From Bob Geldof to Sydney Pollack and Frank Gehry, Ultan Guilfoyle has worked with plenty of talent. The film producer tells Gemma Tipton about what it takes to be creative
Most of us have a notion of talent, even genius. The idea of a creativity that forces those who possess it to their desks, canvases or computers to make the work that is fighting to get out. Ultan Guilfoyle, the Irish producer of a new film about the architect Frank Gehry, has a different view. "Talent is nothing but energy plus common sense," he says. "But it's mainly energy. There's nothing new to be done. There's only the energy that it takes to do what there is." That doesn't mean the energy always flows. "Is starting hard?" asks Sydney Pollack, the film's director, in its opening scene. "You know it is," replies Gehry. "I don't know what you do when you start. I clean my desk. I make a lot of stupid appointments that I make sound important. I'm always scared that I'm not going to know what to do."
Pollack made Tootsie, The Firm, Out of Africa and The Interpreter, among others. Gehry is the superstar architect who created the shining, curvaceous Guggenheim Bilbao. Insecurity, it seems, can reach the very top.
Guilfoyle has a great deal of energy, as he has shown from his early days, when he presented RTÉ's Youngline, through helping to produce Live Aid to heading the film department at the Guggenheim in New York, where he curated The Art of the Motorcycle, one of the museum's most successful exhibitions.
Guilfoyle seems too charmingly unassuming to have worked with egos as reportedly large as Gehry's and that of Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim director. Or perhaps that's what makes him so successful.
Guilfoyle links the early days of his success to a time when the Irish were at last beginning to feel they could achieve something. "It was around 1981, 1982. Suddenly, a generation of kids could see that they could be relevant on an international scene without having to go away. Before U2 we had had our achievements . . . it was different with U2. Their success was identifiably ours. We could see them in St Stephen's Green, in the Dandelion. And they went off and did their tour in America and released their albums, and everyone was very energised by them, but they were still hanging around. That gave a huge injection of self-confidence."
A lack of funds initially kept Guilfoyle out of university, so he went to work for ICI for two years before attending Trinity College, in Dublin. University, he says, was a wonderful experience. "Four of the happiest years. They can't not be. You get to listen to Brendan Kennelly lecture once a week and to live in an amazing place, play football, go out with nice girls. It's 'Hey, welcome to the grown-up world', only you're not really grown up, because you don't have to be responsible for anything except getting the occasional essay in on time."
From Trinity to RTÉ, the "grown-up world" didn't exactly force itself on Guilfoyle. "I was having a great time, the funniest time imaginable. I was sharing an office with Mike Murphy and with people like Dermot Morgan and Tony Boland. You were paid very badly but made up for it by laughing all the time."
Nonetheless, Guilfoyle left to go to London and work for the BBC, as a producer on the music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test. While he was there Bob Geldof had the idea of raising money to help relieve famine in Africa. "He [and Midge Ure] came up with Do They Know It's Christmas? And my boss sent a crew down to cover the recording, and that became the video. Then, as it was the end of the season, we all went off on holidays. The next thing I know is I get a call saying, 'You've got to come back. There's a big concert coming up, and we need all hands on deck.' So I pitched up in London and that was Live Aid."
Guilfoyle stayed with the BBC as head of features and documentaries in Belfast. "It wasn't the happiest time," he says. "I was able to plunder the south a bit, because I knew the bands down there. I'll never forget the first time I heard Sinéad O'Connor sing, and I'm thinking, Holy s**t, this is incredible. I got her on the last Whistle Test, which was from Belfast, with U2."
Nonetheless, Guilfoyle was ready to move on. Going back to RTÉ wasn't an option - "because nobody asked me", he says. "If someone had said 'Do you want to come down here?' I'd have been down like a shot. But nobody did."
Returning to England, he set up a production company, Planet Pictures, with Geldof and Tony Boland. "We had this Paddy enclave in London, and we were determined to make good films." "Good films" included work for the BBC's Arena documentary series and programmes for Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show, one of which was about the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. "Doing Frank Lloyd Wright is like trying to 'do' Picasso," he says. "We could have done a long, long film, but Melvyn needed a really tight hour. So Richard Rogers, who was working on the film with us, said: 'Why don't we just go to the Guggenheim in New York, his last and possibly greatest building, and we'll use that as a way into Frank?' "
Filming in the spiral rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, Guilfoyle got to know the director and staff there, evidently impressing them. "When the film was done, the Guggenheim's director, Thomas Krens, said: 'If you want to come to New York, you can set up a film department for us.' And I said, 'Sure,' and I did."
Which insouciant comment brings us back to the original question of talent and hard work. Is it simply a mixture of charm and graft that has got Guilfoyle where he is, or is it more the respect and trust he has earned from the influential, the innovative and the inspired? At the Guggenheim he made a series of short films about the living artists in the museum's collection, including Jeff Koons, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel and James Rosenquist. "It was like making short stories in film. Once you come to an artist with an idea, and they know they can trust you, people are generous. If you go up to anyone and say, 'I hate your work,' they're going to tell you to go f**k yourself.
"We had tiny budgets, relatively, but the best fun. It was like having your own tiny studio making art films."
After September 11th everything changed. "The Guggenheim went from having 6,000 visitors a week to, in the week after 9/11, having just six visitors - in a whole week. The atmosphere of New York changed, too."
Nonetheless, a new project was on the horizon, Sketches of Frank Gehry, a film that came out of a meeting between Gehry and Pollack at the newly opened Guggenheim Bilbao. Guilfoyle remembers a long dinner and plenty of Rioja, then going home in a taxi with Frank and his wife, Berta, and Frank saying, "Wouldn't it be great to make a film of all of this, and wouldn't it be great if Sydney directed it?"
"And I laughed and thought it would never happen. But it did. Frank put out the feelers, and Sydney found himself in a position where he really couldn't say no. And then Sydney called me, at Frank's suggestion . . . and we got together."
Through the dialogue between Pollack and Gehry, interspersed with interviews and stunning shots of Gehry's buildings, Sketches is a film about the nature of work, the nature of creativity, and it gives an insight into how the crazy shapes of Gehry's buildings come about. But what is Gehry like as a man? "By turns he can be delightful and charming and funny to sit and have a drink with, to have a lot of drinks with," says Guilfoyle. "And he can be a grumpy, short-attention-span guy who wants to get on with his work and who doesn't want to be bothered. He's now 75 years old and he feels mortal. He feels that he's running out of time, and he's got a lot to do."
With typical unassuming understatement, Guilfoyle concludes, "It's a small little film about a great, great man."
• Sketches of Frank Gehry is being screened at the Cannes film festival on Thursday