Ten minutes before Aidan Quinn arrives in the penthouse suite of the Clarence to talk about his latest film, This is My Father, myself and the woman from the PR company case the joint with alacrity. Gravitas is abandoned in the running up and down of stairs, opening of doors and general kerfuffle of discovery.
Yup, it's all there: the baby grand, the private bar, the hot tub out on the roof, the bird's eye views up and down the Liffey from the porthole windows, a blue kitchen, two huge bedrooms. It's fierce flash altogether.
Aidan Quinn comes up the stairs to the penthouse's barn of a chill-out room. He asks permission to smoke a cigar. He sits on one of the three white sofas. Or rather, he sits down for about 30 seconds. I open my mouth to ask a question.
"Hey, isn't this place just great?" he says straight away, his gaze swivelling from window to window. Then he hops up and yo-yos curiously around the place, opening doors and exclaiming at the views. To watch Aidan Quinn scamper around the suite without a scrap of pretentiousness is to feel instantly endeared.
This is My Father, which opened yesterday, is a true co-operative project among Quinn and his siblings. It's been written and directed by Paul Quinn, the cinematography is by Declan Quinn, the star is Aidan Quinn, and there's a cameo role played by their sister, Marian. This is the dream-becomes-reality adult version of kids producing, acting and directing plays in the family garage.
It's the story of middle-aged Irish-American teacher, Kieran Johnson (James Caan). He travels from Chicago to Ireland with his teenage nephew to try to find out who his father was, after his mother has a stroke and he finds a photograph of her with a man he has never seen before.
Shot in flashbacks, the ill-fated love story between his parents, Kieran O'Day (Aidan Quinn) and Fiona Flynn (newcomer Moya Farrelly) unfolds with an unexpected tenderness. Linking both stories is Mrs Kearney (Moira Deady), who knew the young lovers and whose B&B Johnson and his nephew go looking for and then stay in.
Night after night, she tells the visitors another piece of the story. Any attempts at straying into sentimentality gets short shift from Seamus Kearney (Colm Meaney), who gives a brilliant and hilarious performance as her cute hoor cowboy son. Also in the cast are Brendan Gleeson, Stephen Rea, Eamon Morrissey, John Kavanagh, Gina Moxley, and Pat Shortt, who add both darkness and light to the story. Declan Quinn has done magical things with the cinematography. This is a film which surprises.
A lot of the pre-publicity for the film has mentioned that the idea for the story came from the Quinn's mother, who grew up in Cloghan, on the Bog of Allen, where much of the film is set. So what story did she tell her children? Aidan Quinn puffs on his cigar and looks elusive.
"Let's put it this way," he says after some hesitation. "The film is fiction based on a few true events that happened over 50 years ago. A coffin was once laid at the door of a household on the way to a funeral, and a curse put on that household, yes. That is certainly true. But although this and other events happened a long time ago, those families do not want to be reminded of it. When my brother Paul went to that area in 1985, trying to research the story, he met only walls."
Their mother loves the film, and gave some advice about the interiors and the costume. "Parts of Fiona's character are based on my mother," Quinn had said at the press conference after the screening. "We should have given her a cameo role," he reflects retrospectively. "Or done something like having a photograph of her on a mantelpiece. We didn't think of it."
As children, the Quinns commuted easily between their two cultures, coming over and back from the States to their grandmother's house in Ireland. Marian Quinn now lives in Leitrim, with her husband, Tommy Weir, and their two children.
In the past decade, Aidan Quinn has come here to make The Playboys, Michael Collins, and now this latest film. He lives in New York city with his wife and small daughter, and keeps a cottage in upstate New York, but he gets over to Ireland when his schedule allows. "Give me a film every couple of years in Ireland and I'm happy." At 18, he had a stint of living in a flat in Drumcondra, trying to write stories. "Writing is what I thought was my first love," the actor admits. "But I didn't have the discipline for the aloneness of it. I still write a bit now, though. I keep a very infrequent diary, but when I write in it, I write a lot."
Michael Collins, although a critical success in the States, did not do well in the box office there. "The association with the IRA scared off a lot of people, especially at the time it was released, when the peace process was so fragile. And the critics were afraid of it too. It was a difficult film to promote, because they were trying to be terribly politically correct about it. But here in Ireland, what I found most astonishing about seeing that film in a cinema was seeing the back of all those white heads. It seemed like everyone went out of their houses the length and breadth of Ireland and made it into the cinema for that film."
Given the numbers of Irish who have emigrated to the US, it's astonishing so few films have been made which attempt to explore the stories of second-generation Irish-Americans. "It's a completely untapped realm for cinema. Yet the Italians and the Jewish have done it," Quinn marvels, pointing out the potential enormous audience such films would have.
What was it like working so closely with so many siblings, with all those egos doing radar duty under pain of collision? Declan Quinn is hugely admired for his work on Leaving Las Vegas. Paul Quinn is in discussion about directing a film version of J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man. As for Aidan Quinn himself, he is currently shooting 50 Violins with Meryl Streep, which is due for release in the autumn. "A little bit frightening," he says. "If you explode, it goes deep. But we had a shorthand with each other too, because we know each other so well."
And yes, in case anyone was wondering, his eyes are that blue.