When pushed, Barry Dignam and Audrey O'Reilly will cheerfully describe themselves as lucky, fortunate and cheap - very cheap. By the time they make it to the summer though, they may be forced to re-word their by-lines. Chances are, they're just very good. Gary Quinn caught up with them as they packed for their next festival appearance.
As you are reading this, film-making duo Barry Dignam and Audrey O'Reilly are already en-route to France. On slightly more, than a wing and a prayer they were selected for the Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival. For those of you who don't know - yes, that's a big deal. The only Irish entries at the 2000 event, their film, In Loving memory, will compete with the world's best in short film and O'Reilly and Dignam are beaming. "Its just because it's the biggest. I suppose more than anything it's a good ego boost." Dignam explained.
Produced as part of the Shortcuts programme the Clermont screening will also mark the films international debut. They missed the traditional shortcuts launch, the Cork Film Festival, by three days due to an unfortunate illness on the part of one member of crew. They hope to make up for this by having it selected for the Dublin Film Festival in a proposed Shortcuts programme, automatically giving it star billing since all the others in last years Shortcuts were already seen in Cork.
Audrey O'Reilly and Barry Dignam established their working relationship at college where within a week they had a 'blazing row'. They have maintained that rhythm, concerned that the past twelve months hasn't been marked by their traditional annual head to head. Both students of Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, O'Reilly scripted In Loving Memory and then presented it along with four other scripts to see if Dignam would agree to produce. "I liked them all, but In Loving Memory, was the one that I thought we should go with." They put together an application for the Shortcuts programme "to convince these people to give us a hideous amount of money to make the film."
Hideous is a word they use sparingly now to describe their budget. Straight out of college, the £34,000 budget that they won from the Irish Film Board was ten times greater than anything they had worked with before and the smallest Shortcut budget awarded ever. Now on the other side of the process they realise that the money is all relative. "We probably could have spent £80,000 and it would have looked the same. The advantage with shortcuts for us was that we could work with people who were completely beyond our reach normally." they explained.
Audrey O'Reilly referred me back to their lucky streak, "It was that really slack period. Some people who didn't need the unbelievably reduced rates that the Shortcuts budget offers were available to work because they wanted something to do. We had put together a list of our ideal crew and we got all those people," she said.
The Director of Photography was Ciaran Tanham and Jim Harkin was the production designer. Both men had worked on the Peter Sheridan directed short, The Breakfast, and the documentary, Real Men Don't Wear Togs. These films had qualities that Dignam and O'Reilly wanted for In Loving Memory. They were delighted when they got them. Barry Dignam explained. "The learning curve was very steep. I think we learnt more in six months than I learnt in four years just by working with people who are already out there doing the job."
As writer and director, there was a lot of pressure on Audrey to ensure the 'look' of the film was right. She sat down with the Ciaran Tanham and worked through the storyboard and let new ideas come into the process. The end result? "I think I got a nicer looking film than I had ever planned," she said smiling.
From the initial entry to Shortcuts to the end of post-production, took almost a year, with a lot of waiting around in between. The actual shoot was four days long. Now that its finished I ask about their strategy for selling the film in Clermont. They both laugh on cue. Claiming to not previously had a use for the word strategy, they go on to belie their coy replies and tell me about the 15 to 20 meetings they have already set up with distributors and broadcasters over there. The film is already a success having gone as far as it has for its premiere. Selling it will be the challenging part.
Meanwhile their careers go on. Audrey O'Reilly is currently working on Honour Bright, her Miramax winner from last year, with Kirsten Sheridan. "We got development funding from the EMDA and it's an ongoing project which we both want to put to bed soon." She is also working on a feature script called Lamping, and as she puts it "just throwing lots of mud against the wall to see what sticks." She has a script ready for a digital project which she is planning and when she gets back from Clermont intends to get down to some serious writing. "I'm a director first and writer second, but someone pointed out to me once that unless you are actually directing you are not a director and until you are established, the best way to break in is to write. So that what I'm doing." She said with determination.
Barry Dignam will leave Clermont and pop home for the Oscar nominations to see who has made it into the short film category. His other short, Dream Kitchen, which this time saw him direct, has been doing the Oscar run in the US. Then its back to Europe and the Berlin Film festival where the same film has been selected for competition in the shorts category there. A couple of weeks later and he's off to London where he meets up with Audrey again as both their films are showing at the London Irish Film Festival at the end of February. He has just finished working with Ed Guiney on the Laughing Suicide Club as Assistant to the producer and looks for ward to the chance to work with him again, but next time he wants to direct.
I ask the pair if they feel that there is a real film community in Ireland. "I think there is. Maybe because we live a charmed existence and we have got the funding we have looked for. It really seems quite good so far. We have had a lot of support," Barry explained.
Audrey continued, "The really interesting thing is that the least experienced people on the set (of a Shortcuts film) are the producer and the director but you aren't made to feel that way. There is a real team spirit where everyone else says, yes, we like this script, let's try and make it the best film we can."
And that's exactly what they did.
Barry Dignam can be contacted at barrydignam@eircom.net
Audrey O'Reilly can be contacted at audrey_o_reilly@hotmail.com
