From screenplay to special effects, it seems there are Oscars for just about everyone's contribution to a great movie except one: casting. A few years ago the US film magazine Premiere highlighted this omission with its own "unsung Oscar", awarding the accolade to Ros and John Hubbard for The Commitments.
Their office in the heart of Soho in London is bursting at the seams. John has three scripts to read before tomorrow morning. Ros is off for a meeting with Peter Yates. The phone never stops ringing. The company cast around 16 feature films a year, and then there's television.
"A lot of our work now is trying to get films off the ground," John explains. "You have a fantastic team of people, a fantastic script, yet if you can't get a certain type of actor to commit to it nothing will happen. But if you can say Rufus Sewell or Emma Thompson or Ewan McGregor or Robert Carlyle wants to do this script, you're in business. But they're so grand and are all so busy with scripts chasing them, it's very hard to land them."
Eighty per cent of the scripts they get sent never get made. Yet a brilliant script remains the single most important element in a film. Followed by casting and director, says Ros. John demurs: No. Director then casting.
Sparring with each other is part of the Hubbard dynamic. As in any successful double act each has a different role. Ros is emotional, chaotic, Irish; John is calmer, more circumspect, English.
"We are very competitive," admits Ros. "John and I will have a knockdown argument about who thought of somebody, particularly if they're good. `That was my idea.' `Excuse me. Excuse me. I think you'll find . . ..' " Ros plays both parts, her nodding head turning this way and that while John just smiles at her one-woman performance, hands folded across his chest.
"But that's what creative work is about. You've got to feel on your mettle. It's not meant to be a nice comfy little job that you do by rote." Although they share a joint credit, only on Alan Parker's films do Ros and John actually work together. One reason is simply the amount of work involved on a Parker film where the Hubbards cast everyone, even down to "extras whose faces matter". They clearly have an extraordinarily close relationship with Parker who won't work with anyone else. Even though Evita was a huge USfinanced film, it was all cast from London.
"Our ideal director is somebody who comes with an empty sheet of paper," says John. "The ones we find tricky are people with a very strong idea that you disagree with, though now we have the weight and experience to say `trust us. Meet these other people. Have a look at these tapes'."
Translating a director's ideas into flesh and blood, mining their memories for the right actors, trusting their instincts for unknowns, all goes to create the alchemy of a great performance.
The Hubbards' unerring ability to fill the screen with interesting faces has made them the most successful casting team in Europe. Their particular forte is finding new talent. They discovered Kate Winslet who John cast in Heavenly Creatures. ("He knew it the minute he saw her," says Ros, beaming at her husband.) They discovered Catherine McCormack (Braveheart) and Jonathan Rees Myers who won the young Irish actor of the year award last year.
They found Jonathan in a pool hall in Cork when casting for The War Of The Buttons. "Children are very hard to cast. And the work involved is phenomenal," Ros explains. "It's much easier to sit at the desk here and talk to eight top agents in London and bring in people who you know are brilliant." But casting for the Hubbards is often a succession of schools, pool halls and community centres - "hardly glamorous," she admits. But then glamour is not a word one immediately associates with Ros Hubbard, for whom funny and homely are more apt.
She recounts how Alan Parker wanted to cast her as the DHSS lady in The Commitments. She refused.
"I can read in, but put me the other side of the camera and I don't know what they do. It's magic that only actors know. And we're here to get them work, not take it from them. And they're all nervous wrecks. Every time they come in they know their arse is on the line. They've got to walk into the room and be brilliant. So I think the best function we have is to be maternal and paternal. Mum and Dad casting."
Both Ros and John have a huge respect for actors, unlike some directors, it would appear. John has his own way of dealing with problems. "I say `Have you ever stood in front of the camera?' And I say `Just go and stand there and see what it's like'. Because when you do make that long, long walk and there's this glare of lights and the camera and these faces in the darkness and all the attention is on you, it's quite something to then be able to deliver something which suddenly makes people cry or laugh or moves people or is incredibly magical."
Although they had been married forever and have two grown-up children, Ros and John didn't work together until comparatively recently. They met in Dublin where Ros was running a model agency. John was in advertising, writing and producing TV commercials. They moved to London - John making his way up the corporate advertising ladder and Ros casting commercials.
"I had two young children. With commercials you have to work like a dog but you can work at home, and it's a short involvement. Whereas if you're on a film it's two months that you don't own and you do lose track of your family."
The return to Ireland came with a commercial for Smithwicks. Compared with the situation in London, Ros says, the set-up here was quite hopeless.
"There was only one agent, so actors received their messages in pubs. We were the first people to put a cast list on a table in Dublin. Before us, they just phoned round the place and waited to see who showed up."
Then came The Commitments.
John's ability to remember names, faces and performances had long been a source of wonder (and information) to his wife. He had always hankered after some sort of involvement with films ("to be close to the magic") and at 40 decided he had enough of the corporate life.
"I knew I could sit there till pension day. But work has to excite me, and advertising is a young person's game. This is the opposite. If you were going up a dangerous mountain would you use someone who had been up the mountain once or someone who had been up 30 times? It's an obvious answer. If you think of the thousands of performances and actors and all the films that we've done, it makes you much more valuable in the business than just being young and enthusiastic."
Age and experience also helps sharpen their "instinct", John feels. Ros agrees. "You get a faster sense of judgment and that's why we do a lot of open casting sessions for new talent or kids because we can see 800 kids between us in a day and we'll know the four or five that should come back. When I first started I would try and make the bad ones do it properly. I'd end up shouting at the poor kids `Do it like you mean it'. And now I know to just let the kid go, he's had enough fun coming up to meet you. But it does take years to learn that cruel side."
But ask them what it is they're looking for, what exactly it is they see, and they can't explain. It's just "instinct". There is no audition, as such. "We don't want a performance, leave that for the camera." And does the camera love some people and not others? Definitely. Ros does readings with a video camera on her shoulder.
"You just have a bit of a chat. You listen. Try and find out something about their personality. If you feel the person you're looking at fits the categories, looks right, has a bit of something, then you might read with them at the table. And if they do it quite well with you, then they will go and read with the director."
As for the future, they're already taking care of it. Their expertise is now worldwide. John Sayles wants them to go to America to cast his next film. ("It would be like treasure land.") Their son Daniel has already shown that he has "the instinct". ("He discovered Marcella Plunkett in Dublin. She's just dynamite.") They're generous with help to those who can't afford them. "Anyone in film school gets their films cast free. They're training and we want them to be trained to use casting directors and not try to scrabble it together themselves. What we hope is that when they're working, they'll come back with a film."
David Caffrey, a young Irish director, has done just that. "We had done all his film-school films, at the Royal College of Art and he did a couple of independent shorts in Ireland and we helped him with those and he came back with the big film (Divorcing Jack) and indeed he got a cast that was just stonking: David Hewless, Jason Issacs, Laura Fraser. He got the most exciting young cast in London."