. “The bottom line is the balance sheet. The rest of it, you can work, you can create, you can build the interest but you must do that. If you are losing money no one is going to be interested. What we (the industry) have to get right is to emphasise the value of the industry to the country and to the government. They have got to take it very seriously because every time a film is shown abroad it represents the culture of the country, its another flag flying for the country and I think that’s got to be promoted. It’s a two pronged attack. The impetuous has to come from the film industry itself. There are no real reasons why it can’t work for us here but we have to have the effort. At the moment we talk about the Financial Services Centre and all the other wonderful things which Ireland is offering. The Government must feel that this is an industry which they should be involved in. Obviously at the end of the day it’s all about making money unfortunately and tax breaks do attract people in here to spend money and therefore you get product” he explained.

Colgan set up Editline, a picture editing company in 1992. He recognised that non-linear editing, and in particular Lightworks the digital editing system, was the future and decided to invest in one Lightworks machine. The BBC was their first big name client in 1993 and this enabled them to invest in their second machine. Soon after came Braveheart and since then almost all the major Ireland based productions have used their facilities including Rob Roy, In Dreams, Angelas Ashes and Michael Collins. Their systems can be dry hired to other locations with qualified editing assistants if required and they currently have three machines working on features in England. The company prides itself on its ability to provide not only the system hardware but full technical support and the experience it has gained from working on major feature films.

Jim Colgan was also a founding director of Ardmore Sound. “I’m still linked in a small way but we operate as completely separate companies. We had no sound post-production here and this was the starting ground. Michael Collins helped a lot because Neil Jordan stayed here for about six months doing his post production in Ardmore which kicked it off and finished it in America because we couldn’t finish it here in those days. But then, In Dreams, although it was filmed in America was completely finished in Ardmore Sound.” Once Ardmore was operational Jim Colgan’s role was reduced. Paul Moore was Managing Director and additional people were then needed to be brought in to allow it to reach new goals. “My role to a certain extent was minimised, and I think there was a real need for other people to come in, like Doug Murray who brought in the American experience because he had worked with Skywalker, and people like that. They always had a view that it would look to the international market to pull in work to here. I think its going very well for them.”

Jim Colgan rates the highest point in his career to be the time spent working on the Michael Collins film. Colgan would see it as one of the most significant films made at that time. Quite apart from the tales of Liam Neeson cycling to Editline each day and queuing for his pint in the kitchen he is justifiably proud of their work on the project. Originally they wanted to cut the film with conventional cutting techniques using the Steinbeck. “We fought hard to convince them to go to non-linear which was what Editline was set up for and they said right, you say you can do this then do it all, and bill us. It also turned out to be a very enjoyable film. Sometimes you can take on these projects and they can be like hell. Afterwards you can say great we got through it but I wouldn’t even consider this one to have been difficult to do. It was tasking but it was very enjoyable.” The film needed to have somewhere to show rushes and Editline obliged. “Then they moved in lock, stock and barrel and in fact towards the end of the film Neil Jordan and Steve Woolley had offices here so we had the whole house given over to the film.”

He admires many of the people he works with. Unsurprisingly Neil Jordan is the first name he mentions. Jim Sheridan is the second “I’ve known Jim a long long time because I would have worked in theatre the same time as he was there, when he left the Project and was acting in the Abbey. Jim is a fantastic story teller.” Outside directing, Jim Colgan admires Seamus Deasy for his work in photography and how he has made an international scene, Sean Corcoran who he considers to be “one of the most amiable and best lighting cameramen around.” Pat Duffner is “a superb editor” and Kieran Horgan is “probably one of the best sound-recordists we have ever come across and sound is something we know because we listen to their tracks an awful lot and he’s absolutely fantastic. A lot of people don’t realise that on Michael Collins about 90% of the actual dialogue you hear is the location dialogue, its not ADR’ed. And where it was it was usually because Neil wanted a different performance rather than a problem with the sound. I think people like these are fantastic. They do things I only dream about doing.”

Although he doesn’t mention it, the Editline team itself is clearly one that he is most proud of. Technically still a small business, the staff complement totals only four. Working 10 hours a day they are currently working close to capacity. At the moment they have four major features in post production. Neil Jordan’s new feature, The End of the Affair, Paddy Breathnach’s film, Never Better, Pat Murphy’s US production, Nora, and Kevin Liddy’s, Country. “I would still regard us as a small business. I suppose the Ardmore Sound experience convinced me that if I am running it directly myself it’s a small business and run in a small way. I suppose one of the reasons I left the BBC was that I was unsettled being cocooned like that. I like it small. We slip in and we slip out again. It’s a tight team and of course we take on freelancers from time to time. It just makes it managable.”

Recently Editline has completed work on Agnes Brown and Angela’s Ashes. They were asked to provide some voiceover material for Angela’s ashes designed to represent the author’s voice at the opening of the film. They put together a test piece with Limerick actor Andrew Bennett and recorded a series of takes in an edit suite but not in a sound booth. The producers liked the result and asked them to try some more. “As far as we were concerned we were still doing a demonstration voiceover and the actor himself thought this. Then we got a phonecall from the sound editor saying that they didn’t want to meet the actor but they wanted to rerecord some new lines using the same actor and the same room and it was this they used. So we’re very pleased about that.”

Editline continues to seek out new challenges. Although Jim Colgan would be delighted to get back to the edit suite he knows the future lies in new international partnerships. In March he went to Australia on an Irish trade delegation and found it a very useful trip. “There was nothing there to frighten us technically. In fact I would say we were ahead in some ways which was very good. What was remarkable was their historical view.” The Australian film industry would be more developed and certainly older than the Irish industry. "They have encountered similar problems and were able to anticipate how our industry would develop. They accept totally that they are in the hands of the Americans like everyone else.”

The trip was set up to develop co-production opportunities. “They (Australians) have quite stringent rules about their co-production deals. You would have to certainly meet at least 80% of their requirements but I think at that stage you could negotiate things. I don’t think distance is a problem anymore. If something happens between two production companies, because facilities companies can’t make the link in that sense, then we are there to support and back it up.”

It is this ability to be there and available to back people up which Jim Colgan does best and it is his reliability both practically and in a business sense which keeps productions returning to Ireland and to Editline again and again.

Further information: www.iftn.ie/editline
editline@iol.ie

- GQ 16/9/99



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