Irish films need to be emotionally universal to compete outside the Hollywood machine, the Film Board's new chief executive tells Michael Dwyer

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. After years of relying on Britain as a partner for co-productions, Irish film producers need to look elsewhere now that the Blair government has introduced tax incentives aimed exclusively at production expenditure in the UK. Meanwhile, the Irish Film Board (IFB) has a new chief executive in Simon Perry, a man with a vast experience of the film industry from different perspectives, and with a distinctly European perspective rare among his fellow British producers.

"Well, we're back in the real world," Perry says at his new IFB office overlooking the harbour in Galway. "The former British tax scheme was a completely unreal world. It could give you 15 per cent of your budget in return for little input into the UK infrastructure. It was free money, and it couldn't last. The UK has now adopted a scheme that is aggressive in terms of its prostration to Hollywood. It allows Hollywood pictures to come into England and claim back 20 per cent of all its expenditure in the UK, including Hollywood salaries paid in the UK. It's quite clear they want the big Hollywood pictures there. They've just seen the James Bond film made in Prague, and they don't intend to let that happen again."

The scheme is not just unfriendly but positively hostile towards European co-productions, Perry believes. "But Ireland is going to win on that basis, I reckon. Ireland is a member of Eurimages, which the UK isn't. Ireland, I'm happy to say, now has somebody running the Irish Film Board who is very ready to involve Irish producers as co-producers in other European films on a reciprocal basis. The plan is there and I think we're extremely well placed to do that."

That "somebody running the film board" is Perry himself. Having produced two micro-budget films in the mid-1970s, he worked for three years in the London bureau of the leading film trade paper, Variety. In 1982, after three years as head of the UK National Film Development Fund, Perry set up his own production company, Umbrella Films, and produced 10 feature films, three directed by Michael Radford - Another Time, Another Place, Nineteen Eighty-Four and White Mischief. In 1992 he produced The Playboys, written by Shane Connaughton and shot in Cavan with a cast led by Albert Finney, Aidan Quinn and Robin Wright Penn.

For most of the 1990s, Perry was chief executive of British Screen, providing support for film production and development in accordance with a cultural and commercial remit. During Perry's tenure, British Screen invested in 144 British and European films, among them The Crying Game, Land and Freedom, Richard III, Wilde, Topsy-Turvy and Bend it Like Beckham.

Since 2000 Perry has been co-founder and president of Ateliers du Cinema Européen, a Paris-based training initiative for producers; film financing consultant for a Swedish regional film centre; course supervisor and lecturer at the International Film School in Cologne; and film production consultant for the republic of Macedonia's ministry of culture.

"IT'S WHAT I do," Perry replies with a smile when I ask what attracted him to the IFB post he took up in January. "I like this kind of producing - with money. That is how I see it. Producing with money is something that has almost disappeared in our world. Producers typically now have no money and have to go out and raise everything. Not that I see myself as doing the producer's job. I'm extremely sensitive to the fact that everyone wants to call themselves producers nowadays. Just because they put in a bit of money, I don't think they have that entitlement. I regard a lot of these executive producer credits as 'go away' credits for people they don't want to see again.Having some funding you can bring to bear on the process, you are enabling things to happen, and enabling is what this is all about and I like that.

"You have the opportunity to think about the work. You can think more strategically and more long-term about what kind of films should be coming from this part of the world, how we can make a mark on the screens of the world, how we can compete with the big engines."

Perry is acutely aware of the pressures and responsibilities for the IFB as the only dedicated agency for film in Ireland. "There is nowhere else for people to go if we won't support them because there's no meaningful level of broadcast support for cinema. But this is a small country and the broadcasters have their own agenda, so films depend very much on the film board. Producers can't go away when you say no and find the money somewhere else and put you to shame. But I know the pressure of decision-making and it doesn't terrify me."

Asked how he perceives international awareness of Irish cinema, Perry says his impression is that it has somewhat lost its profile in the world in recent years. "People aren't sure what is going on. There haven't been any of those very striking films that get out there, and in the end it always depends on the films. You can have all the policies and strategies in the world, and print all the expensive brochures, but all that matters is that a country makes some interesting films that go out there and knock people over.

"It can only take one or two film-makers. You have a Pedro Almodovar and suddenly, Spain means something. You have a Lukas Moodysson and people are talking about Swedish cinema. We saw it in Britain in the 1990s with Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom. That hasn't been happening in Ireland for a while."

Many indigenous films have fared extremely well at the Irish box-office - Intermission, Man About Dog and Breakfast On Pluto, for example - but did not make a significant commercial impact internationally.

"It's not that there's a shortage of talent," Perry says. "There are some very impressive writers here and some very exciting directors. There are some real voices here, but somehow it's as if the bullets are flying around off the target and not finding the mark." He believes that "international penetration and visibility" is essential.

"The margin that is left to us by Hollywood is so small, and it's dramatic how true this is in Ireland. This market is tiny, and it's made even tinier because it's often shared or cross-collateralised with the UK. So profits from Ireland simply pay off losses in the UK. There is a colonial relationship that is maintained in film distribution, and I think that's appalling. We suffer in exactly the same way as Austria suffers with regard to Germany, or Belgium with regard to France.

"It's a very extreme illustration of how difficult the market is for all of us working outside Hollywood, this machine that's so efficient and so effective at marketing, distributing and placing their films across the world. The margin left for the rest of us is tiny. If we're going to compete in that margin, it's got to be in that margin all across the world. We've got to find a place in that margin in France, in Bulgaria, in Argentina - everywhere. Films have to be able to work internationally, by which I don't mean that we should sit down and cunningly write the international film. That would be a recipe for utter disaster. We need to tell stories that are emotionally universal."

The most serious problem with Irish films, I suggest, is that many have been rushed into production before the scripts have been fully developed, generally because money has become available through a tax-incentive scheme.

"There is that trap," Perry says, "but I don't think it's the whole story because writing is not the whole of cinema. There is directing, film-making, and if you look at a Ken Loach film, the script is less than half the film. You can trust that Ken is going to realise that notebook which is the script into something that is going to work on the screen. A lot of European directors are able to work that way and have to work that way."

Significantly, however, one of the first IFB initiatives introduced under the Perry regime encourages applications for scripts at the early ideas stage. "It's the way I'm used to working," he says. "Most of what is submitted here for development is already in script form, and I find that strange. Now a submission can be a few pages, maybe even less. It could be half a page and a conversation - a concept, the description of an idea. You can tell a lot from that."

PERRY DISMISSES film industry rumours that the IFB will cut back on funding for shorts. "If anything, that commitment will be stepped up. As one of my colleagues here said, 'The shorts are in need of a haircut'. That's true, but it doesn't mean they're going to have short hair, just that their hair might be a little tidier. We're producing some great shorts and some remarkable animation. What we might do is franchise out programmes for a year or two to a production company to run it under our general guidance. That's one of the things we're looking at."

He believes that Irish film-makers have a great deal to gain, culturally as well as financially, from working with European production partners. "It's a strategy to underpin a consistency of activity instead of relying on one particular deal, one particular country." He cites The Wind That Shakes the Barley as a model for the future, as a five-way co-production between Ireland, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany. "On the screen, that's a purely Irish film. There's no trace of anything else. It's also a perfect example of people who work together all the time. They know each other, and they know why they're backing the film. There's nobody trying to say that a French actor has to be in the film if they are going to put in some money from France."

Is it significant that so much of what is shooting in Ireland this year - The Tudors, Rough Diamond, Northanger Abbey and other series - is for television rather than cinema? "It's not so much significant as logical," he says. "We're going to lose out now to the UK for the big Hollywood films. But the UK tax regime will only apply to films for cinema release, whereas Section 481 here applies to cinema films and to television. This is where we have a real edge."

We have to be realistic, he says. "There's no way that Ireland could cope with King Arthur three times a year. We don't have the resources, whereas there is a thriving, skilful sector that can very well look after higher-budget high-end television and medium-budget films that can be co-produced with Europe."

So, are the days of big-budget epics such as Braveheart, King Arthur and Reign of Fire over for Ireland? "I hope not," he says. "I would hope that our cour-ageous Government, and they have been terrific by upgrading the tax break, will look once more at that, and they seem ready to do it. The way the system works here is very sophisticated. The money's there when you need it during production. There are no intermediaries draining money out of the system. It's been going for years. It's absolutely dependable.

"I've got to tell you that working with the Government here, the relationship is, for me, absolutely unrecognisable - the accessibility of our minister, John O'Donoghue, and the professionalism of the civil service and their depth of knowledge of the sector, and the lack of arrogance. There really is a can-do attitude, which is fantastic."

The IFB will hold interviews next month for the new position of a film commissioner based in Los Angeles, and there are some very good candidates, Perry believes. "It's is a weight off my mind because I've seen offices established by other countries I won't name and manned by real wasters who swan about and deliver nothing. I know we're not going to do that.It is going to be more difficult to sell Ireland to the big studios, but it will be possible. Where these big Hollywood pictures go is often a matter of pure caprice. If Nicole Kidman says she would like to spend six months in Dublin, that's all it takes. Or it could be a matter of the exchange rate. I think our commissioner is going to be very busy, maintaining warm relationships so we don't miss out on any caprices, but at the same time digging well into the independent production and television sectors."