Readers of these pages will be familiar with the ongoing difficulties of the Dublin Film Festival following the departure of its programme director, Maretta Dillon, two months ago, and may have wondered how quickly the festival would manage to find a replacement. The DFF has now announced the appointment of the new programme director, Paul Taylor, who will have a job on his hands to re-establish the festival's credibility in the relatively short time before the event takes place next April.
The affable Taylor admits that he has a "very short timescale" to put together next year's programme, which will follow a similar format to the 1999 event, with the bulk of screenings taking place in Virgin Cinemas on Parnell Street. "I'm taking a lot of advice," he tells me. But he says that he won't necessarily be bound by the ways things have been done in the past. "For example, I have no problem with the idea of multiple screenings of films, when it's appropriate," he says.
The DFF will also need to move quickly to appoint a new manager, with the departure this month for personal reasons of current manager Anne Burke, but Taylor will not be involved in that appointment. It hardly seems fair, at his first public introduction as programme director, to quiz him about the structural and organisational difficulties which led his predecessor to resign after less than a year in the job, but he admits that he's aware of the public perception of the festival as having lost its way. "You're right, in as much as it will have to be seen as back on track," he says. "But I've been given a very broad brief, there's been lots of confidence expressed in me, and I'm personally confident that the difficulties which have arisen in the past aren't going to impinge on me."
As for reports that the festival may be facing increasing financial problems, with disappointing box office figures over the last few years reflected in an ever-expanding deficit, he avoids commenting on specifics, but does say that "some of the information I've been given about that end of things encourages me".
As the fourth programme director in as many years, Taylor actually applied for the Dublin job last year, but withdrew before the final interview stage, for personal reasons. He has been with the British Film Institute since 1983, successively as programme advisor, film exhibition officer and central booking co-ordinator. Before that he was cinema organiser at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and has also worked as a freelance journalist, reviewer and film researcher. Most recently, he has been co-ordinating the official programme brochure for this year's London Film Festival, which started on Wednesday.
Perhaps most importantly from the DFF's point of view, he co-founded Shots in the Dark, the Nottingham-based festival which celebrates thrillers and crime films. "When we were setting up Shots in the Dark, we looked around the UK, and saw that there was a plethora of small film festivals which had been set up without a focus," he says. "So we decided to go instead for a festival which celebrated a particular genre." By a happy coincidence, their decision happened at the same time as an explosion of interest in the thriller genre in the mid-1990s, and Shots in the Dark has established itself as one of the more interesting of the smaller British festivals.
Although declaring a fondness for independent cinema, "whatever that means these days", he describes himself as a reactive programmer: "I tend not to like monolithic seasons at festivals," he says. "With Shots in the Dark, we found that very often it was more productive, say, to feature the work of certain cinematographers rather than just directors. I'd be interested, for example, in focussing on the work of screenwriters at some point."
The Dublin Film Festival is a somewhat different kettle of fish, he acknowledges, although admitting he knows it "more by repute than experience. I see it as a celebratory festival, promoting the pleasure of cinema. But things should always be looked at, to see how they can be improved. As a programmer, you should always be aware that you're dealing with an audience, and be willing to alter your own expectations to take account of that."
