Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A writer and film director known for films including Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, and Michael Collins.
On the island
Eight records
'Round MidnightFavourite
One of the best known staple kind of tunes in jazz is Around Midnight... he's got this spiky little style of playing the piano that is absolutely magnificent.
You always heard the best versions of kind of soul and American music in carnival environments and I remember this from my youth and I put it in a movie called The Butcher Boy.
When I first experienced when I first heard uh Beep Up jazz, when I first heard specifically heard Charlie Parker, you know, I heard a kind of a world of tonality and a world of kind of uh discovery that was terribly fresh.
If you were on a desert island, yeah, and you wanted to remind yourself of the entire history of popular music and soul music and the essence of it... all I'd want is Sam Cooke
Irish Tune from County Derry (Danny Boy)
Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble
It's uh a beautiful arrangement of the most hackneyed tune of all time, yeah, which is actually still a beautiful tune... which I would I tried to fit into a movie I made called Michael Collins, but uh just couldn't quite get it in there.
I suppose I love voices really, you know, and uh um I love Astrid Gilberto's voice because she doesn't seem to put any effort into it whatsoever.
These melodies always remind me of um you know, my uncles and aunts and the kind of generation that just I suppose that came out of the War of Independence, you know what I mean, and the kind of weird sense of uh kind of Irishness that they came up with, half Victorian, you know, half invented, but quite beautiful.
Pavane pour une infante défunte
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn
This is a piece I thought of at one stage of putting on the end of the affair and somewhere when I was toying with the temp music, but I was saved from that necessity by the great Michael Nyman
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30How surprised are you that you've become a filmmaker, given that you intended all along to be a writer?
Traditionally I suppose it was a very it was not a very wealthy culture, not a very wealthy place. When I grew up in the fifties it was very, very downbeat... and the uh the thought of me in the f when I was growing up of an Irish person directing a movie was like a contradiction in terms... writing was reading and writing was the great escape for me.
Presenter asks
4:57What attracted you to Graham Greene's novel [The End of the Affair]?
I'd read Alder Green when I was a kid and I'd always felt that he was never well served by his directors... because the films never had the atmosphere that you feel in the books... and what it struck me there was something very cinematic right in the middle of the novel, which is the fact that there's a a love affair scene from two different points of view... I thought it could become a cinematic very cinematic thing.
Presenter asks
6:06Why does the theme of two men being obsessed by the same woman crop up so often in your work?
It's probably happened to me a lot in my life... the examination of erotic desire or of um the idea of what we call love, you know, people think it's simple, you know, I never think it's simple, ever, you know. And I often think that people don't even know what they desire... and the whole mechanism of need and longing fasc has always fascinated me
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
I would take uh Marcel Proust's Alle Recherche de Tompes Perdue, and I would try to take two versions of it, one in English and one in French, and I'd try and learn the French by the end of my sojourn on this little island.
The luxury
I'll take a typewriter... because... the fact that the words you put in a page, there's some finality about them if they're actually printed onto a page that you have to tear up if it's wrong and if you know, shrivel in your hand and throw away. So, I probably enjoy reestablishing that relationship again.
Presenter asks
9:47Did you have visions or hear voices as a kid?
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, all the time, yeah, yeah, yeah... when I was grow growing up, you were constantly told that you were being watched by not only, uh, you know, uh God and the Virgin Mary, but by about thirty seven variety of saints at the same time... anything you do is observed by unseen eyes everywhere in the sky
Presenter asks
10:51Why were you rationed heavily on cinema as a child?
I think it was because my father was a teacher. I was allowed to see one movie every two weeks. And grew up in a house without a television... I think it was because being a teacher and being very concerned with ideas of literacy and reading and all that sort of stuff, he thought movies were kind of detrimental, you know, to the psyche, somehow kind of a corrosive force.
Presenter asks
23:23Do you regret making Michael Collins?
No, not at all. I mean it's it's um I think somebody should have made it. If it wasn't me, I think s I would have demanded somebody else made it... I felt it was an important film to be made and I felt it was um an instructive film for anybody who's interested in, you know, relationships between these islands.
“Dublin that I grew up in, every street and every brick had more words per cubic centimetre than any other city in the world, it seemed.”
“I wrote that film [The Crying Game] thinking if they don't if I don't get this film made, actually I probably retire gracefully from the scene, you know, because it uh I mean it was about d it was about serious confrontational issues, it was about politics and sexuality and race and... Northern Ireland.”
“The idea of being on a desert island on my own, believe me, would be pure hell. To say hell as other people, don't they? But I suppose. For me, hell is myself, yeah.”