Noel Pearson's career in theatre and film spans four decades - but he's not about to write his memoirs, he tells Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
Arriving early for our appointment at the Merrion hotel in Dublin this week, Noel Pearson is browsing through John Montague's new book, which he bought that morning. "I like to have two or three books going at the one time," he says, and at present they include Richard Crowley's No Man's Land and Roy Foster's Luck of the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970-2000.
"Of course, Foster credits Garrett FitzGerald for everything good and blames Charlie Haughey for everything else," Pearson says. "But Charlie brought in the writers and artists scheme, and he was one of our best health ministers. We could do with him there now. I spent three years trying to make a documentary about him, but he wouldn't do it. I did not want to do it unless he agreed to appear in it. It would have been like Hamlet without the prince."
Now 64, Pearson has been to the forefront of Irish show business for more than 40 years, producing plays, musicals, movies and documentaries. It started in his native Dublin in the mid-1960s when he became the manager of the Chessmen, a showband that featured Robert Ballagh on bass. "There used to be a dance at Anglesea Lawn Tennis Club on Wednesdays," he recalls, "and they were the relief band. I was working as a trainee accountant at the time, and I just hated it. It was a complete rip-off. The line they gave you was that they were giving you a career, so the pay was only a few quid."
Never shying away from the high risks involved, Pearson has enjoyed huge hits and, inevitably, he has been burned along the way. He continues undaunted, with several film projects in development and a new movie, How About You, opening next week. Based on a Maeve Binchy short story, it features Hayley Atwell as a young woman left in charge of a residential home over Christmas. The formidable cast includes Vanessa Redgrave, Imelda Staunton, Joss Ackland, Brenda Fricker, Orla Brady and the late Joan O'Hara, to whom it is dedicated.
The film had its world premiere in Dublin on Wednesday night. "The phone was going all week with people looking for tickets," Pearson beams. "We could have sold it out three times over. It's a great cast. I got all the actors together. We did a market research screening of it in London, at a cinema in Wimbledon, and it got a 90 per cent positive response. It's a great audience film. We're talking to three companies about a deal to release it in America."
ANTHONY BYRNE, THE film's young Irish director, is less than half the age of most of the cast members. "Vanessa was tough to deal with, you know," Pearson says. "Anthony had the patience of a saint. He had worked with her before when he made Short Order, although she was in that for only five minutes. I told him it would be a different kettle of fish when she would have to be working on this for seven weeks. She nearly broke his heart. But she was great. One thing I really admire about Vanessa is that she was willing to do the scene where she says she hates being old and she takes off all the make-up. Most American actresses wouldn't do that." At one stage an agent tried to persuade Pearson to cast Faye Dunaway in that part, but her reputation preceded her. "That would have been too much for anyone to deal with," he says. "The cast all got on well, which was important. Brenda was the mother hen, Mother Earth.
"Maeve came to the set one day. She picked the day we were doing the snow effect. Maeve is like a child when it comes to the movies, and she was fascinated to see us creating the snow. She's a lovely woman. She has sold more than 43 million books, but she has no vanity whatsoever."
Pearson had produced dozens of stage plays and musicals before he ventured into film production in 1988 with My Left Foot. "I had known Christy Brown for a long time, since the 1970s," he says, "and I said I'd have a go at it with Jim Sheridan. None of us had ever made a film before. There was nothing happening in Ireland then - no film industry, no film board, no tax relief scheme.
HE ASSIDUOUSLY ASSEMBLED a patchwork of financing. "I got a lot of guys who put up 20 grand or 50 grand or 100 grand, and then Granada came in and put in a million, but for that, they got all the rights. One of the mistakes we made, because we were total novices, was letting Granada agree to everything. They sold the US rights in perpetuity to Harvey Weinstein for a million bucks. We still don't even know exactly how much the film made, although it did very well. At the end of the day, the only good thing about it was that Granada gave us the money right away to make The Field."
Not the only good thing, of course, because the low-budget Irish movie made by these "novices" went on to get five Academy Award nominations in 1990, including one for Pearson in the best picture category, and Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker collected Oscars for their portrayals of Brown and his mother.
"That was a great night," Pearson says. "That was a great week. We were staying in the Bel Age and we had got so many bottles of champagne after the Oscars - Dom Perignon, Cristal - that when we were leaving, we gave a bottle to every one of the hotel staff. I went back a couple of years later and they were still talking about the champagne."
Pearson and Sheridan reunited for the film of John B Keane's The Field, which earned the late Richard Harris an Oscar nomination a year later. "Nobody wanted Harris in it, including Granada," Pearson says. "They wanted him to go to Manchester to audition for it, but I didn't tell Harris that. So I said to them, 'No Harris, no movie', and they agreed then. That turned his career around."
Having been on the set of The Field and covered the Oscars that followed, I noted that Harris seemed cantankerous both times. "He was difficult, but he was actually very nervous," Pearson says. "It had been a long time since he had made a film. He had been touring America for years in Camelot. They would come down from the hills to see him. I became good friends with Harris, but then he fell out with me for two years because I gave [ Michael] Gambon the part in Dancing at Lughnasa instead of him. He took that really badly."
Asked to name his biggest disappointment as a film producer, Pearson cites his earlier Maeve Binchy adaptation, Tara Road. "I didn't enjoy making that at all. I don't know what happened. There was no chemistry there, and you could see that on the screen. It was one of those things that just disintegrated from day one. You never know what's going to happen."
ANOTHER DISAPPOINTMENT has been not getting his long-planned film on Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott into production. "Caroline, his widow, and her daughters control his estate, and they don't want a film made about him. I've tried time and again to get the rights to his music for the film, but they won't allow that. We did everything. We went to the head of Universal.
"And you can't make a film about Phil Lynott without having his music." The Lynott screenplay is by Johnny Ferguson who, Pearson says, has done "a great job" on adapting Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way for the screen. "It's a wonderful novel set in the first World War, but it has to be a big movie. It will cost around 40 or 50 million, so we have to get either a big star or a big director. We're talking to two directors about it at the moment."
Before that happens, Pearson is teaming up again with How About You director Byrne to make A Place That Hits the Sun, which they plan to shoot in South Africa next year. "It's about a Zulu runner, Willie Mtolo, who used to run 10 or 15 miles to school and back every day," Pearson explains. "He was picked for the South African Olympics team in 1988, but his father died. He had no phone, so he never showed up and needless to say, he was never picked again. He entered the New York marathon in 1991, but they wouldn't let him run because of the sanctions against South Africa. When they were lifted the following year, he entered again and won it in record time."
Clearly, Pearson has no plans to retire any time in the near future. "What would I do?" he asks. "The only part I hate is raising the money. It takes longer and longer. It is worse now than ever. In Hollywood, they say the art is in the deal. Well, it is. Years ago you could go to Harvey Weinstein, pitch him a script and he could say yes or no. He's probably the only one left with that power now. There's nobody else who can say yes or no. It's all committees. You have all these marketing guys with their calculators."
Despite all his highs and lows and many colourful experiences in show business down the years, Pearson says he has no plans to write his memoirs.
"What's the point? You should never say never about anything, but it's not on my radar at the moment. When I was in a bookshop today, I was shocked to see some of the people who have written their memoirs. This celebrity shit at the moment, isn't it terrible? It is absolutely appalling."
How About You goes on general release next Friday
On the Stage: theatrical memories
Richard's Cork Leg (1971)
"I did it with the Dubliners at the Peacock and then at the Olympia and in London at the Royal Court. They were getting £47 a week and they thought I was ripping them off. I told Luke Kelly that if he were Ralph Richardson, he'd be getting the same money. So every Friday night there would be two taxis waiting outside the Royal Court to take us to Kilburn or Cricklewood, and they would get a thousand quid for the night." Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
"That was massive. It was booked out for months in advance. And then there were all the protesters outside the Gaiety with their pickets. After that came Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and that ran for a year. At one stage in the 1970s, I had a show in nearly every theatre in Dublin."
West Side Story (1974)
"The proscenium arch collapsed in the Olympia the day we were due to open. We were just blessed that everyone was on their lunch break and nobody was injured. I moved the show to the State in Phibsboro. I still had the keys to the State since we did Joseph there. There was no time to ask could we use it. So the curtain went up there instead that night."
The Pirates of Penzance (1981)
"Everyone thought I was crazy. They said nobody would come to a Gilbert & Sullivan show apart from the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical Society audience. It was a very big hit, but very expensive to stage because it had a huge cast."
Brothers (1984)
"America was a whole different ball game, but I felt I really had to do it. The play closed after the opening night. The New York Times review wasn't that brutal, and the critic Frank Rich became a friend of mine afterwards. It starred Carroll O'Connor, and he was the biggest thing on American television at the time, as Archie Bunker in All in the Family, but the TV audience doesn't go to the theatre there. "By then, only an actor like Micheál Mac Liammóir would have his own dresser, but I went into O'Connor's dressing room one night and he was sitting there while this man took his trousers off him. I couldn't believe anyone could be so lazy. O'Connor said, 'This is America'."
Dancing at Lughnasa (1991)
"It's an amazing piece of writing, the definitive memory play, and all those women were terrific. The opening night on Broadway was one of the best nights of all time. We had to pay the doorman at Sardis to keep the door of the loo closed because Brian Friel wanted to read the reviews and he didn't know what to expect. He worries too much. The New York Times review said this is what theatre was meant to do. You can't get better than that. The party went on for a week. And then we had the Tony awards a few months later."