QUINN’S STORY

Bob Quinn is in the mood to talk. It isn’t just that his new film The Bishop’s Story is being released. In truth, he is generally optimistic about the current state of the nation – especially since the appointment of Michael D. Higgins as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.

“It gave us a lot of hope I can tell you. A very intelligent man in a position of power for a change, you know. And he has taken the bull by the horns and actually done things.

“Of course, he reinstituted the Film Board. But I actually regard the lifting of Section 31 as infinitely more important than the Film Board, Teilifís Na Gaelteachta, lifting the cap on RTE and so on,” Quinn elaborates. “I think Section 31 is the big block in our consciousness and psyche that has choked us in the past twenty years or so. I think the lifting of that is wonderful. I feel a breath of fresh air blowing through this country just since that was lifted.

“For instance there was one of these Declaration forums in Galway a few weeks ago and to be able to walk into that and not feel paranoid, not feel ‘Oh Jesus will they think I’m a Provo for going in’, ’cause that’s what we were taught over the past twenty years. We were terrorised that if people said anything vaguely understanding of the situation we were fucking Provos. This is the Independent line. Harris. Dunphy. That sick bunch of people. Conor Cruise who started it all. And we were going around quite afraid, nervous or careful. Careful, which is even worse. But now it’s great. It’s a lovely feeling.”

Bob’s new film, The Bishop’s Story, is really a completion of his earlier picture, Budawanny, but the resonances are wider now. What’s it about?

“It’s a story about a priest who becomes a Bishop and loses any belief he ever had, partly through the experience he had when he implicated a young one and tried to act responsibly and, then, also becoming institutionalised as a higher ecclesiastic. A combination of those two things made him end up as a shell of a man with no faith and in a kind of despair. That’s the story. What’s it about is more difficult.

“The resonances of it, I suppose, are that cinematically I’m tired of trashy cinema, blinding with sound and fury. I wanted to say something quietly. The quieter it is, the more I will listen. Although it’s not a silent film any more. I’ve made the dumb speak, as Donal McCann says, and I’ve made the actors speak in Connemara Irish.

“Also it’s about sex and whether you can do without it. And the relationship between man and woman because the whole thing is fraught nowadays. The whole thing has collapsed because the traditional relationship between men and women has broken up and what is going to replace it, we’re all in terror of. We don’t know. Not just men who are obviously shell-shocked by what’s happened to them. But I think a lot of women are pretty shell-shocked as well.

“They’re on the crest of a wave at the moment, d’y’know, but when the dust settles I think you’ll probably find that the women of a certain class will dominate women of another class just as men have been dominating men of an other class. I don’t actually see much difference between the way women behave and the way men behave in economic power or careers or anything. So it has an element of that in it I suppose.”

What has the reaction to the film been like, so far?

“I was talking to someone last night, who was disgusted. He came all the way down to Galway to see this (adopts brash exaggerated American advertiser’s accent) bran-new Cinemascope film and all he got was the old film finished. He felt cheated, you know, and I suppose I don’t blame him. Perhaps I should have explained more that it was simply a film which I’d left unfinished and which is finished now. With a difference. You can see it on a big screen now. In the internal story I’ve used the Irish language in a particular way to suggest words half-remembered, sounds half-remembered, a language in several senses of the word fading away into the past.

“If it works it works. You can talk all night saying what was intended and everything else but I’ve no idea. The audience last Saturday week seemed to be paying attention. I was there watching the audience. There was a man sitting in front of me and I thought of patting him on the back or saying to him ‘Listen, lighten up, it’s only a fucking auld film’. But, he was sitting in front of me, you know, and I saw his head going like that. (He angles his head severely, with a mock over-stern facial expression, somewhere to his right.) He kept on doing that. (Repeats the motion.) Then, suddenly, something that I hadn’t realised, I hadn’t heard. Somebody was opening a sweet bag over in the far aisle. And this was disturbing the person.

“On the one hand, I thought this is flattering. He wants actually to hear every single tiny sound in this film. There’s a lot of sound in the film. A lot of work has gone into the sound. And, on the other hand, I said look it, for fucks’ sake, if the film can’t survive a few sweet bags then you shouldn’t be in the business.

“But, naturally I didn’t. I was delighted with him. But they seemed to pay attention. I didn’t see too much shifting. I only saw one person getting up for a piss. That’s a very good sign. So I was quite satisfied. And I suppose the people who went there wanted to see it, were interested in it.

“I’d say the average run-of-the-mill film that we see is not taking any chances. It’s blasting us, you know. It’s saying stay on your feet because someone’s going to get stabbed next, or the music tells you that someone is going to get blasted, or kicked or somethin’ or someone’s going to fuck. I feel if I have any confidence left in the human race it’s that people still like to sit back and let somebody tell them something quietly and will listen properly or watch properly and it’s to that dimension in each of us that the film is addressed. I think it’s called reflective.

“That’s why I can’t imagine many teeny-boppers liking it,” he adds. “There’s no full frontals, you know. Who wants to see broken down bishops and priest talking about something that happened years ago and you can’t even see it? There’s not a tit in sight. Nobody says ‘Hey’. Nobody says ‘Lighten up!’ and nobody says ‘Make my day’”

Bob Quinn is obviously happy to have the film finished at last. Prompted by me, he dwells a little bit more on the kind of way in which the completion of Budawanny dragged.

“It was an albatross on my shoulder. It’s shot down, got rid of. So it’s great to have it finished. Great. Because it did niggle. It was the first film I’d never finished to my satisfaction. Really, in the last eight years I’ve only done small things, various documentaries and thing, you know, and it’s a bit of a cheat, I think, if you go and set off on something new without having finished the last thing.”

In spite of the fact that Bob Quinn’s film has its embryonic form in the earlier Budawanny, there are probably those who will still believe that it was based on the events of Casey and Annie Murphy. However, The Bishop’s Story is actually based on two stories which were written before the memorable forbidden fruits of 1992.

“The first story is Súil Le Breith by Padraig Standúin which was published about 1983, and the second one is 2016 AD which was published in about 1985. The first one is simply a straightforward story of ‘I’ve done it. I want to be a priest’ etc. The second one is, I think, a better book. It’s a journey. The culmination of the book is – to cut a long story short - that Orangemen come down and take over the GPO. It’s written by Padraig Standúin. A priest, you know. And all the youngsters are as they are now. All the undergraduates now are very reactionary and right-wing just like the Americans were ten years ago. And they’re all travelling to Dublin for this great kind of Eucharistic Congress but there’s this ancient, cancer-ridden ex-priest who is travelling alone, eatin’ with them and talkin’ with them and the state of the country is real drab and he also has an old friend in Maynooth who is a Bishop.

“This Bishop is the young priest of Súil Le Breith grown up. So I strung the two together. For Budawanny I actually wrote a monologue for the young priest becoming a bishop which then Peadar Lamb delivered. Did a great job in the circumstances but there was no irony in it. But now the irony has been restored.”

Is there a feeling that the original stories and even the film itself might be eclipsed by parallels with the Eamon Casey story?

“I think that’s possible but I doubt it actually. I think that word of mouth is very good, word of mouth is much more important than anything else. It’ll find its own level. It’ll have a life. A quiet life perhaps. I’ve made films a long time ago and I still hear the odd reaction. They have a life, you know, particularly I think if they’re made not simply to catch on to the immediate buck.

“I have absolutely no illusions about this film. No illusions whatsoever. I hope it’s a quiet film which will seep through the consciousness because there’s no other way. If you don’t get in behind the skull you’ve failed. If you can creep in behind the skull it has a life. It’s like being told a fairy tale when you’re a child and you remember certain scenes from it. Or you read a book. You might see a film and remember a scene from it. It’s that kind of object. That’s just the way I work.”

But Eamon Casey did, finally, give Bob Quinn a kind of inspiration . . .

“I thought what happened was hilarious and marvellous. Then when Seamus Deasy (cameraman for the film) rings me up and says you’ve got to finish the job, I suppose tied in with the enjoyment of the thing I said ‘Yeah, fuck it. Let’s do it’. In that sense it was a spark to finish it but the actual working out of what we did had nothing to do with Casey because, if you remember Budawanny you will see that most of the arguments that were made in that original turgid monologue that I forced Peadar to speak are contained in the discussion between these two characters.

“However, there’s a little thing at the end – I couldn’t resist it – when the young priest asks what was it, a boy or a girl. ‘Ah child’, replies the older ecclesiastic, ‘that’s another story’.”