Going from theatre to TV was an eye-opener for Darren Thornton. His new play about a young film-maker deals with a similar loss of control, he tells Belinda McKeon

Everywhere he goes in Drogheda, even on a bleak morning in early January, Darren Thornton gets the nod. At the train station, from a young woman coming through the door he's exiting. In the car park, from a man wrestling with the same ticket machine. Outside the new shopping centre - "horrible," he says, pointing out how it obscures a sweeping view of the River Boyne's wide path through the town - the security guard greets him with a cheery hello.

It's hardly surprising; Thornton, after all, put Drogheda on the map in 2004, when the RTÉ production of his five-part drama series Love is the Drug proved a critical and popular success. The lives and loves of his characters, the Kirwan brothers, were played out on these streets, across these bridges, in the shadow of this crumbling mill, under the gaze of this beheaded saint (Oliver Plunkett, remember?). He might not exactly have the freedom of the town - if he had his way, you sense, this shopping centre, a temple to uniformity with a space-age footbridge thrown in for good measure, would never have materialised - but he means something to Drogheda, this quietly-spoken 29-year-old in the ripped jeans and the well-worn trainers.

He's someone.

Then again, he's been someone in this town for more than a decade, having founded one of Ireland's best-regarded smaller theatre companies back in 1994. Calipo, of which Thornton is also artistic director, grew out of his realisation that he was too old to stay with the town's youth theatre company, but too hooked on acting and directing to do anything else. The company, founded with a number of other graduates of Drogheda's youth theatre scene, quickly established itself as an outlet for multi-media work that appealed to young audiences, and as an opportunity for young actors, directors, film-makers and technicians to experiment and learn.

Community outreach work with local youths was a core part of the company's work from the beginning, and remains that way, with a number of film and theatre initiatives opening up paths for school-leavers on both sides of the border.

Onstage, a 1995 adaptation of Reservoir Dogs was a hit with teenage and twenty-something audiences, while from 1998, when the decision was made to produce only new work, the award nominations came rolling in for plays - including the original stage incarnation of Love is the Drug and Xaviers - that explored, with wit and innovation, the lives of an emerging generation.

The direction in which Calipo would take its work - a confident marriage of stage performance with film and video production - was decided, for Thornton, by the diploma in film and television which he took at Coláiste Dhúlaigh in Dublin, finishing in 1996. Though he had founded a theatre company, he realised, film was not something that he wanted to leave behind. "Film was always, really, what I wanted to do, even before I knew anything about the theatre," he says. "I wanted to work in film and to make film, and so the two merged quite early on."

But this attraction to film didn't, understandably enough, come from any home-grown inspiration in the early 1990s. "It certainly wasn't anything in terms of the Irish film industry," he reflects, "because I had absolutely no knowledge of Ireland's identity within film. My experience and exposure up to that time was really of American cinema."

The transition from watching films to creating them came about accidentally, he explains, as he was rummaging in a storeroom at his secondary school. "I found the school's camcorder, this old, ancient thing that must have been one of the very first camcorders ever made," he says.

"And it was covered in dust, and locked in, and it wasn't being used for anything. I managed to convince them to let me bring it home at weekends for my own stuff - I'd shoot all the sports events in school and they'd let me keep the camera and go and do what I wanted with it."

What he wanted to do with it was to make movies, and every friend and passer-by was roped into the process - "crazy stuff, horror films, all that daft sort of thing". Finding somewhere to send the end result was something of a challenge, but the young Thornton was nothing if not resourceful.

"At one stage when I was 14 or 15, I started just sending all my tapes to RTÉ," he laughs. "Just, like, sticking them in an envelope and addressing it to RTÉ and thinking maybe someone would open it and think, 'this is great'".

And, though several classic Drogheda horror flicks may have been tragically undiscovered in the meantime, that is eventually what happened for Thornton, when his screenplay for Love is the Drug landed on the right desk in Dublin 4. It should have been freewheeling from there, but what followed for Thornton, in reality, was a roller-coaster ride of satisfaction and setback in equal measure, of exhilaration tainted by creative frustration. And 18 months later, he has written a new work out of the experience.

If the plot of the new play, Wunderkind is anything to go by, it seems clear that that experience was a traumatic one for Thornton. Through performance - Owen McDonnell is the one man of the one-man show - and video work, Wunderkind tells the story of a young Irish film-maker, Sean Quinn, who is snatched from the brink of success with his first international feature film by the boorish demands of his American producers instantly recognisable as the producers who have walked all over the vision of many a young film-maker.

The film, set in Cavan town of all places, and featuring a young hurler who has just discovered that he has a son, is too thoughtful and slow-moving, they tell Sean, to catch the eye of cinema-goers; the editing room, they tell him, is off bounds, and he must sit alone in a London hotel as they take the scissors to his precious reels, turning it into something along the lines of Billy Elliot.

A harsh turn of events, certainly, but surely Thornton's time on the set of his own creation was not as much of a nightmare as Sean's turns out to be? It wasn't quite that bad, he says, but it was certainly an eye-opener. "Going from theatre, from a place where you're used to having complete creative control and you're communicating with a small number of people, small number of actors, small number of crew, and it's all very clear-cut, to a world where you've got six different departments, and a crew of 80 people . . . this whole circus, and you've got to keep it moving the whole time."

He takes a deep breath. "You've got to be in complete control of yourself, and of everything around you, at all stages."

Did he not, then, feel in control of what was taking place? He thinks for a moment. "I mean, I loved it, but at the same time, I came out at the other end with a lot of . . . I mean, Love is the Drug didn't get where I wanted it to, and I kind of beat myself up about that for a long time, and I spent a lot of last year feeling funny about that. About why I couldn't take a lot of satisfaction from that, and I was going, why can't I feel good about the fact that this happened, and was well received . . . " And why couldn't he? The end result came across as assured and hugely enjoyable; what aspects of it continued to niggle at Thornton?

"Loads," he says, simply. "I felt like we got 50 or 60 per cent of what I envisaged, and what I co-wrote onto the screen. There's a massive amount of it that's not there, I lost a huge amount. It's very diluted from what it was. And I found that really frustrating."

He admits, though, that his expectations may have been unrealistic. "I suppose I came into it wanting to shoot the €10 million version of it whereas in actual fact we only had the €2 million, whatever, but I didn't at the time realise how grand my vision for it was, that it wasn't actually possible to achieve."

On set, he hints, he may have irked others involved in the process. "The shoot was incredibly difficult, because I was very reluctant to let things go. And then also, I had difficulties with the powers that be. I think in the TV world it's not very common for the writer to be directing as well. TV is very much about efficiency and deadlines, and they don't want somebody who's close to the material coming in going, 'no, I want this, we have to keep going,' and trying to drag everybody along and working overtime. They want to keep the status quo, keep the balance, and get it out, broadcast it, and so I think that kind of mad energy can be dangerous in television."

The kind of creative freedom he had hoped for in his first major experience of television production is afforded more room, he believes, in the arena of the feature film ("in TV they definitely don't want us," he says).

Which is partly why he has made his protagonist in Wunderkind the creator of a feature rather than a television series. But there's more than just wish-fulfilment at work here. "I suppose I wanted to do it as a way of protecting myself from it happening, nearly," he smiles. "So that, maybe I can exorcise all these feelings now, write them now so that when I get to that stage I won't make these mistakes or whatever."

Sean's journey in Wunderkind is toward "self-acceptance", says Thornton; a journey with which he can empathise. "He finds it only through the failure, from his point of view, of his film. He gets . . . what's the thing they always say in screenwriting courses? The heroes should get what they need but not what they want." He laughs. Somehow, you sense, he's not just talking about Sean Quinn and his Cavan hurler.

• Wunderkind opens Jan 26 at the Project Theatre's Space Upstairs, Dublin