DESPITE suffering from a heavy flu, Terry Gilliam, the London based American director who is the subject of this year's festival retrospective, was articulate, informative and regularly very funny during the course of his public interview at UCI Coolock on Tuesday afternoon. The discussion ranged through his high school days in Hollywood, his early career as an animator and illustrator, his involvement with the Monty Python team and on to his film career as a director.
That Times Bandits is his most mellow and gentle film to date reflected his own mind at the time, he said - this being before he was put through the Hollywood mill with Brazil, which Universal Pictures had to be embarrassed into releasing in the US. And even worse was to follow as he struggled to make The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen in the midst of chaos, escalating budgets and pressures from all sides.
Gilliam's preoccupation with time travel is again central to his latest movie, Twelve Monkeys, which opened the festival on Tuesday night in the Ambassador cinema. It features Bruce Willis, in a strong physical performance, as Cole, a prisoner despatched from the year 2035 to present day Philadelphia in order to unravel an apocalyptic nightmare before it completely erases humanity from the planet. Madeleine Stowe is impressive as the psychiatrist intrigued by Cole, and Brad Pitt lets rip in a flamboyant performance as the unstable son of an influential scientist (Christopher Plummer).
Made with the breadth of imagination we have come to expect from Terry Gilliam and filmed on elaborately designed sets, Twelve Monkeys is structured like a surreal jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are gradually revealed, some repeatedly, until they connect. It is a challenging and stimulating film which builds to an exciting finale as all the pieces lock satisfyingly into place.
"I thought we were making a crazy quilt on film," Gilliam said on stage at the Ambassador on Tuesday night. Control freaks don't like the way the movie is structured, he believes, yet 11 year old children have no problem with it. Irish audiences can see for themselves when Twelve Monkeys opens here on April 19th.
Of the 100 plus movies showing at the festival's principal venue, the Screen at D'Olier Street, the first to be sold out was not surprisingly - Tim Robbins's Dead Man Walking, which is showing on Sunday night. An accomplished actor who made such a strong directing debut with the political satire, Bob Roberts, four years ago, Robbins tackles the much more sombre and complex theme of capital punishment in Dead Man Walking, a based drama featuring superb, Oscar nominated performances from Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.
In his most vivid and intense screen portrayal to date, Penn plays Matthew Poncelet, a convicted killer who has been on death row in a Louisiana prison for six years. An aptly understated Sarandon plays Sister Helen Prejean, the humanitarian nun who becomes his penfriend, and then his spiritual adviser in the days leading up to his scheduled execution by lethal injection.
She is faced with a crisis of conscience when confronted by the distraught parents of the killer's teenage victims and with another when Poncelet reveals himself as a white supremacist racist. Robbins's beautifully directed film achieves a rare balance as it tackles these moral dilemmas and it builds to an emotional but unsentimental ending. The film is based on a book by Sister Helen Prejean, who served as a consultant on the film, and the Poncelet character is a composite of the first two death row inmates with whom she became involved.
Dead Man Walking will have its official Irish premiere, to benefit Amnesty International, at Virgin Cinemas, Dublin on Wednesday April 3rd. Tickets, which include a reception afterwards, are £40 and are available from the Section Shop at 48 Fleet Street, Dublin 2.
Showing as one of the festival's family galas this weekend at 2 p.m. tomorrow in UCI Tallaght and at 2pm on Sunday at UCI Coolock - the Irish German coproduction My Friend Joe, arrives here fresh from the Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Blue Bear award for best children's film an award voted by a jury entirely composed of children.
The movie's appeal to children was borne out by the rapt attention it received at a special preview in Dublin last Sunday afternoon. Directed by Chris Bould, it features Schuyler Fisk as Joe, an androgynous American acrobat, and John Cleere, as Chris, the Irish boy befriended by Joe when the circus comes to his town for 10 days. What the audience learns well ahead of Chris is that Joe is a girl forced to wear a short wig and boyish clothing by her physically abusive uncle (Stephen McHattie).
This Crying Game for younger audiences, directed by Chris Bould, successfully operates as both a cautionary moral tale and as an entertaining coming of age story. Crucial to its success are the engaging performances of its two young stars - John Cleere, who builds on the promise he showed in The War of the Buttons, and Schuyler Fisk, who has inherited the looks and the acting ability of her mother, Sissy Spacek.
The festival's board members and staff are well represented on the festival programme this year. Programme director Martin Mahon makes his film directing debut with the short film The Condom, which is due to arrive wet from the lab to be shown before The Boy From Mercury on closing night. Festival manager David McLoughlin is the producer of Brendan Bourke's lyrical short film, Fishing the Sloe Black River, which is screening before The Crossing Guard in the Savoy tomorrow morning.
Festival chairman David Collins is one of the producers of Diarmuid Lawrence's Loving, filmed in Birr, Co Offaly last year and starring Mark Rylance, who will attend tomorrow night's screening of the film. Board member Jane Doolan is the Irish distributor of three festival films, Kids, Nothing Personal and My Mother's Courage through Clarence Pictures. Another board member, John Boorman, is one of the 32 international directors contributing 52 second films to the unique centenary of cinema project, Lumiere And Company, showing next Thursday in the Savoy - is segment was shot on the set of Neil Jordan's Michael Collins.
And showing before Richard III in the Savoy on Sunday morning is Boorman's Two Nudes Bathing, an elegant and engaging half hour speculation on the background to the anonymous painting which hangs in the Louvre. Shot on Super 16 in Anjou, the film is set in 16th century France, when a puritanical count (John Hurt) commissions a young painter (Charley Boorman) to capture his virtuous teenage daughters "in all their innocence". Irish talent is represented on both sides of the camera in this truly diverting exercise, among them actors Angeline Ball and Britta Smith, costume designer Lainey Keogh, lighting cameraman Seamus Deasy and on sound, his brother, Brendan Deasy.
AS if the programme were not packed already, the festival has added another six movies to next Thursday's schedule - three at 5.30 p.m. and another three at 8.30 p.m. in the Screen at D'Olier Street. The early evening shows' include the last year's Spanish entry at Cannes - Montxo Armendariz's socially concerned Stories From The Kronen, which deals with aimless middle cast young men wholly preoccupied with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. It is directed with a certain accumulating power and Armendariz elicits credible, naturalistic performances from his young cast, especially from Juan Diego Botto as its wholly self centred 21 year old protagonist.
Another 5.30 p.m. show is Paul Hills's well regarded Boston Kickout featuring John Simm (who was excellent as a gay teenager in the last series of Cracker) as a young man growing up in the new English town of Stevenage. Emer McCourt co stars in the film, which was shot partly on location in Waterford. The third 5.30 p.m. show will be Michael Verhoeven's "director's cut" of My Mother's Courage - a reedited, dubbed in English version of Verhoeven's new movie which is showing in the festival on Sunday. Both Verhoeven and the film's star, Pauline Collins, will attend Sunday's screening.
The movies added at 8.30 p.m. on Thursday are the promising Danish thriller, Final Hour, in which a group of students is locked in a high school with a corpse; the British drama, The Near Room, directed by David Hayman and featuring, Adrian Dunbar as a cynical journalist; and from China, He Jianjun's The Postman, which took first prize at the Rotterdam festival last year.
