From his New York perspective, Gabriel Byrne warns that Irish-American culture is in danger of dying. He talks to Michael Dwyer
Gabriel Byrne, who turned 57 last Saturday, had the distinction of being Ireland's first soap-opera heart-throb back in the 1970s, when he played farmer Pat Barry in the RTÉ series Bracken. Since he made his film debut in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), Byrne has featured in more than 60 movies, including outstanding performances in Defence of the Realm (1985), Miller's Crossing (1990), Into the West (1992), The Usual Suspects and Dead Man (both 1995), Spider (2002), and most recently, Jindabyne.
Byrne's latest role, however, is chairing the working group that will establish an Irish cultural centre in New York, following an invitation from the Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue. "I've lived in New York since 1989," Byrne says. "About a year ago I was talking after a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, and I addressed what it meant to be Irish and what it meant to be Irish-American. I consider myself to be an Irishman who lives in America.
"It seems to me that Irish culture in Ireland is changing un-self-consciously by the day, principally due to the new immigration here. Irish-American culture, on the other hand, is to a great extent the result of the emigrants who came from Ireland with their stories and their songs. The problem now for Irish culture in America is that emigration no longer has the same pattern there. So Irish-American culture is in danger of actually dying. I didn't have any answers, but I wanted to ask some questions, so I contacted the Government here and met the Taoiseach."
The working group Byrne is chairing consists primarily of business representatives. "This plan is a business plan and a plan to help culture," he says. "The idea of corporate business helping out the arts is something that wouldn't have happened 15 or 20 years ago. I've met with lots of Irish-American business people and the plan is moving ahead."
Apart from the new immigrants, what other changes has Byrne observed about Ireland on his regular visits home? "When you come back to a country that you've left," he says, "you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.
"It's the dilemma of the emigrant or the exile. The danger for an emigrant coming back is that you long for things to remain the same, yet inevitably things must change.
"I think Ireland is in the midst of a true revolution now. It's not just cultural but social and economic. Each time I come home I notice something different. I don't find Dublin as friendly and as intimate as I used to, which is inevitable as a city grows. We're a more outgoing, optimistic country, whereas we used to be introverted and perhaps we carried the burden of history a little too heavily."
SOME THINGS HAVEN'T changed, he adds with a broad smile. "I was walking down a street in Dublin recently and I was wearing trainers. This woman passed me by and she said, 'For the love of God, you'd think with all the money you're earning that you could afford a decent pair of shoes'."
A former member of the Irish Film Board, Byrne welcomes the growth of indigenous productions representing Ireland on screen. "The importance of an Irish film industry is that we tell the story and not someone who comes in from abroad to present a series of stereotypes that go around the world.
"There was a time when we saw ourselves on screen in Ryan's Daughter or The Quiet Man, and that became the definition of ourselves in America. It's interesting to look on those two films now as social documents. I've always felt that John Ford mythologised Ireland in The Quiet Man, although there's a grain of truth in it, and I believe David Lean took a benign colonial view of Ireland in Ryan's Daughter. It was interesting, too, that Lean cast primarily English and American actors, with all the actors from the Abbey given just a line or two."
Indigenous Irish films are still struggling to find an audience, he remarks. "It's the same with independent film production around the world. The success or failure of a film depends, sadly, on whether it becomes a hit in America. If you want to see an Irish film in a multiplex in America, you'll be waiting a very long time.
"If you want to see an American film in Ireland, you will have absolutely no problem in seeing it in any multiplex anywhere. The end result of that is that we absorb American cultures and values non-stop. The American cultural juggernaut rides over everything else, and American films have even changed the way we speak to each other.
"Twenty years ago, if you put a kid from Galway in the same room as a kid from Los Angeles, they would have very little to say to each other. Now they speak the same language because technology has united almost the entire world. They have a shared cultural experience."
European actors working in the US today continue to be defined by their "otherness", he believes, and as a result, they are more likely to be cast as villains. "When I left here, the idea of being an Irish actor abroad was still unusual. Nobody knew what to do with us. There were a few of us in London - Liam Neeson and myself - and then we went to America. Producers and directors still ask me if I'm going to use an Irish accent. My theory about that is that characters are universal.
"An accent defines to a great extent what you are, but it doesn't define who you are. I've always felt that if it's essential for a character to sound like he's from Texas, well, I'll do that accent, but if it's not essential, I'll make him Irish. Jindabyne, for example, was written for an Australian actor and I put in all the stuff about the character's background as an Irish racing driver, and I put in the St Bridget's cross because I wanted to make a point about how we have lost our contact with ritual, whereas the Aboriginals haven't."
BYRNE GIVES ONE of the finest performances of his career in Jindabyne, which takes its title from the Australian town in New South Wales where it is set. Based on the Raymond Carver short story So Much Water So Close to Home, it is a compelling, simmeringly powerful drama featuring Byrne as one of four male friends who go on a fishing weekend. The film addresses the moral dilemmas that ensue after they find the body of a dead woman in a river and then continue with their fishing before reporting the discovery.
As directed by Ray Lawrence, Jindabyne makes no concessions to the Hollywood assembly-line process. "One of the interesting things about it is that Ray refused to make the picture unless he could make it as he wanted to make it and unless he had final cut. He's a man full of integrity. He's only made three films in 21 years. He cares so much about the control of the artist over the end product that he was prepared to give up the film. Yet I never worked with a director who gave so much control to the actors. He never said 'action'. He never said 'cut'. He would just say, 'okay, in your own time'. And he never shot more than one take of any scene."
When I mention Jindabyne is the third movie in which Byrne and Laura Linney play a married couple, after A Simple Twist of Fate (1994) and PS (2004), Byrne laughs and points out that Linney has also been married to Liam Neeson in a movie and a Broadway play. "So she's been married five times to two Irishmen," he says.
Given the escalating tension between the couple they play in Jindabyne, did Byrne and Linney feel any need to keep apart at the end of a day's shooting? "No, we lived right next door to each other," he says. "She was the first person to show me how you use that thing where you can see people on the computer screen, and I used that to hook up to my kids. She and I had dinner a couple of times.
"I don't believe in actors staying in character. To my mind, it's a kind of affectation for actors to be bringing their roles home. If you pursued that logic, Anthony Hopkins probably would have eaten his entire family while he was making The Silence of the Lambs."
After Byrne saw Ray Lawrence's previous film, Lantana (2001), he told his agent, Teri Hayden, that he would love to work with him. "She contacted Ray and he came to New York and gave me the script of Jindabyne," Byrne says. "He said he wanted me to do this film and that he would not do it without me. And he said he felt that I would have a spiritual experience making this film.
"Nobody had ever said that to me before, and it was a spiritual experience.
It was incredible, and not just to be in that amazing landscape but to work with somebody who cares and is so passionate about film, and yet makes the process seem so simple."
DESPITE HIS PROLIFIC output, Byrne hasn't made a film in Ireland in 10 years, apart from a very brief cameo in When Brendan Met Trudy. "There's no particular reason, except that the right role hasn't come up," he says.
However, he is evidently enthusiastic about Brendan Gleeson's adaptation of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which Gleeson intends to direct as a feature film. Earlier this year, Gleeson assembled much of the cream of Irish acting for a script-reading in Dublin.
"It was one of those great afternoons where we all gathered to read through the script Brendan has written," Byrne says. "There were about 20 of us actors from different generations sitting around the table - John Kavanagh, Sean McGinley, Eamon Morrissey and myself, and Cillian Murphy came from London and Colin Farrell flew in from Los Angeles.
"There we were, all these nervous actors clearing our throats. It made me feel how disconnected we were as a group. I had never met Colin before and I'd never met Cillian. They're lovely guys, really down-to-earth. It was a very special afternoon. The film will be made, and with an Irish cast that reflects my generation and the younger generation."
Jindabyne opens next Friday, May 25