Sitting in the foyer of Dublin's Morrison Hotel, less than an hour before the gala premiere of his new feature film, Rat, director Steve Barron looks much younger than his 44 years, belying his 25 years' experience in the movie business since his days as a clapper loader in the 1970s. With a career in mega-budget mini-series and classic music videos behind him, the softly-spoken, Dublin-born, London-raised director is in a sense returning to his roots with his latest project.
"I grew up in London," he says. "But my Dad grew up here, and he's got that sense of humour. Until I was 13 or 14 I used to come back at least three times a year for holidays with my grandmother on the Templeogue Road." His grandmother died during the shoot at the age of 88. "I'd love for her to have seen it," he muses. "Seeing as it's set just two miles down the road in Kimmage. It was hard for her to understand exactly what we were doing when I tried to explain it."
Rat tells the story of Kimmage breadman Hubert Flynn, who comes home from the pub one evening and turns into a white rat, to the surprise and indignation of his wife (the marvellous Imelda Staunton), the disgust of his creepy, novice priest son (Andrew Lovern) and the dismay of his loving daughter (Kerry Conden). Enter an unscrupulous local journalist (David Wilmot) and a pompous uncle (Frank Kelly) and the stage is set for a black comic fantasy of great originality and wit.
In a world where the majority of movie scripts have been drafted and re-drafted to the point where all quirks and peculiarities have been eliminated well before the film goes into production, Wesley Burrowes's screenplay for Rat is a remarkable exception. Originally conceived as a one-act play, Burrowes's story had lain in a drawer for several years. At his agent's suggestion, he re-worked it for the cinema. The finished script ended up in the hands of Barron, a director who has spent much of his career working in the area of fantasy and special effects. He showed Rat to producer Alison Owen, who was riding high on the success of the Oscar-nominated historical drama, Elizabeth, and she proposed Universal Studios should back a film she describes as "comedy Kafka".
There is something quite dark about the film's depiction of a viciously infighting family, Barron concedes. "But it's not wickedly dark or mean-spirited. The underlying spirit of this is not that way at all." He agrees that the spirit of Flann O'Brien hovers over proceedings. "I was made more aware of that by Wesley, and you can certainly see that influence there."
Burrowes is one of our most distinguished writers for stage and screen, especially for television as creator of The Riordans, Bracken and Glenroe. His comic dialogue, especially for Frank Kelly, who plays the pompous neighbour, is a delight. Rat is such a gem, in large part, because of Barron's sympathetic, well-judged direction. He feels that his own Irish background certainly helped.
Although set geographically in the working-class suburb of Kimmage, it's harder to figure out when exactly Rat takes place. Barron artfully blurs the styles and fashions of the past 40 years to create a world which could be anywhere between the 1960s and the 1980s. "Wesley wrote it about 10 or 15 years ago," he explains. "He based it on a Dublin that was dying out even then and is completely gone now. You couldn't have set it now. I couldn't see jeeps or mobile phones or computers there. So we said right, we're going to have to control the whole look of it, to create a period which could be now but isn't."
The resulting film is a long way from most fantasy cinema. In fact, there's more than a touch of Mike Leigh's downbeat naturalism in the affectionate portrayal of the Flynn family and their many foibles. "The only way I could see of making this more than a short film, was to really invest in the characters, not to let them slip into satire. I was constantly drawing people back. It could be done in a more over-the-top way, and you could have funnier laughs earlier, but I think you'd end up paying in the long run. This way, you're slowly pulled in but you can laugh later on, because you can believe in the characters.
"It makes it a more unique film, because it is a complete hybrid, and you become fonder of it, I hope. I've noticed that with a few people, who liked it the first time, and then it grew on them even more when I saw them again."
With a film such as Rat, a lot depends on its original release and how it fares in its home territory. Barron agrees that such a quirky film will be perceived as a difficult sell by many in the film industry. "It is a problem, but you just have to hope that people will take a chance with it and like it." He is very happy with the promotional material, including the poster of a white rat guzzling a pint of stout. "The trailer has been getting a great reaction from audiences over the last couple of weeks," he says. "We really hope that it will be a success here, and that will help as a springboard for the British release early next year."
Barron knows what he's talking about when it comes to the movie business, having directed one of the most commercially (although certainly not critically) successful films of the last 20 years - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - and acted as executive producer on such Hollywood productions as While You Were Sleeping and The Specialist. "You've got to be a certain kind of person to do that Hollywood thing," he says. "A good politician and a good tactician to get what you want out of it. If you get the right project and can weave your way through it, you can do great things. I'm just not great at the tactical side of it.
"After the last Hollywood film, I decided to come back here. It was all about getting my hands on really good material, which wasn't going to come from within the studios, and getting it into the studios from outside was always going to be difficult. Also, the creative control thing is really hard." Barron has been happy in recent years, working on big-budget television mini-series such as Merlin and The Arabian Nights for the American Hallmark Company, better known for manufacturing greeting cards, but now moving into film and television drama production. "You've got all the resources of a feature film, and far more creative freedom, but it's for three hours of television."
He is off to India soon to shoot a new version of The Thief of Baghdad, Hallmark's first venture into cinema feature films, but he's philosophical about the fact that fantasy or non-realist cinema rarely gets the critical acclaim or awards that naturalist drama receives. "When you're dealing with something that's fantastical and takes you off into another world, it's always presumed that it's not going to go particularly deep," he says.
"We were at the Emmys recently, where Arabian Nights had been nominated for best mini-series, but we knew that we weren't going to win. But there's always a place for fantasy cinema, and for the musical as well. The musical just has to come back, once they sort out the music." Which is a little ironic, coming from someone who was one of the prime creators of the modern pop video. Starting off in the late 1970s with bands such as The Jam, Barron went on to become one of the top video directors of the 1980s. He looks slightly embarrassed when I mention my fascination with one of his most famous, the promo for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.
"I saw it on TV the other day for the first time in 10 years and it looked really, really dodgy," he says. "I got the gig because he'd seen my video for The Human League's Don't You Want Me, and he loved that idea of a film within a film. On the set, we were all shocked, because you have to remember it was the first single from Thriller. "We shot the rehearsal, and we couldn't believe what we were seeing. No one had ever seen anything like it. He'd been practising this for two years without showing it to anyone, and we were actually filming it. When he finished, there was a complete silence and everyone just started applauding. But there were a couple of videos I did later which, when they do the VH1 Top 100, always end up in the Top Ten, like Aha's Take On Me or Dire Starit's Money for Nothing, whereas Billie Jean's always back at number 32 or something."
It seems a long way from the glitz of 1980s MTV to the absurdist black comedy of Rat, but Barron is more than happy with his more recent work. "Most films open the door and show you the way in," he says. "This doesn't. It is what it is and you take it or you don't. That's what makes it a little darker in a way, because it doesn't try to excuse itself or explain itself or anything. Consequently, it's a little bit harder in a way, which I really like. If it had been done the other way, the Hollywood way, it just wouldn't work."
Rat is showing at selected cinemas
