The Hot Press Interview with Paul Duane

Paul Duane is a man with an eye for untold stories and fascinating characters. For confirmation, look no further than Happy, a documentary short about the controversial artist and dandy, Sebastian Horsley. Duane also approached Brooke Magnanti – more commonly known as Belle De Jour – before she became famous, seeking the rights to turn her blog about life as a prostitute into a television show. The result was the hugely successful show Secret Diary of a Call Girl, starring Billie Piper.

Other projects include what he has half-jokingly referred to as ‘The Geezer Trilogy’– a triumvirate of documentaries about extraordinary and infamous men. The Making of The Rocky Road to Dublin was about filmmaker Peter Lennon; Barbaric Genius, meanwhile, examined the career of the virtuoso writer John Healy; most recently, Very Extremely Dangerous was a brilliant and often terrifying portrait of ex-con musician Jerry McGill. The director also made Natan, the acclaimed untold story of Bernard Natan, the hugely influential – but largely unacknowledged – 1920s and '30s Franco- Romanian film director and pornographer, who was targeted by a vicious, anti-Semitic smear campaign that eventually drove him not only out of film company Pathé, but France itself.

It was Very Extremely Dangerous and Natan that brought Duane to the attention of Variety magazine, which named the Irishman as one of the 10 Directors to Watch in 2014. The list has previously name-checked the likes of Christopher Nolan, Ben Affleck and George Clooney, making it a highly prestigious accolade indeed.

When I meet Duane, he’s getting ready to jet off to LA to attend the Creative Impact Awards and Variety’s Directors to Watch lunch. All that cosying up to talented, beautiful stars means that he’ll miss the RTE broadcast of his highly anticipated show Amber, a four-part drama in the vein of The Killing, which will air nightly from January 19 to January 22.

Duane takes a break from packing to fill me in on where his head is at, at the start of a year which promises much for this hugely talented Irish director...

You've just been named among Variety Magazine’s Ones to Watch! How did that comeabout?
Variety writer Steve Gaydos had tweeted about my film, Very Extremely Dangerous. He said he was really, incredibly excited about seeing it. So I got in touch with him and asked, "How did you come across the film, because it's not distributed in America?" He said that he's a screenwriter and former songwriter in Nashville, and he ran into Gerry McGill in the early '70s when he was drinking in some bar in Nashville. He met this guy who was called Curtis Buck, which was McGill's pseudonym at the time. And ‘Curtis’ was travelling at the time with Waylon Jennings, so when Steve ran into Waylon Jennings a few years later he said, "Hey, I met your friend Curtis Buck!" – and Jennings turned completely pale and immediately left! So that kind of cemented his interest in Gerry. A few years later, he came across the trailer for the film, loved it and he tracked it after that. So then, when we were screening Very Extremely Dangerous in Los Angeles at a great festival called Don't Knock the Rock, run by Allison Anders, one of the godmothers of American independent cinema, Steve came along – and there was an amazing audience reaction. He loved the film and said, "let me see what we can do in Variety to publicise it."

Did you realise what a big deal it was when he told you?
No! I got a call off him a few weeks later. I'd expected him to do a little profile around the time the film was going on release. He said “I think it'd be better if we put you on our 10 Directors To Watch list." I kind of went, "that sounds great, thanks a lot.” Then I went off and Googled it because I had no idea what it was – and I realised Wes Anderson had been on, as well as Ben Affleck and all these other people!
And the reaction was pretty immediate.
Yeah, I spent six weeks feeling really nervous and not wanting to tell anybody, until the list actually came out in Variety. And then, sort of 30 seconds after it was published, I started getting emails from people in Hollywood, that, you know, have made eight films that you've actually paid to see. Proper A-list people going "We're interested in seeing your films." So that's kind of why I'm going over to L.A. now – to sit down and talk to some of these people. You know, my stuff is so separate from all the Hollywood stuff, I don't know if there's any kind of meeting possible, but, well... they're interested in talking to me. So, if there's a way of getting something working, then great!
It might even get more attention for your previous projects, particularly Natan – which was such a great story but hasn’t been widely seen.
It was on once in the Dublin Film Festival. I've been talking to the IFI and other people about it. It's a funny one, because it's only 66 minutes long. It's currently travelling all over the world: it's on in Rotterdam this month, it's on in tons of festivals in the US and it's being screened in London on February 1. It's hard to find opportunities to show films like that in Ireland. Despite the best efforts of the IFI and the Lighthouse, there isn't really a film culture in Ireland. When an Irish film comes out, they kind of tend to give it the bare minimum of four or five days on release – and then it's gone. I find it very irritating. They're working very hard in the IFI, but there's a bit of resistance to going to see movies, and it hasn't built up into a situation where it's financially viable for people to put out Irish films, properly. Hopefully you'll get a chance to see Natan soon. I'm working on some ideas.
I believe the film has inspired some unique tributes to Bernard Natan himself.
Someone did a 'yarn-bombing' of Natan's former studio! They put a memorial in wool, which sounds funny, but it's the first time there's ever been a memorial to him. I sent a picture to his family and they were amazed. So it shows that there's kind of a grassroots thing going on now where people are saying, "It's time this guy was recognised!" If the film is going to be shown again in Dublin, I'd like to have a bit of an event feeling to it. I'll wait and find out if there's a way that we can do that. We'll see!
I know you have a lot of ambivalent feelings about the phrase the ‘Geezer Trilogy’, referring to your films about Peter Lennon, John Healy and Gerry McGill. With those films and Natan, the characters have either fallen out of favour and been ostracised – or have done it to themselves, like Gerry McGill. Is there a redemptive theme?
Well, it's always nice to have a story where somebody has the possibility of redemption. I was very interested in John Healy for a long time. I was interested in his book when he was at the top of his game, and then 20 years later he was still interesting when he had fallen from favour. You don't lose interest in people just because they're not on the front pages any more. With McGill, it was totally different because it was about the outlaw: he was a fascinating character for the small circle of people that knew him. He had blown every opportunity he had. But he was this extraordinary, charismatic character. I don't know, I find it very difficult to theorise about these things. There's a lot of stories I wouldn't bother pursuing. Other people might chase them doggedly, because they're interesting to them. I have to go with the stories I find interesting.

I was blown away by Very Extremely Dangerous – because most people would stay far away from this guy and be genuinely scared.
You know Gerry isn't that unusual to me. I mean, he's probably extreme, but I've met a lot of extreme characters. I like people who are interesting to be around. He was slightly more out there, in that I don't generally intend hanging around people who carry guns and stuff. It was a difficult line to cross. But I like characters who are larger than life. The reason I know someone like Olaf Tyaransen is because we know Sebastian Horsley who was a mutual good friend. Sebastian was quite an extreme character, but one of the most lovable people I've ever met. And I've met people like that wherever I go, and these people can't force it, and they tend to get on with me because I don't judge them. A lot of people would have been quite judgemental of John or Gerry. I'mnot terribly judgemental, so they kind of get a sense that they're okay with me and they know I'm not going to stitch them up or make them look stupid. There is a kind of tendency in some documentaries to find somebody who has flaws, and then make a film about them and say, "Oh, look at these flaws! I never realised this person had these awful flaws!" No, you knew it going into it, you were just waiting for a moment that you could just stand back and go: I'm shocked! It's terrible to do that. With Gerry, we knew what his issues were at the start and we just kept going until we got to the point where we said, "Look, the flaws are outweighing our ability to continue."
Is it that you have done the extremes yourself and so understand them?
Gerry and I got on because he could see that I didn't shirk the madness. I wasn't partaking in it. But I'm not afraid of it, and I think you have to let people feel that you're looking upon them as an equal, not like an etymologist studying a subject. You're dealing with these people, and certainly for documentaries anyway, it's part of the whole toolkit. You have to have respect for the people you're working with – for the people you're putting on camera, who are giving you their trust. They're trusting you with their lives. Whether they're dead or alive. I had to have a relationship with Bernard Natan's family, and they had to feel comfortable with us, that we weren't going to abuse it. The whole porn thing could easily have been abused and turned into something that was more salacious. But we dealt with it in the most straightforward way we could, and that was something we had to get the family onside with. It's about trust, you know?
Speaking of salacious subjects, we spoke before about your work on Secret Diary of a Call Girl, based on the novel by prostitute Belle de Jour, or Brooke Magnanti. It was more mainstream than you would have liked.
Yeah. Certainly, yeah.
You seem to get on really well with Brooke still, and stay in touch.
Brooke and me think the same way. We're both kind of gobsmacked by the way the show ended up being successful, because both our minds would lean towards something more underground, or whatever. So we get on very well. We keep talking about doing other stuff together. Nothing's clicked. I think, if I had been in charge, or if Brooke had been in charge, it would been a lot more left-of-centre. Thankfully the guys who made it knew a lot more about making mainstream, popular programmes, and they went straight to it. If I had done it, it would have been one series and never recommissioned, because it would have been too crazy. So it worked out okay!
I find Brooke fascinating. She's so articulate and brilliant on sex-worker rights. Was getting into that subject matter attractive to you?
Totally! We talked a lot in the early days about the ethics and morality of it, because, you know, we're making a show about someone who's made a decision to be a sex-worker. I mean, Brooke would be the first person to say that it's not a line of work that everybody should jump into, that it takes a certain amount of self protectiveness, a certain amount of distance, a certain amount of control. Like everything, it's not a job that suits everyone, and I think we were very keen, in the early days of developing Secret Diary, on trying to figure out how to tell the story in a way that didn't seem to be glamourising the activity. You know, you don't want to do Pretty Woman. You want to be realistic, to show all sides. Brooke has always been terribly honest about her experiences, positive and negative. A lot of sex-workers I've talked to, their experiences of everyday life and relationships are more bruising than their experience of sex-work. You've got to look at all sides of this. Anyway, yeah, it was an interesting arena to work in. It touches on a lot of ethical and aesthetic fundamental questions about life and sexuality and humanity.
I think the conversations she's having in the UK about sex worker rights and sex positivism are really interesting. In Ireland, we just can't have that dialogue, because we haven't sorted out abortion and that needs to happen before any sex worker rights.
Yeah. I've been talking a lot to a friend of Brooke's, Laura Lee, who's also on Twitter. She has done a lot of documentaries in the UK. She's a sex-worker, and specialises particularly in working with disabled people or people with different physical problems. She's Irish, terribly articulate and funny. I've been talking to people here about trying to do something about her take on the Irish sex-work industry, and nobody is interested. They just can't get past peddling the particular line that's okay for media here. It's very difficult to get beyond that: and it's very frustrating. It's just the way it is in this country.
Would you consider leaving Ireland?
Ah, no. I was in London for a few years. I live here, I've got a kid here and I have spent the best part of my life here. It's where I live. I'm happy travelling, it's just I don't think I'll be basing myself anywhere else for the foreseeable future. I can't really do that.
Your work is doing the travelling for you, with your new show Amber being broadcast internationally.
Yeah, it was only made as an Irish thing for Irish people. And it's showing all over the world. It's done fantastically well in the US, South America, Australia and Scandinavia. It's not because myself and Rob [Cawley] were aiming to do an international market: it's a low-budget show. We think in terms of stories that will travel. Our documentaries have travelled. Amber has travelled. Because both of us have lived and worked abroad – Rob worked in Australia and created the first Aboriginal sitcom; I worked in London and travel a lot – we're very conscious of not factoring our ideas around Ireland. We're looking to the UK, looking to the US. You can travel without travelling. Dublin is a great place to be from. Frankly, and some of the people I have spoken to in L.A. have said the same, you're better off being based in Ireland because you come over here and people are really interested in you. If you live in Inglewood, they don't give a shit, they just think, "Oh, here's that guy, again!”
So tell me about Amber. RTÉ was really pushing the ads for it over Christmas and January. It looks fantastic.
Amber is something we're hugely proud of. It's incredibly exciting to know it's finally going to be on TV here. We completed it two years ago, and it's been two years waiting, for various reasons, to be on TV. It's a very, very ambitious attempt at a drama series that isn't the usual kind of template. It's four one-hour episodes, kicked off by the disappearance of a teenage girl. Then it jumps forward two years. Each episode is from the point of view of a different character. The first episode is from the mother’s point of view, the second of from the point of view of the best-friend, a journalist. She tries to help out. But because of her position, she ends up being compromised. The third episode is from the point of view of an illegal Chinese immigrant who comes into possession of Amber's phone, which she had on her when she disappeared, and then has the quandary of how to deal with that without bringing herself to the attention of the police. The fourth episode is from the point of view of her father. Each episode gives you a different angle, so by the end of the four episodes, you've seen certain events from different points of view. You begin to put together a bigger picture of what actually happened. The audience has the whole picture, which no individual character in the story has.
And RTÉ have been really supportive?
Yeah. We came up with this idea, with this very complicated structure, but RTÉ bought into it and said, "Yeah, sure, go do it.” It was brainmelting complexity. We had big charts on the walls: where everybody was at, any given time, so on any day we could know where anybody was. We couldn't make mistakes in terms of having two characters in one place at any given time. It takes place, like I say, over two years, so you have to plot out storylines in great detail, more so than you would for a normal TV show. It's going out four consecutive nights. They decided to make an event of it. They're taking off current affairs programs and putting Amber on instead. Primetime is off, so it's a big event in the schedule. Hopefully that will draw people to it. RTE haven't done that since Roddy Doyle's Family in '91!
Amber seems to feed into your documentary philosophy: that idea of taking a character and knowing that there's no absolute truth. You can't tell it all from one person's point of view. There might be a thematic thing going on there, because it's not about ambiguity. I think ambiguity can be overused – ambiguity can be an easy "get-out" for people. You can show the different ways peoples' experiences affect their actions, and so on. Again, it's slightly down to the non-judgemental thing, because there are characters in Amber who are hate figures. There's the journalist who kind of feeds off the feeding frenzy around the family's loss. She's not a negative character, she's just doing what she thinks is right to help. There is the illegal immigrant who's blanking mobile phones to sell on Moore St., and then he comes across evidence. Characters who are in a moral grey area. These are all really people who are trying to do their best. What's that Jean Renoir quote from The Rules of the Game? "The tragedy is, everybody has their reasons.” There's no good or bad in it, it's just people trying to get along and people making massive, awful mistakes in the process of trying to fix their lives. It's very ambitious, that's for sure.
And you’re working on a short about fame and a rock star called Don’t You Know Who I Am with Hot Press writer Olaf Tyaransen and Larry Love from Alabama 3. How did you find working on it?
Olaf is a very old friend, a very good writer, somebody who has a great talent as a screenwriter. And I'd been out with Larry a few times in London and thought he was lovely guy, with a great presence and a great voice. The weird thing was, when I said I was working with Alabama 3, I had so many people warning me, saying, "They're so dodgy and so dangerous." And the truth is, they're the sweetest guys in the world.
What do you think people's perceptions of them were?
Well, drugs and larceny, and all sorts. You'd be amazed by the stories some people told me. They're just a really positive bunch of guys. Larry, particularly, was completely committed to doing a really great job on the film. He turned up and knew everything, the characters and the scenes, inside-out. He was unfailingly good-humoured and polite to everybody. We had a laugh. We got drunk on the last night and the guys went off and recorded the theme song on an all-night session. It's amazing.
You’ve done some work with Hot Press and Olaf before, on a cocaine awareness ad years ago.
First thing we ever did as a company, yeah. When we had just formed Screenworks, and we did a little pseudo, viral campaign, which Olaf wrote. The Broadcasting Standards Authority nearly had a heart-attack when they saw it, because it was about cocaine. It traced the passage of coke from some fat, sweaty drug smuggler’s back passage to some society girl’s cleavage. It was basically saying, "Beware of where these things come from, it's not as cool as all that.” It was fun. It got broadcast in the end, but it was quite touch and go. Took a lot of work to make it palatable for the Broadcasting Standards!
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about legalising cannabis over here. How do you feel about drug legislation?
My feelings have been unchanged for years, which is, the world’s criminal underworld is fuelled by and paid for from the proceeds of drug sales. If you suddenly, sweepingly legalised cocaine and heroin, let alone marijuana and everything else, tomorrow, and made it available to registered drug users from pharmacies – first of all, you'd completely cut the legs out from under the criminal underworld. Where would they get their money for their guns, ships, smuggling and various activities, if they couldn't sell drugs? Then, if you want to be a registered user, sign up. You probably would have great difficulty in getting a job or a drivers licence or whatever. If you really wanted to use, and you really wanted to get your drugs, you'd buy them from a shop. They're taxed, money goes to Revenue – I mean, make a Fair Trade, the same as on coffee beans. People who are growing drugs then don't get killed or dismembered. Seems to me that Prohibition was a complete failure and we're just blindly following the same awful, stupid trail, with drugs. If people want to use drugs, the same with alcohol, they know the risks, let them do it, but in a controlled way where you go into a shop – but you can't buy two kilos of heroin. You're a registered user, as people were in living memory in London in the '60s. It was perfectly possible to be a registered heroin addict, and you'd go and buy enough drugs to keep you stable. You didn't have to become a criminal or deal with criminals and it was a success. As David Simon showed in the brilliant third season of The Wire, which focused on the legalisation of drugs: it's politically impossible for any politician to approach the subject of drugs, no matter how successful it would be if it was done. It's just completely impossible. I would be in favour of it, as you can see.
Have you experimented?
Look, I worked in London, in the media, forChrist's sake! I've had friends become addicts, I've had friends die from drugs. I know very, very well what the problems and the troubles are around drugs. Then, I've had friends become alcoholics, I've had friends become homeless through alcohol abuse. I've had friends have their marriages fall apart through alcohol abuse. Some people are going to fall foul of these things, whatever happens. For society to feed into a criminal enterprise as it does by colluding in the continuing prohibition of drugs – as they do – is making things worse for everyone. Where do you think criminals get the money for their guns? If you watch Love/Hate or read the Sunday World, you'll see the amount of money that these guys have. That's because drugs are illegal. And, yeah, my personal experience means drugs are just as bad or just as good as any other recreational substance. They can be misused and can destroy lives. At the same time, being made moderately available, wouldn't destroy the fabric of society, from my experience.
Experimenting with drugs and constantly being around these extreme characters – it seems like that could have been a recipe for disaster, in terms of avoiding some form of addiction or self-destruction yourself.
I think in my late teens or early twenties, if I'd have had access to Class A drugs, I would have crashed and burned, because I was a complete lunatic then. As I've gotten older, I've become a lot more stable and controlled about my attitude to most things. Now, I'm quite able to be around extreme behaviour without necessarily being destabilised by it. Mind you, when magic mushrooms were legal in London in the early 2000s, there were some seven-day weekends at that point!
So, what's up next for you, work-wise?
I'm heading to LA to start filming a documentary about a guy called Kim Fowley. I suppose the best way to describe him is, he's like the Robert Evans of the Hollywood music scene. A seventy-something songwriter, producer, manager. He was played by Michael Shannon in The Runaways. Kim is an extraordinary man. I've been trying to get him to agree to let me make a film about him since 1996, when he came to Dublin and was producing bands here for a few months. He was like this 6'5" Californian man, wearing a red suit, wandering around Dublin, kind of freaking everybody out. I immediately thought, "This guy is fascinating." I couldn't get any money at the time. Tried again in 2001 but he wanted too much money, and I couldn't manage it. Now, sadly, he's dying of cancer, and he's very unwell. However, he's finally at the stage where he really wants to make this film. I'm going to start filming with him next week, in L.A. There isn't any money for it, yet. I’m just going to start filming without the money and hope it comes. It's called Death-Red Hustler and it's basically his life story and his death story. He wants to go all the way to the very end. He said, "I'll let you make this movie, provided it's a cross between Citizen Kane directed by Ingmar Bergman, with a touch of Alejandro Jodorowsky in a kind of Fellini world." I told him, "That sounds great!"
That's not a tall order at all!
Well, he's the kind of guy who creates that world around him, anyway. So it's just a case of documenting it as well as possible. He's pretty out there!
How does that feel, making a film about a man who is dying? Even with Gerry, he was so ill during filming – then he passed away. It's almost like a cinematic pre-eulogy.
Maybe, yeah. I was talking to someone on the phone about it and they said, "Why do you do such bleak things?" and I told them, it's never struck me as bleak. Certainly, with Gerry, the cancer was the one thing causing him to get his life together and try to make a last ditch attempt to be a decent human being. Which was kind of what happened in the end. Then, with Kim, he's totally unafraid of dying. I spoke to him on the phone the other night and he said, "First time I got cancer I had to think, 'Is there anything I'll miss?' and I thought, 'No, there's nothing I'll miss'. I won't miss all the shit that happens trying to get out of bed in the morning. I won't miss the idiots and assholes. I don't have a problem with dying." He's totally unfazed by it. He's going into it as an adventure. I wrote the proposal for it and I said, "He's taking to death like it was a Class A drug." He's never used drugs or alcohol in his life, so death is like a big adventure for him, and he's taken it on, in an extraordinarily inspiring way. I find it's not pretty, but it's certainly interesting, and it's a trip.
Until then, it’s Hollywood schmoozing time!
Yeah, I hear U2 are going to be over. I stole Bono’s hat once.
We definitely need more information on that one.
It was around 2004 and I was drunk. Pat McCabe was talking to Bono and I thought it would be funny if I took Bono's hat off, and suddenly all these people materialised out of the shadows and said, "I'm sorry, but you're going to have to leave." I put the hat on Neil Jordan who said, "It's ok, he's with us...", and I just thought, "Shit, I've made a complete asshole of myself." I'm hoping Bono won't remember that…