A set of moving paintings – Making The Bridge of San Luis Rey. An interview with Director Mary McGuckian. (Page 3)

Her next film, Rag Tale, which starts shooting in London in the autumn will be very different, both in terms of subject matter and the way it will be shot, moving from the very traditional piece of film making that is The Bridge of San Luis Rey, to a more experimental way of working that sounds intriguing: “It’s almost an antidote to that type of film [Bridge]. It’s about tabloid newspapers, set in London. It’s a week in the life of a tabloid newspaper, shooting on high definition film, improvising the dialogue with a group of great contemporary young actors, shooting it in six weeks, making it a very fast, funny, small and energetic film. It’s a black comedy. I’ve never done something like this. Again, it’s not an Irish film, it’s more Anglo-American, but I think we all get the tabloid culture. Not that we’ll be saying anything new about tabloid culture or the cult of the celebrity, but I do think somehow, as the world has become ennured to the proliferation of the tabloid culture in all of the media, that maybe a reminder piece will be fun. And we’ve had some American help on that as well, with Carl Bernstein looking at it, and Chris Horrie who wrote Stick it up your punter – the rise and fall of the Sun. It’ll be set when we shoot it, which is fairly opportunistically in the run up to the American Presidential Election”.

Best

This is not her first foray into a tabloid related subject, as her last film Best, a biopic of legendary footballer George Best, couldn’t but take into account tabloidism and the cult of celebrity. Interestingly enough, the tabloids, who have self-righteously created and destroyed so many celebrities, were protective about Best when it came to the film: ”At the time it came out in England, the English tabloids still claimed him as a public property and they didn’t want in any way to denigrate him, and the fact that he was an alcoholic was a shameful thing. They didn’t want to bring it up or deal with it. But in other footballing countries like Italy, Spain and South America, where the film did really well, there was a great amount of sympathy for him”.

The film did particularly well in Italy, where I managed to see a dubbed version, which, for someone used to the soft northern accent of leading actor John Lynch, was more than a little strange. The Irish film director laughs,“I used to have a real issue about pictures being dubbed, but when it’s done well it’s actually quite amazing. It’s funny, we saw it in Italian as well once. John quite liked it, being half Italian himself ”.

The film was a great success in football crazy countries, but it wasn’t particularly the football that attracted McGuckain to make the film: “What intrigued me more was his life and his clash with all that surrounds becoming a celebrity icon. He had a great talent, he had a genius, an instinctive talent, he was never prepared either with technique or a protection to deal with the fame that was thrust upon him. Arguably, people could say, he was one of the first sports celebrities”.

Best offered two distinct challenges to the film-maker: the first a technical one, in terms of getting the football shot: “it remains the most technically difficult film I’ve ever made. Getting the football together. The big challenge, that all the distributors and financiers were worried about was the football, and since then there have been a number of successful football films, but at the time football was seen as the kiss of death for a film. The attitude was that nobody ever gets football to work on screen, and the added problem was getting George Best’s football to work on screen, because all the footballing episodes were very well known. They had to be accurate. They had to be right. It had to be the real thing. We had to get our actors to slot in to the original footage, and the famous goals, the Nottingham Forest goal, the European cup goals, they had be absolutely accurate. At the time we had neither the budget or the technology to do the kind of CGI work you can do now, so we had to do it all on camera, which was kind of tricky {laughs]. Great fun to do, and the success of it was that nobody really referred to the football at the end. They either said it worked or didn’t even mention it, which was great. I was expecting it to be lambasted!”

The second challenge was more of a moral one, the representation of a living legend: “He [George Best] was very around it at the time and you couldn’t take on somebody, a living legend’s life story, morally, I felt, without their being a part of it and being comfortable with it. Which meant inevitably that there were parts of the script that did not make it into the finished film. Not many, but there were certain areas that we tried to explore, parts in particular about his family which were places he didn’t want to go.

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