Irish cinema in the twenty-first century

Ruth Barton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526124449
  9781526138378
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526124456
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Irish History

An accessible, comprehensive overview of contemporary Irish cinema, this book is intended for use as a third-level textbook and is designed to appeal to academics in the areas of film studies and Irish studies. Responding to changes in the Irish production environment, it includes chapters on new Irish genres such as creative documentary, animation and horror. It discusses shifting representations of the countryside and the city, always with a strong concern for gender representations, and looks at how Irish historical events, from the Civil War to the Troubles, and the treatment of the traumatic narrative of clerical sexual abuse have been portrayed in recent films. It covers works by established auteurs such as Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, as well as new arrivals, including the Academy Award-winning Lenny Abrahamson.

1

How to make an Irish film

Before turning to an analysis of the content of Irish cinema, it is useful to understand how Irish films are funded and why. In common with the situation in other European countries and small national cinemas, nearly all Irish films receive state subvention. In Ireland, this funding comes mainly via the Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann (hereafter IFB), but most productions are equally reliant on tax breaks (Section 481) and international co-productions for equity. Section 481 itself depends on government support for its continuation. Unlike, say, British cinema, Irish cinema has always been too small to consider competing with Hollywood, even if it relies to an extent on Hollywood filmmaking codes. This raises a further question (which will be discussed at the end of this chapter): is Irish cinema ‘art cinema’?

How to fund an Irish film

The IFB currently (IFB/BSÉ, 2018a) provides for the following: project development; production funding; co-production funding; documentary production funding; animation funding; completion funding; support for distribution; and short film funding. In certain exceptional circumstances, the IFB will also fund television production. From 2017 onwards, additional funding of €50,000 was made available for projects with a female writer or director and €100,000 with a female writer/director (IFB/BSÉ, 2018a). In 2007, the IFB announced the launch of a new Regional Support Fund to offset the additional cost of shooting in regional areas. Films including Breakfast on Pluto (Neil Jordan, 2005) and The Guard received support from this fund, but it seems to have since been dropped. Instead, most local councils also offer some film funding. IFB support, therefore, runs from the initiation of a project through its completion, and allows for producers to market and distribute their own films.

The IFB experienced its own crisis during the recession. In 2008, they received government support of €20 million, which was reduced year-on-year to €11,202,000 in 2014 (IFB/BSÉ, 2016: 36). The budget of 2017 saw the Board receive €18 million, returning it to a figure close to its pre-recession income. In addition, following the economic crash, the McCarthy Report (An Bord Snip Nua) recommended that there was no need for a Film Board:

The Group considers that continued funding of the Irish Film Board is not affordable at this time in the context of other more pressing spending priorities. Given the scale of tax expenditure (€418m since 1993 and €33m in 2008) via the tax incentive scheme for this sector, and given the level of international competition in this market space, there is no objective economic case for subventing the Irish Film Industry. (McCarthy et al., 2009: 18)

In the end, after extensive lobbying, much of which was focused on the jobs created through inward and local investment, the tourist potential of an Irish setting, and the ancillary spend on hospitality and so forth, the IFB was saved.

Other small pockets of money exist, including the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s licence fee-derived Sound and Vision fund, which has been responsible for much of the funding for the documentary sector, the Arts Council of Ireland, and European money from the MEDIA and Eurimages programmes. Some producers raise finance through crowd funding (Atlantic (Risteard O’Domhnaill, 2016) and Out of Here (Donal Foreman, 2013) are examples). Filmmakers and the IFB have long been critical of the lack of television funding for Irish filmmaking but given RTÉ’s own financial deficit, this is unlikely to change.

Section 481 (the tax incentive scheme) is crucial to Irish film and audiovisual production. One of the major benefits for Irish producers is that they receive the money up front, rather than after the release of the film or broadcast of the television show. It has been estimated (Department of Finance, 2012: 12) that for every €100 raised under Section 481, the exchequer cost was €34 but that only €19 accrued as a subsidy to the producers with the balance being returned to investors or accounted for in administration costs. Thus, it could be more efficient. It is also constantly in competition with tax incentives in other countries, particularly in the neighbouring UK. When the UK introduced tax incentives of 20 per cent for television shows that cost more than £1m per hour in 2013, Ireland increased their incentives to 32 per cent (effective from 2015). They also amended the regulations to allow, as the UK did, companies to claim for non-EU production and creative personnel, including Hollywood actors, as part of the qualifying expenditure.

If IFB support and S481 constitute the two local pillars of Irish film funding, the other major source of money is through co-production. European Union rules dictate that a tax incentive can only be claimed on 80 per cent of any budget in one country, so that it is in the interest of Irish producers (and overseas producers) to seek co-productions. It is also in the interest of anyone with ambitions to make an Irish film with a budget of more than €100,000, the maximum awarded by the IFB to ‘micro-budget’, or fully funded, indigenous films.

In their comprehensive overview of Irish film funding and production, Flynn and Tracy (2016: 38) have traced the increase in co-production funding to the recession, when indigenous funding evaporated:

the Board established a creative co-production fund to make small investments (circa €200,000 per film) in a variety of projects originating in Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and further afield. Inevitably, this diluted the cultural specificity of the body of films supported: between 2009 and 2011 at least sixteen films with no discernible textual connection (i.e. setting or content) to Ireland were supported by the Board.

Flynn and Tracy (2016: 42) also discern a movement by the IFB towards putting higher sums into more market-oriented productions, notably by high-profile directors, featuring established stars: Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto and Ondine (2009), John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard and Calvary, Intermission (John Crowley, 2003), Shadow Dancer (James Marsh, 2012), and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, 2005). Overall, Flynn and Tracy (2016: 50) concluded that the IFB was most focused on productions that displayed market potential, even if they had no Irish theme, in order to sustain industrial activity. In fact, as we see below, this is also the practice of production companies, many of whom seem to be using non-Irish-themed co-productions to maintain cash flow.

The IFB’s 2016–20 strategy plan (IFB/BSÉ, 2016) acknowledges the Board’s previous reliance on economic arguments to justify its funding and places greater emphasis on the cultural importance of supporting indigenous filmmaking. In this, its hand was very much strengthened by recent Academy Award (and other) prestigious nominations and wins. These include animation: Fifty Percent Grey (Ruairí Robinson, 2001), Give Up Yer Aul Sins (Cathal Gaffney, 2001), The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey, 2009), Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (Nicky Phelan, 2010), Song of the Sea (Tomm Moore, 2015), The Breadwinner (Nora Twomey, 2017); short films: Six Shooter (Martin McDonagh, 2004), New Boy (Steph Green, 2007), The Door (Juanita Wilson, 2008), Pentecost (Peter McDonald, 2011); and features: Once, Room, Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015). Individual nominations for Saoirse Ronan and Ruth Negga in non-Irish as well as Irish films also enhance the prestige of the Irish film industry, as do three Academy Award nominations for Irish costume designer, Consolata Boyle.

Finding an audience for Irish cinema

The IFB’s Strategic Plan also acknowledges the challenges of finding an audience for Irish cinema. Over the years, the greatest praise for Irish films in the media has come in the wake of award nominations and wins, and the greatest criticism in terms of box office performance. The following list shows the ten highest-performing Irish films at the Irish box office to date (figures not adjusted for inflation) alongside their US box office take:¹

Michael Collins €5,139,473/$11,092,559

The Guard €4.3m/$5,359,774

The Wind That Shakes the Barley €4,134,909/$1,829,142

Veronica Guerin €4,020,924/$1,569,918

Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie €3.8m (no US release)

In the Name of the Father €3,063,964/$25,096,862

In Bruges €3m (approx.)/$7,800,825

Angela’s Ashes €2,798,977/$13,038,660

The Commitments €2,764,963/$13,955,001

Brooklyn €2.6m/$38,322,743

Intermission €2,506,172/$889,857

Certain films performed relatively better in the United States than in Ireland, notably Calvary, which was the top film at the Irish box office for 2014 with a gross of €1.5m and took $3,600,000 at the US box office. Laws of Attraction (Peter Howitt, 2004) took $2,277,196 at the UK/Ireland box office and $17,871,255 in the United States.

Of the other films that had Irish co-producers, the top performer at the US box office was Becoming Jane (Julian Jarrold, 2007), which took $18,663,911, and Love and Friendship (Whit Stillman, 2016), which took $14,016,568. Of these, the latter ought to have been profitable for its majority producer, Blinder Films, given its low budget. However, there are no figures that suggest that co-producing a non-Irish-set film (other than Room, which will be discussed below) was a particularly profitable venture for Irish production companies, rather more that such films paid for overheads and wages. Far more profitable is the television co-production market and many Irish production companies focus on this for income generation.

What is most difficult to explain in these figures is the massive discrepancy between the performance of Brooklyn at the Irish and US box offices. Received wisdom suggests, however, that Irish taste, particularly in recent years, favours comedies. This speculation is bolstered by the relative success of The Young Offenders (Peter Foott, 2016), which took over €1m at the Irish box office and is now a television series and The Hardy Bucks Movie (Mike Cockayne, 2013), derived from a TV show that itself started online, which took approximately €464,000. The performance of Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie (Ben Kellett, 2014) reflects the massive popularity of the original television show, which, as John Fagan (2015) has interestingly argued, speaks to a little-considered audience that favours broad comedy over cool millennial humour.

If all Irish films enjoyed a box office take like that of Mrs Brown’s Boys D’Movie, then the contentious debates that characterise so many public discussions in Ireland about the Irish film industry would never take place. The films that provoke such heated responses tend, however, to be those that do not appear in the above listings, are supported by the IFB, and achieve minimal financial returns or receive no theatrical release at all. Responding to a question concerning the poor showing of many IFB funded films, then-director of the Board, James Morris (in McGreevy, 2013) suggested that this was the production’s fault:

If it doesn’t hit the spot, it is usually a missed opportunity. You can see the potential that is there and it isn’t delivered. The other reason is that the talent wasn’t there and that is usually the fault of the director because it is a director’s medium. If the director blames the script, it is still the director’s fault. It is our job to take risks. Some of the films turned out bad, but to say that you should never have had a go, that’s another thing.

One problem faced by small Irish productions is promotion. In a marketplace flooded by Hollywood films that come with ready-made campaigns, getting the news out about an Irish release is challenging, particularly in the current environment of deciding the fate of a film in the cinema on the back of the opening weekend figures, rather than letting it build word of mouth. The IFB (IFB/BSÉ, 2018b) offers some support for this, allowing distributors to apply for 90 per cent, up to a maximum of €75,000, of marketing and publicity costs. They also support ‘direct distribution’, for films that have not found a distributor, ‘capped at 80% of the total distribution b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 How to make an Irish film
• 2 Animating Ireland
• 3 Ireland of the horrors
• 4 Documenting Ireland
• 5 Irish history and trauma
• 6 Filming Northern Ireland
• 7 Rural and small-town Ireland on screen
• 8 Images of the city
• Conclusion
• Appendix Funding for Irish audiovisual content
• Index