Feel the power

With the release of the award-winning Snap and One Hundred Mornings just behind us and Brendan Gleeson’s dark comedy The Guard hitting cinemas this summer, 2011 is all about impressive Irish films. The latest offering is Ian Power’s warm-hearted comedy The Runway, an uplifting tale about a Colombian pilot whose plane crashes in a quiet Cork town in 1983.

As the locals come together to build a runway for the pilot so that he can get home, the mysterious visitor in turn helps the struggling townspeople build up their own sense of pride and community. He becomes something of a father figure to tweenager Paco, played by the charmingly cheeky young actor Jamie Kierans.
For award-winning commercial director Power, the tale of a young country boy becoming caught up in an extraordinary adventure held a special appeal, having known what it was like to be a bored young lad in rural Ireland himself.
“Everyone talks about growing up in the country like it’s this magical place, but as a kid you just find it boring!” he winces. “I moved down when I was six and it was such a culture shock, it was weird. When I saw ET at seven I thought it’d be so much easier to have a friend drop out of the sky than try to make a whole new set of friends. So combined with seeing that story about the pilot on the news, I thought it’d be fun to make a film using the pop-culture reference of ET but to have it be about this adult pilot who’s a completely inappropriate friend for a young boy!”
Though he lacked as many playmates as he might have liked, Power remembers a palpable sense of support and togetherness in the country, despite the harsh realities of Ireland 30 years ago.
“I grew up in Wexford in the ‘80s, and rural Ireland is almost hard to describe now. In my head it always feels like when you see footage of Russia or an Eastern Bloc country. That’s what it felt like, in a restrictive way! But at the same time, there was never any sense from the people that they couldn’t pull through it. There was something very optimistic about the ‘80s that I remember.”
This all sounds uncannily like the speech Barack Obama delivered to the Irish people less than a fortnight ago. Indeed, the theme of community makes the film incredibly relevant today, but Power says he wrote The Runway before the recession hit Ireland full-force.
“It’s funny, I wrote it in 2007 but it’s more relevant now than it was then,” the director reflects. “But there was a trigger that caused me to write it. One of the themes for me was always that, when we had nothing, in a lot of ways we were better off than when we had everything. I was working in Belfast and went to the bar in my commuter hotel. I ordered a drink and gave the bartender some money and when he said something to me, I immediately put my hand in my pocket and offered him more money. And he gave me this odd look and said, ‘I just asked you how you’re doing’. And I thought, I don’t remember the last time someone behind a counter in Dublin just made a social interaction, to the extent that my mind had switched off to it. And I thought that’s not right, we’ve lost our sense of welcome.”
Luckily for Power, his sense of foreshadowing meant that not only did he get finance for the film just before the recession hit, but that the attitude in Ireland has changed. Now, the country’s recent difficulties have made us rediscover our sense of community, something he experienced while shooting in Cork.
“We had a runway we had to build, we had a plane we had to build, it was a logistical nightmare! It’s not easy to make a film on any scale, truth be told, but we just didn’t choose to make life easier on ourselves! But shooting in Schull was such a pleasure, and not just because it’s so beautiful. You’re relying in a blind way on the benevolence of the locals and they welcomed us with open arms – perhaps a little too warmly (laughs). The crew seem to have gone out far more than I was aware of!”
Yet another thing Power and Barack Obama have realised – no matter how difficult the circumstances, Ireland’s sense of community can always be found in a pint of Guinness. And hey, who are we to argue with a President? Sláinte.
The Runway is in cinemas from June 10.