Rod Stoneman is sitting in his room in Boswell's Hotel on Molesworth Street, his habitual stopping-point on his regular trips to Dublin. Earlier that afternoon, on the other side of Kildare Street, the Seanad approved the raising by £50 million of the overall financial ceiling governing the allocation of monies to the IFB in the annual estimates. The current ceiling of £30 million was due to be reached by the Board before the end of this year. "The 30 million limit had cut us off at the knees, which is why it went through the Seanad in short order," explains Stoneman. Coming at the end of a long process of consultation and independent reports, the vote marks the most significant point in the history of the IFB since it was revived by Michael D. Higgins in 1993. Among its consequences is the bringing of the Irish Screen Commission under the Board's direct control. "The Screen Commission [which promotes Ireland internationally as a film location] is subsumed within the Film Board, but will continue its operations seamlessly . The future is in consolidation and convergence, and that is part of that," says Stoneman, who also welcomes the Minister's rejection of proposals to change the IFB's name and relocate its offices from Galway to Dublin. "The Minister's speech today, I'm glad to say, supports our position on those issues."
It's now seven years since Stoneman, a former commissioning editor with Channel Four, took up the position of chief executive of the IFB, which supports the script development, production and marketing of Irish-made films through investment and loans. Typically, the IFB will provide around 15 to 20 per cent of a film's budget, with the remainder coming from other (usually overseas) investors and Section 481 tax incentives. But Stoneman admits that the shoestring nature of the operation has been under strain.
"Instead of holding it together with sticking tape, we can now actually get some people in to fill much-needed positions," he says. "We need to take on, at a minimum, somewhere between four and seven people."
Like other state bodies, the IFB is beginning to feel the pinch in a competitive market for employees. The crucial post of development manager has remained vacant all year, since the departure of Mary Callery to take up the job of Drama Commissioning Editor at RTE. "We tried to appoint a development manager in May," says Stoneman. "But frankly we couldn't do it because the salary allocation was so low." The sterling exchange rate made the job particularly unattractive to applicants from "across the water", he says.
But structures are one thing, and results another. In terms of quantity, Stoneman has overseen an unprecedented period of growth in Irish film production - he points with pride to the long lists of features, documentaries, shorts and animation laid out in the Board's most recent annual report, as compared with its 1993 equivalent. Although, as he notes, the IFB only forms one part of the overall package in any particular film, the question of what editorial policy it brings to its choices is a crucial one.
"Any national film agency has to have a vision, and part of that is an editorial vision," says Stoneman, who defines the IFB's policy as one of "radical pluralism" (a phrase he brought with him from his days at Channel 4). How well does he think the Board has fulfilled that policy thus far, and how has it been reflected in the films it has supported?
"Well, you would have your own views on how successful or not the different genres and areas and levels and types of Irish filmmaking have been over the last few years," he says. "Some are stronger and some are weaker, of course, but I'd like to think that there is no particular thread or thrust which has been blocked or denied the opportunity to develop. That's what I mean by radical pluralism. Whether one is talking about the gangster genre, the rural drama, the romantic comedy, smaller arthouse films, bigger omniplex films, all those ranges of film-making have had a shot."
Not surprisingly, the IFB has been subject to criticism from both ends of the ideological spectrum, as well as points in between. Film-maker Joe Comerford, for example, has used his membership of Aosdana as a platform to proclaim the "crisis" faced by film as art in a market-driven environment. Certainly, experimental and avantgarde work appears to form a tiny and peripheral part of film-making in Ireland, I suggest.
"Inevitably, that sort of work is more tenuous in a smaller culture," Stoneman responds. "But in my opinion, there are four such film-makers of note working in that area and we're funding all four of them."
From the other end of the spectrum comes the criticism that the IFB's investments have not been commercial enough, and that it should be looking for a higher level of return on its investments. "Our level of recoupment has been as high as 20 per cent," says Stoneman. "Recently it's at around 13 per cent. It's still good in comparison to other national film agencies: the British Film Institute gets 5.8 per cent; the Australian Film Commission, 11 per cent; the Dutch Film Fund, three per cent. It's something we're pleased about, but it could clearly go further forward.
`BUT if you ask me about radical pluralism, it's certainly not what's happening in British organisations such as BBC Films and Film on Four, which are all saying they want to do fewer, bigger, more market-orientated films. What's happening in Britain is the cutting out of the mid-budget area towards bigger films with a chance of penetrating the American market. Apart from anything else, I think it's a very dangerous policy, because if they don't have a Full Monty or a Four Weddings pretty soon, they'll have failed by their own criteria. We'll be playing to our strengths, which are more diversity, more small to medium budget films."
The Film Board in general, and Stoneman in particular, has also come under attack recently from two high-profile Irish people aggrieved that their applications for funding were turned down. In an interview in Hot Press magazine, actor Patrick Bergin launched a highly personal attack on Stoneman for his role in the IFB's rejection of his proposed adaptation of W.B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, while (also in Hot Press) writer/director/ comedian Brendan O'Carroll was equally scathing about the Board's refusal to provide postproduction funding for his feature film, Sparrow's Trap. Both men criticised the IFB for lack of accountability in its decision-making process, a charge Stoneman rejects.
"We've always tried through meetings and readers' reports to be as accountable as possible," he says. "We normally supply readers' reports on request or at least pass on salient, constructive points from them. We are always willing to meet people and aim to provide maximum feedback - the only constraints are time and pressure on a very busy team. We hope to be able to improve on this as the Board expands."
A recent editorial in Film Ireland magazine suggested that, whatever the individual merits of Bergin's and O'Carroll's complaints, they might represent a broader level of dissatisfaction with the Board's operations among film-makers afraid to speak out lest they bite the hand that feeds them - a suggestion which Stoneman indignantly rejects.
"Board members and staff have worked very hard to maintain the integrity of the selection process over the last seven years," he says. "I reject any implication that this is not so, together with the suggestion that there may be some veiled threat to the future careers of those who criticise or are openly hostile. On the contrary, we are working with, and will continue to work with, some of our fiercest critics."
An alternative argument is that too many films are being made, and too quickly. What about a recurring criticism of Irish films, usually from newspaper reviewers, that very often they seem to go into production before their scripts are ready? "Well, I'll try not to be too defensive about that," he says. "Of course one can stand back and say after the fact that the script could have been better or sharper. Some people say these films get made because people need the financial turnover, but that doesn't take into account the realities of how these things happen."
As an example, he picks Gerry Stembridge's new romantic comedy, About Adam, not due for release until early next year but already hailed by many (including this writer) as a resounding success. "If that had needed a couple of other passes on the script, which it didn't, not just the Film Board would be culpable. The same would be true of Miramax and of BBC Films, with their vast echelons of script editors. So when a script supposedly goes into production before it's ready, remember that all those organisations have approved it.
"The other factor is that putting a film together is a very complex cocktail. I know the old saying that it's the script, the script, the script, but there's also the casting, the editing, the cinematography . . . It seems to me that in some instances when people have pointed at a film and said the script wasn't ready, that it was an inaccurate displacement of complex problems on to the script. Often that's just not true. A film is as strong as its weakest link. I looked at our films as honestly as I could, and I feel there were two or three cases where that particular criticism was valid."
As an Englishman (from Torquay, in Devon) with a long association with Ireland, who has been living in Galway since 1993, he says he's now "less concerned" about his nationality. "I'm not sure exactly how assimilation works, but I feel pretty assimilated."
But given his earlier remarks about the shortlist of candidates from "across the water" for the development manager job, it's not mere parochialism to question whether Irish film-makers would be best served by a public cultural organisation whose key decision-makers were not fully versed in the nuances and particularities of Irish society. After all, I point out, British-based organisations already play a huge role in deciding what sort of Irish films should or should not get made.
"It's a question of proportion, isn't it?" he says. "Some outside input can be refreshing and helpful. Too much of it begins to distort things."
Which raises film historian Kevin Rockett's criticism of the "Los Anglicisation" of Irish cinema. In Rockett's view, filmmaking here in the 1990s has enthusiastically embraced the international marketplace, jettisoning the more culturally and politically specific concerns of the "first wave" of indigenous film in favour of themes and stories more attuned to the demands of a globalising Anglo-American culture, whose centres of power are in London and Los Angeles.
It's a debatable point, not entirely borne out by the evidence of the films themselves. But, as Martin McLoone points out in his new book, Irish Film; The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema, the key tension in Irish film-making practice is between the local and the universal. "Clearly nearly every one of our films is negotiating the contradictions of sufficient integrity, authenticity and honesty to work with a home audience, and sufficient openness and accessibility to work with a foreign audience," says Stoneman. "But part of the strength of what's been built here in seven years is to do with the toughness involved in the financing, casting, editorial and marketing ability needed to bring market money - which is inevitably international money - into our films. It's actually made the industry more sinewy, skilled and adept at what they do."
He is looking forward with enthusiasm to the changes which will take place over the next few months at the IFB. "It's a necessary and timely building on and enhancement of what's been going on over the last seven years. We've had a Strategic Review Group, a report, consultants, and now I feel it's time to say `let's do it'. "
