Producing the goods

IRISH FILM PRODUCER Redmond Morris was returning from the Golden Globe awards in Los Angeles last month when his plane touched down in London and his wife Sheila phoned to tell him he had just been nominated in the most prestigious category at the Bafta awards. As one of the producers of The Reader, he is nominated for the best picture trophy.

“I gave a hoot and a holler,” he says, “and the flight attendant came over to see what was wrong. I was absolutely thrilled to be nominated.” Exactly a week later, Morris was leaving London for a flight home to Dublin when he learned that he had been nominated for best picture at this month’s Oscars.

When we talked at his house in Dublin last week, he was preparing for a whirlwind week of travel, returning to Los Angeles last Sunday to attend the annual lunch for Oscar nominees. Next stop was the Berlin Film Festival where The Reader, which is set and was shot in Germany, was shown in competition last night. Then he flies to London for the Bafta awards tomorrow night.

Film is in the Morris genes. Redmond’s father was Michael, Lord Killanin, who worked on a number of movies with the great John Ford. Redmond’s son Luke has received Bafta nominations for the short films, Je t’aime John Wayne (2000) and Heavy Metal Drummer (2005); “I have to get another nomination to equal Luke,” says his father with a proud smile. “He doesn’t have an Oscar nomination, though.”

Now 62, Redmond Morris was born in “the appropriately named” Hatch Street nursing home in Dublin, and he grew up in Spiddal, Co Galway. “My father was a good friend of John Ford and he was involved with the making of The Quiet Man,” he says. “I remember when I was very small and my dad taking me on a film set for the first time. It was for the railway station scene in The Quiet Man when John Wayne gets off the train and he asks what’s the way to Innisfree.”

In the 1950s Lord Killanin formed a production company, Four Provinces Films, with John Ford, Hollywood actor Tyrone Power and architect Michael Scott. “They made The Rising of the Moon and Gideon’s Day, which was for MGM,” says Morris. “I remember going with my dad to MGM and having lunch with him in the canteen there. They had poached salmon on the menu. Coming from Spiddal, I asked my dad how could they admit it was poached.”

Film was “just a small part of my father’s interests”, he says. “He was originally a Fleet Street journalist. He met my mother, who was the daughter of the canon of Oughterard, at the Galway races. They went to live in Spiddal. We went to school there and then we came to Dublin where I went to Pembroke, St Conleth’s and Gonzaga. Then I went to Ampleforth in England.

“I came back and went to Trinity and I didn’t do terribly well. I spent a lot of time in theatre there at Players. I began doing history and then business studies. When I failed my exams, my dad told me I should go and do what I always hoped I would do, which was to work in movies . . . a friend of his offered me a vacation job on a film. That was my start.”

It was 1968 and Morris worked with the advance aerial unit of Darling Lili, the wartime drama starring Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson. Director Clive Donner was planning to make Alfred the Great with David Hemmings in the title role, and he hired Morris as his assistant in London for six months while he was preparing the movie and then as third assistant director on the production in Galway.

“I had a fantastic time,” Morris says, “and I got my ACTT union card on that movie.” One of his brothers, Michael “Mouse” Morris, who later became a successful jockey and racehorse trainer, also worked on Alfred the Great. “He dealt with the horses. Our brother John kept hawks and all the hawks on that film were under his aegis.”

A year later, Morris worked on another wartime adventure The Red Baron, filmed in Ireland by US producer-director Roger Corman. What lessons did he learn from the famously frugal Corman? “Frugality,” he laughs. “There was a plane crash sequence in the film and although some of the actors were not in the proper gear, they were told to go in and crawl out. The movie had one shot of two planes crashing and exploding in the air, and then Corman used the same footage from a different angle for another scene.”

IN THE 1970s Morris moved to London because it offered more opportunities for film work. “I worked on a Hammer film, Moon Zero Two, a space movie that was Hammer’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but without the budget,” he laughs. And he was an assistant director on The Bitch, a risqué but very profitable yarn starring Joan Collins. “She was such fun to work with,” he says.

He went on to work with producer Stephen Woolley during the heyday of the adventurous Palace Pictures, on the political drama Scandal and the boxing picture The Big Man, starring Liam Neeson. Harvey Weinstein, who distributed many of Palace’s productions in the US at the time, later backed The Reader.

“At the premiere of The Reader, Harvey spoke very kindly about me and my involvement with some of his early successes such as Scandal and The Crying Game,” he says. “Of course, some didn’t make any money even though they were equally good, like The Miracle.”

Morris produced that underestimated 1991 movie, the first of six on which he worked with Neil Jordan. “I admire Neil very much,” he says. “It’s always a challenge with him because he sets the bar so high. No matter what he’s asking for on a production, there’s a reason for it. He’s practical as well. Neil was the first writer-director I worked with after many years of working with directors on films from screenplays by other people. It’s so much easier with a writer-director because you don’t have to refer to other people if any changes need to be made.”

After the success of Jordan’s Oscar-winning The Crying Game, they worked on the lavish Anne Rice adaptation, Interview with the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas. “That was a fantastic opportunity,” Morris says. “We shot it in New Orleans, San Francisco, Paris and London.” It was a major box-office hit, unlike his next two films with Jordan.

“Michael Collins was a huge success in Ireland, but I don’t think Warner Bros knew what to do with it internationally. And they certainly didn’t know what to do with The Butcher Boy, which is probably my favourite of all the movies I did with Neil. It was so quirky. It wasn’t big-scale. We had fun making it up in Clones.”

FOUR YEARS AGO MORRIS WAS a co-producer on Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. “As an experience, it was one of the most enjoyable and one of the most educational in my life,” he says. “Ken insisted on shooting in sequence, which rarely happens. I’ve worked on such good movies in the past few years.” He was executive producer on Richard Eyre’s stalker drama Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, and produced by Scott Rudin. It was Rudin who invited Morris to work on The Reader, which stars Kate Winslet as a former Nazi concentration camp guard and received five Oscar nominations.

“As far as the Oscars are concerned, we had hoped for Kate because she has been getting so many accolades, and quite rightly,” he says. “We knew the film was on the radar, but it hadn’t been acclaimed universally. So while we always hoped the film would do well in the nominations, we wouldn’t have been surprised if Kate was the only nominee. She’s wonderful in the movie and it was a great experience to work with her.

“I worked on The Reader for almost 18 months. It was hard at times because of logistical problems. We had started shooting it without [in the original cast] Nicole Kidman because she was still working on Australia, and then she announced she was pregnant. Kate had just finished Revolutionary Road, so she was cast instead and everything worked out so well in the end. I’m glad for Harvey Weinstein because he stuck with the project the whole way through all the changes.”

Morris says he relishes any opportunity to work in Ireland so that he can be close to his wife and their two young daughters. “I’ve got two projects of my own, which the Irish Film Board has given development money,” he says. “One is written by John Kelly, the RTÉ presenter, and it takes place in New Orleans and in the west of Ireland.

“Then there is The Maharajah of Connemara, about an Indian who owned Ballynahinch Castle in the 1930s. He used to go there for the fishing. He was the first non-white cricketer to play for England and was on the same team as WG Grace. The screenplay is by Anne Chambers, who wrote the book Granuaile, and David Reilly.” And Morris is involved with producer Michael Garland of Dublin-based Grand Pictures on the Billy Roche-scripted Rhapsody, which also received development finance from the film board.

THE NEXT PROJECT for Morris, however, will be London Boulevard, based on a 2001 novel by Irish writer Ken Bruen, who lives in Galway. The pre-production process starts next month and filming begins in London in June. Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley will play the leading roles in what Morris describes as “a contemporary story about an ex-con who goes to work for an actress in a big Holland Park house”.

Redmond Morris inherited the title, Lord Killanin, when his father died in 1999. “It seems slightly anachronistic, but I’m very proud of the title and I would never relinquish it,” he says.

“However, I would find it hard now to change my name on the credits of a movie. I went to the House of Lords after my father died, but I was only able to go for six months because it was at the time when Tony Blair expunged a lot of the hereditary peers. I did find it odd, I have to say, that there was I in a position to vote on things that were basically British. I always remember my father saying that going to the House of Lords was like being an extra on a film.”