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Interview with Nick Ryan – Winner of the George Morrison Documentary Feature IFTA
11 Apr 2014 : Deirdre Molumby
‘The Summit’, a documentary feature charting the tragic 2008 K2 expedition during which Limerick mountain climber Ger McDonell and other mountaineers died, won the George Morrison Documentary Feature Award at the IFTAs last week. IFTN spoke with Nick Ryan after his win at the IFTAs to find out how he felt having won the award, what were the difficulties of making ‘The Summit’, and what are his next moves as a director and producer.

Having won awards at so many international film festivals, how did you feel about winning the IFTA Award for Best Documentary?

“I was genuinely surprised. I mean that, I’ve come to never expect anything. The competition was ‘Natan’, ‘Here Was Cuba’ and ‘Broken Song’, which are all wonderful movies. So it’s really an honour to win amongst your peers like that. I genuinely was touched and completely unprepared on the night. I genuinely didn’t think I was going to win. In the end, I pretty much dedicated it to the climbers on the mountain and the people who made the movie, because it’s not about me, the award was for the film.

“It’s a great honour to be awarded by IFTA, I think it’s just fantastic for everybody involved in the film, and especially for the families and the climbers – I think it means so much for them. Acknowledgement coming from one’s own country, even with Sundance and every other festival, means a lot.”

What has been your experience of the IFTAs and why do you think the ceremony is special? “That was my first IFTAs, I think it’s a very Irish ceremony in many aspects and I personally really enjoyed it. I think they’re great because I think for Irish cinema and television, it’s wonderful to get to turn around to peers and give them that arena to show what they do and to be awarded for it. It’s a hard business, everyone is doing their best, everyone is trying to raise the stakes for what they do, so to be celebrated in any shape or form is fantastic. I think it’s well worth it, any criticism has been for all the wrong reasons.”

You’ve also had experience directing and producing shorts, such as ‘The German’ and ‘A Lonely Sky’. How do the two types of filmmaking (narrative short and documentary) compare?

“Well, my background was narrative, and ‘The Summit’ has a lot of narrative aspects with the dramatic reconstructions. The one thing I would say about the difference is with writing, is narrative films is so much easier because you can solve a lot of problems in the writing – if something isn’t working, you rewrite it to make it work. With documentary, you don’t have that luxury as it is reality, so if something didn’t pan out the way you wanted it to, you can’t just write something in that’s going to make it work.

“It’s especially difficult with dramatic reconstructions, they are something that people will either love or hate in a film, and people may argue that with reconstructions, it’s not really a documentary. But we were extremely diligent with the dramatic reconstructions, in how they were written and how they were filmed. There were no liberties taken so that can be quite a frustrating process because you want an easy way to get a story across, but you don’t have that freedom.

“The other aspect is that there’s a moral aspect with a documentary, especially with so many people still alive and others were lost on that mountain. You carry a huge amount of responsibility on your shoulders to make sure that their stories are told and told correctly.”

This documentary, given its subject matter and the required cinematography, was a huge undertaking. Do you plan on taking on more big projects or indeed documentaries in the future?

“My personal preference is to go back to narrative features, at the moment I’m working on such projects. I never made a conscious decision to make a documentary when the subject of ‘The Summit’ came around. It just struck me as something that I was interested in.

“‘The Summit’ was a four year process, so it took a long, long time to make it. At the same time feature films can be in development for up to ten years before you get to shoot. So all you can do is aim to develop projects that interest you, and I’m certainly looking at several ideas for documentaries with different people at the moment, even just to produce... But I’m also looking forward to getting obsessed with something entirely different.”

What projects are you working now or have you anything specific lined up for the future, both in terms of directing and producing?

“I can’t say too much, but I’m working with Ruairí Robinson on a few projects. As a producer, I’ll also be working with Billy O’Brien who made a film called ‘Isolation’. I’m also working on my own projects, as a director.

“I find when it comes to producing, it’s out of necessity rather than out of desire. I think my strength as a producer though is to put the right people together to make a project as good as possible.”

‘The Summit’ is out on DVD now. See a trailer for the award-winning documentary below:






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