Much more money should be spent by the Irish Government and the Stormont Executive on cross-Border culture to “reflect the island’s story back on to itself”, Oscar-winning film producer David Puttnam has said.
“I can’t think of many areas that are more likely to drive mutual understanding and a shared sense of the future than the film and television industries. Yet, I don’t get the sense that those resources are available,” he said.
Mr Puttnam was in Dublin on Wednesday to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Puttnam Scholarships, which has brought eight film makers from North and South together each year to take part in workshops with the acclaimed director. So far, 32 people have graduated.
“My own belief is that governments in the end either don’t understand, or think that culture’s a luxury. Actually, I think it’s a fundamental. You cannot build shared understanding without culture, you just can’t.”
Film-makers on both sides of the Border believe that colleagues in the other jurisdiction have an easier time, with those in the Republic pointing to Northern Ireland’s commercial successes, such as Game of Thrones, he added.
“People in the South think that people in Northern Ireland are better [off] because of the commercial successes there over the last few years. It is something to be admired, but film-makers think that Northern Ireland’s own stories are not being told.”
Equally, people in film in Northern Ireland look on enviously at the far greater State supports that are available in the Republic, said Mr Puttnam, who won an Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1981 and has now lived in west Cork for decades.
“I have never liked film-makers making excuses. We are not succeeding in the Republic unless we are we commercially successful. But Northern Ireland is not succeeding unless it is telling its own stories, not just commercially successful ones.”
Pointing to the successes of the last four decades, Mr Puttnam said it would have been difficult “to find two crews” in 1984 to work on his movie Cal, which told the story of an IRA volunteer involved in the killing of an RUC officer who later fell in love with the dead man’s wife.
Praising the commercial successes in Northern Ireland in recent years, he stressed the need for people who have now been trained up “over the last few years to stay in Ireland, and not to find them in London, or elsewhere”.
The Puttnam scholars also met the Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson and the co-founder of Element Pictures, film producer Ed Guiney, best known for the films Room, The Favourite and Poor Things.
Asked to identify subjects that should be covered by Irish film-makers today, Mr Puttnam said: “I think there’s a big immigration story that’s sitting there still waiting really to be told.”
During one visit to a Dublin school, he said he stood in its reception room and read a board with the names of the 12 most successful children at the school who had graduated the previous year.
“There wasn’t one single Irish name. Half the names ended with Z and there were a couple of Chinese names. In a sense, the triumph of that hasn’t yet been told. There’s a great story to be told.”
In coming years, he said an Irish basketball team will have seven, or eight Irish-born girls of Nigerian heritage. “Imagine telling that story! That will throw up a problem for the Right. What are they going to do? Celebrate that? Seek to create division by it?”
The film makers from both sides of the Border attended a workshop at Accenture Song and later were hosted at the British ambassasdor, Mr Paul Johnson’s residence by Mr Johson and the British Council in Ireland, Dr Kerry McCall Magan.
