Alexandra McGuinness - a successful screenwriter at 21 - talks to Michael Dwyer.
Sitting in a hotel lounge, a picture of calm while the room bustles with film-industry wheeling and dealing, Alexandra McGuinness is quietly pleased that she has just done her own first deals as a screenwriter. The 21-year-old daughter of Paul McGuinness, U2's manager, and Kathy Gilfillan has sold two projects to Alan Moloney of Parallel Film Productions, in Dublin.
She has taken the sensible course for any screenwriter by drawing on her experience. "Both films are set in Dublin," she says. "It's the young, middle-class Dublin where I grew up, which I know. My family were a bit worried in case they cropped up in one of the scripts, but it's not based on them." So no megastar rock band is hovering in the background? "No, although the girl in one of the scripts has a boyfriend who's in a band, but it's not a band on the same scale."
Before turning to writing, she started to carve out an acting career. "I left Ireland when I was 17 and went to London," she says. "I left after I finished school, and I didn't go to college, but I love it in London, and I regard it as home now. I think it has been better for my writing that I didn't go to college - although I might in a few years - because I learned a lot more from breaking away from the safety zone of Dublin while I was quite young."
Her early acting appearances included an episode of the RTÉ drama series The Clinic and a video for the Scottish band Idlewild. "I was acting in small films and TV shows," she says, "but there were a lot of gaps while I was waiting for the phone to ring. I've always loved movies. I worked for a couple of summers doing script breakdowns for Hubbard Casting, and I learned a lot about the structure of a screenplay, so I started writing my own scripts."
One of her first projects is Hare's Collarbone, which takes its title from the WB Yeats poem The Collarbone of a Hare. It's a coming-of-age story about a closely bonded brother and sister. "It deals with them and their mother, but it's mainly the boy's story. He's 17 and incredibly articulate, but he doesn't really fit in anywhere. The three of them live in a kind of incestuous bubble. Then he falls in love with someone, and this breaks the mould and causes havoc. It's a black romantic comedy.
"I decided I'd fire it off to every producer I knew, to get some kind of feedback. I sent it to Alan before anyone else, and he just sat me down and said he was interested in it. He wants to shoot it sometime next year. And he has agreed to let me play the part of the sister, which I wrote for myself."
Moloney also optioned another of her scripts, Lux Does Love. "It's about a girl who's a successful writer," she says, "and she decides to forgo any kind of attachment or romantic relationship at a young age, because she figures it's not worth the hassle." It is, she adds, pure romantic comedy.
"Alexandra is a really fresh emerging voice," says Moloney. "She's the first writer to come from that Celtic Tiger generation and write about it, and she writes about it very truthfully. Her screenplays are cosmopolitan and universal, and she shows a wisdom well beyond her years."
McGuinness has also been working on the other side of the camera, acting in two feature films. One, Esteem, directed by Sarah Hayes, was shot in a Manchester hotel this year. "It's a two-hander about the volatile relationship between a rock-band drummer and his girlfriend, and they go through every emotion," she says. "It's quite strange, but it's a good script."
She also features in the ensemble cast of Confetti, a mockumentary directed by Debbie Isitt, which is due for cinema release in April. "It has a great cast," she says. "Martin Freeman, Jimmy Carr and a lot of British comedians are in it, along with Jessica Stevenson and Alison Steadman. It's a completely improvised movie that's being pitched as Spinal Tap for the wedding industry. "It's about what happens when a magazine holds a competition for the most bizarre dream-wedding idea. I play one of the rejected couples with Wuzza Conlon, who was in Headrush. Our idea is to have an ancient Roman wedding."
And did McGuinness get any sage advice from her father about working in entertainment? "I have my acting agent in London, but he's been handling my script deals for me, and we shopped around other ideas at the Toronto Film Festival. He's been great, very supportive. He always tells me the truth. He says what he thinks, even if he thinks something is really awful."