John Butleron taking nobody - especially Belgians - for granted
'It's vital to film a shot from the island, so tell me what you will do if it rains."
As the Belgian with the ponytail passed me the bread sauce his eyes narrowed to slits.
I didn't know what I had done to make him angry. I had been hired by a television production company to direct a corporate video for its client, a regional tourist board. The community where we were filming had recruited a Belgian who lived locally to make sure it got its money's worth. Here, in a diningroom with a mounted stag's head in a remote corner of Ireland, I now had a clear enemy.
"Tell me exactly what lenses you are using."
The cameraman studied his ham and sprouts as if they were the Ark of the Covenant. He wasn't the most loquacious man I had ever shared a five-hour car journey with, to be fair.
And, to be fair to the local community, I had heard stories of great excesses from the world of advertising in the 1980s, of crews swinging a camera around for half a day and drinking for five. But this was many years later, a low-budget corporate video and an exhausted two-man crew under interrogation in the musty livingroom of a complete stranger.
"Tell me what the narrative impulse of the piece is."
The grandfather clock in the hall ticked, and the praetorian guard waited for a response. It was a corporate video for a tourist board. What could I say? That morning I had felt sure the idea was to make the countryside look nice, but that seemed hopelessly simplistic now. I studied the hunt scene over the mantelpiece: the riders on horseback, the eyes of the slavering hound, then those of the fox in his jaws. We each knew well which we were.
Narrative impulse, narrative impulse. This Belgian lived in the lighthouse and ran a local internet cafe. I wanted to ask what he thought the narrative impulse should be.
"In Belgium I made Toto the Hero and Man Bites Dog. You have heard of them?"
He smiled thinly. I had been snared in the jaws of a well-laid trap. Those films had scaled the heights. The corporate video could hope only to ramble around the foothills. I couldn't help wondering why they hadn't hired him to make the video, but I assumed he had retired and moved here, as so many do.
I said nothing. In fact I carved a piece of ham into the shape of his head, drowned it in bread sauce, stuck it in my mouth and bit my tongue.
The next morning dawned bright and clear despite a dismal forecast, and we met our overlord from the Low Countries in the car park of his internet cafe.
He hugged us each and produced a flask of coffee. Wasn't the weather great? Wasn't this going to be a super day? The cameraman and I exchanged glances. We had 15 locations to film, culminating in a boat ride to the windswept island to get the vital shot that would work only in sunshine. What had changed to make him so happy?
Within an hour we had found some interesting shots, and he had stopped looking through the lens on each one. By the afternoon he had taken to sitting in the car, listening to Joe Duffy while we forded rivers, holding tripods and cameras over our heads.
We continued filming, ticking off the locations, driven by the resolve that real anger can instil. By early evening we were ready for our final shot of the day, on the island, and he was reluctant to join us. He was sure we would get it right and felt it was unnecessary to chaperone further, but we insisted. He had to come. We turned up the radio and drove on while the heavens opened.
When we reached the pier he offered to find the captain of the boat and check the forecast while we stayed in the car. He returned through pelting rain with the news that the boat would sail to the island but might not come back that night if conditions worsened. Did we really want to spend the night on the island? We sat and listened in silence to the sports news on RTÉ Radio 1. His own opinion was clear as day. It was 3pm. He had given us our way out. We could reach Dublin by 7pm if we simply turned the car around.
The boat ride was hell. A cow stood on deck, legs splayed either side of crates of Coke and Fanta. There were vacuum cleaners and car tyres and there was me, the cameraman and the Belgian, water splashing around our knees and nothing between us and the heavens.
After reaching the island we sat in the only hotel for hours, watching the beating rain. A pan-pipes medley of Beatles songs played over and over, and we drank Cup-a-Soups in silence. And when the rain let up and the sun came up we got that shot and took the ferry home.
Back in Dublin the following month I had forgotten about the whole episode when a trailer for Toto the Hero appeared on television. I found the production credits for it on the Internet Movie Database, then those for Man Bites Dog, and no sign of him on either.
It would be nice to think that he was trading on the popular myth that nobody knows a famous Belgian. Maybe he went for his pint and told the barman he was the great cyclist Eddy Merckx. Perhaps the guy in the bookie's knew him as the real Poirot. But nobody knows anything about anyone, and, as the saying goes, assuming makes an ass out of you and me.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com