Famous direc­tors who fell in love with Ireland

“When I came here to Wick­low in Ire­land, 22 years ago,” begins John Boor­man in I Dreamt I Woke Up, his ​‘iron­ic dis­ser­ta­tion on life and death’ for the BBC, ​“I felt I’d come to a place that had always exist­ed in my imag­i­na­tion. That here I could some­how come to myself at last. Is that what home is? Find­ing in the out­er world a place that coin­cides with an inner landscape?”

Boor­man came to Ire­land in 1969 to com­plete post-pro­duc­tion on his fourth fea­ture, Leo the Last, impetu­ous­ly plung­ing his sav­ings into a late-Geor­gian Church of Ire­land rec­to­ry at Annamoe that he’s called home ever since. ​“It felt like the set­ting for the Arthuri­an leg­end,” he wrote in his 2003 mem­oir ​‘Adven­tures of a Sub­ur­ban Boy’, speak­ing of a land­scape that inspired an abort­ed stab at The Lord of the Rings, a sin­gu­lar sci-fi odd­i­ty in 1974’s Zardoz and the cul­mi­na­tion of his life­long obses­sion with the grail mythol­o­gy in 1981’s Excalibur.

Both the mem­oir and I Dreamt I Woke Up are steeped in Boorman’s affec­tion for the spir­i­tu­al, the pagan­is­tic and the pre-his­tor­i­cal; a deep acknowl­edge­ment of his adopt­ed land’s kin­dling of the cre­ative process. ​“The soft, fem­i­nine folds of the hills, the bleak bogs, the ancient oak woods, the black lakes, the urgent streams… It was har­mo­nious. It fit­ted… I belonged at last.”

Of course, Boor­man wasn’t the first film­mak­er to be entranced by the Emer­ald Isle. In the sum­mer of 1931, a plump 16-year-old boy atop a don­key named Sheeog could be found roam­ing the Con­nemara wilds. By Octo­ber, he’d found his way to Dublin, talked his way into the com­pa­ny of the Gate The­atre and intro­duced the the­atri­cal estab­lish­ment to a cer­tain Orson Welles.

“I was from Amer­i­ca,” Welles told the direc­tor and film his­to­ri­an Peter Bog­danovich in 1969, ​“and in Ire­land, back in those dis­tant days, any­thing Amer­i­can was pos­si­ble, how­ev­er unlike­ly. I informed the direc­tors of the Gate The­atre that I was that same Welles they must have read about. Just for the lark of it, I told them I’d enjoy the expe­ri­ence of play­ing with their com­pa­ny for a play or two – that is, if any lead­ing roles were avail­able… [They] start­ed me off with as juicy a prin­ci­pal part as any griz­zled vet­er­an could ask for, in ​‘Jew Süss’. So that’s how I began – right at the top. I’ve been work­ing my way down ever since.”

The play was rap­tur­ous­ly received, and Welles stayed on at the Gate for a brief time, play­ing small­er roles before return­ing to New York the fol­low­ing year. It wasn’t until Jan­u­ary 1952 – more than a decade after Cit­i­zen Kane – that Welles final­ly got to make a film in Ire­land. A break in the edit­ing of Oth­el­lo afford­ed him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to reunite with his Gate The­atre men­tors, Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir (also his Iago) to star in the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed short, Return to Glennascaul.

Welles’ arrival in Dublin was hard­ly a cel­e­bra­to­ry home­com­ing. His vis­it to the Gate’s pro­duc­tion of Tol­ka Row was marred by a mob of scream­ing pro­tes­tors organ­ised by the Catholic Cin­e­ma and The­atre Patron’s Asso­ci­a­tion, plac­ards held aloft labelling him a com­mu­nist. His waves to the demon­stra­tors from the the­atre win­dows did lit­tle to quell the mood, and after a quick speech onstage he legged it down the fire escape.

The film itself proved much more suc­cess­ful. Run­ning at a mere 23 min­utes, it’s a wit­ty ghost sto­ry that, despite being direct­ed by Hilton Edwards, feels every bit a part of Welles’ work. The boy wonder’s sense of mis­chief – of meta-nar­ra­tive inven­tion – is present from the open­ing scene, as Welles breaks from film­ing Oth­el­lo to intro­duce the tale. Nat­u­ral­ly, he pro­ceeds to nar­rate and insert him­self into book­end­ing scenes, cement­ing a through-line from his ear­ly radio plays to the quizzi­cal nar­ra­tive con­cerns of F for Fake. That the film even looks like one of his, how­ev­er, can’t be laid at Welles’ feet; it was shot by George Fleish­mann, a cam­era-oper­a­tor who – accord­ing to Simon Callow’s recent Welles biog­ra­phy – crash-land­ed on a recon­nais­sance mis­sion in 1942 and decid­ed to stay. Cam­era­men are as sus­cep­ti­ble as direc­tors, it seems, to the country’s charms.

“I love Ire­land,” remarked Welles in 1984, ​“I love Irish lit­er­a­ture, I love every­thing they do. But the Irish-Amer­i­cans have invent­ed an imi­ta­tion Ire­land which is unspeak­able. The wearin’ o’ the green. Oh my God! To vom­it!” One has to assume that Welles’ con­tempt for the Amer­i­can­i­sa­tion of the state­side Irish dias­po­ra didn’t extend to that most famous of Irish-Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly giv­en the 1967 inter­view with Play­boy mag­a­zine in which he declared that the film­mak­ers who appealed to him most were the ​“old Mas­ters – by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”

In his 2001 biog­ra­phy ​‘Search­ing for John Ford’ Joseph McBride notes that, ​“The Irish pro­duc­er Charles Fitzsi­mons felt that Ford ​‘had one great emo­tion­al tragedy in his life… that he hadn’t been born in Ire­land.’” A deeply-root­ed roman­ti­cism towards his par­ents’ home­land suf­fus­es the cin­e­ma of John Ford, echo­ing far beyond those shot or set in Ire­land itself. His fam­i­ly lin­eage in the coun­try can be traced back to the year 350 (Ford him­self was born to first-gen­er­a­tion émi­gré par­ents in Port­land, Maine in 1894).

If his prodi­gious knack for per­son­al myth-mak­ing com­pli­cates the task of pars­ing details from his own Irish adven­tures (not least when it comes to a 1921 trip in sup­port of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary cause), one need only look at the films – from 1926’s The Sham­rock Hand­i­cap to 1965’s Young Cas­sidy – for vivid reflec­tions of the child­hood vis­its with his father described by McBride: ​“John came away with a deep emo­tion­al attach­ment to Ire­land… ful­ly aware of the pic­to­r­i­al splen­dour of the land­scape and its con­nec­tions with the lives of ordi­nary peo­ple. As Orson Welles once said of him, ​‘John Ford knows what the earth was made of.’”

Ford’s Irish films tack­le ques­tions of moder­ni­ty and tra­di­tion, of city and rur­al liv­ing, pay­ing homage to a lit­er­ary and the­atri­cal her­itage both in con­cept and pro­duc­tion to vary­ing degrees of suc­cess. The direc­tor was turned down by Sean O’Casey for his 1935 film The Informer, hav­ing asked the great Irish play­wright to tack­le the screen­play. The rela­tion­ship hard­ly improved with Ford’s screen adap­ta­tion of O’Casey’s con­tro­ver­sial play ​‘The Plough and the Stars’ the fol­low­ing year, as mount­ing stu­dio inter­fer­ence in every­thing from cast­ing to the final cut alien­at­ed both author and filmmaker.

The play caused riots at its Dublin pre­mière in 1926, nation­al­ists furi­ous at its rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the 1916 rebel­lion – events drama­tised in Ford’s 1965 account of O’Casey’s life, Young Cas­sidy. Prob­lems fol­lowed the direc­tor into that pro­duc­tion too, ill­ness allow­ing him to com­plete a mere 13 days of the shoot before he was replaced by Jack Cardiff.

More suc­cess­ful artis­ti­cal­ly – if dou­bly prob­lem­at­ic polit­i­cal­ly – was Ford’s 1957 port­man­teau film, The Ris­ing of the Moon. Of the three short lit­er­ary adap­ta­tions that make up the film, it was the third (titled ​‘1921’) that saw it pulled from dis­tri­b­u­tion, its updat­ing of Lady Gregory’s 1907 play to the Black and Tan wars viewed as a poten­tial inciter of vio­lence. The film was made under the ban­ner of Four Provinces Films, a new pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny on whose board Ford served, the inten­tion being to bring about a ful­ly indige­nous film indus­try. ​“In the last few decades our writ­ers and actors have been leav­ing our shores,” said Ford, ​“Why should they have to go? Why can’t we keep them at home? If this film is a suc­cess it will ush­er in an era in which our exiled artists will be glad to come home and work for an Irish film indus­try.” The film flopped, along with the director’s indus­tri­ous dream.

Fifty years on, it’s Ford’s 1954 film The Qui­et Man that stands as the director’s most vivid por­trait of a time­less Ire­land bathed in a rich nos­tal­gic hue. Its sto­ry of an Irish-American’s return to the land of his father for­goes nat­u­ral­ism for a height­ened sense of fan­tas­tic roman­ti­cism, depict­ing an Ire­land that bears lit­tle rela­tion to its real-world coun­ter­part but one forged out of tra­di­tion and mem­o­ry. Some iffy sex­u­al pol­i­tics aside, the film is mas­ter­ful­ly shot and direct­ed; the pas­sion for the land and cul­ture expressed by John Wayne’s Sean Thorn­ton. Ford re-staged a horse race seen in his 1928 silent film, Hangman’s House, and end­ed it with one of cinema’s most endur­ing bouts of fisticuffs. He may (at best) be trad­ing in arche­type or (at worst) stereo­type, but Ford’s endur­ing affec­tion for ​“the only place I have found peace” ensures that it tran­scends its rose-tint­ed glow.

Oth­er major film­mak­ers were sim­i­lar­ly pow­er­less to resist an Irish sojourn. Dou­glas Sirk filmed his Rock Hud­son-star­ring tale of high­way pira­cy, Cap­tain Light­foot, there in 1955; a formalist’s dream of colour and cos­tume typ­i­cal­ly more inter­est­ed in buck­les than swash. The mak­ing of David Lean’s 70mm epic, Ryan’s Daugh­ter in Din­gle, is lov­ing­ly recount­ed in the doc­u­men­tary, A Bit of a Fil­lum – a bit­ter­sweet expe­ri­ence for Lean giv­en the crit­i­cal maul­ing it received, which kept him away from the cam­era for 14 years.

It should come as no sur­prise that John Hus­ton begins his reflec­tions on Ire­land in his 1990 auto­bi­og­ra­phy with an appre­ci­a­tion of the charms of Irish women, before set­tling into numer­ous pages on the thrill of fox hunt­ing. Hus­ton bought his estate at St Cler­ans in the ear­ly ​’60s, final­ly becom­ing an Irish cit­i­zen in 1964, an hon­orary doc­tor­ate from Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty bestowed on him: ​“Although my artis­tic con­tri­bu­tions to the world were extolled, this occa­sion was also tinged with a bit of Irish provin­cial­ism: ​‘Recent­ly [Hus­ton] has become an Irish cit­i­zen and lives in Gal­way, where, they say, the local fox­es have learned to fear his prowess as a hunter… Lots of peo­ple can write, direct and act in films, but few can sit well an Irish hunter.”

Hus­ton retooled the end­ing of his 1963 film The List of Adri­an Mes­sen­ger in order to shoot an extend­ed fox hunt on his estate, a ter­rif­ic set-piece in a strange film that recalls the horse-wran­gling sequence of The Mis­fits. He con­tin­ued to film in and around St Cleans through the late ​’60s and ear­ly ​’70s, although lit­tle of note beyond a pair of nifty chase sequences with Paul New­man in 1973’s The Mack­in­tosh Man.

More inter­est­ing­ly, the pro­duc­tion of his mar­vel­lous 1956 adap­ta­tion of ​‘Moby Dick’ com­plete­ly took over the town of Youghal, near Cork, which served as a stand-in for the har­bour of New Bed­ford. All the busi­ness­es in town agreed for their fronts to be set-dressed to resem­ble New Eng­land, with the excep­tion of one pub­li­can who held out for more mon­ey. The whole town turned on him, boy­cotting his bar, before Hus­ton inter­vened: ​“I dropped by with a cou­ple of friends. It was emp­ty. The own­er recog­nised me, and I said, ​‘I’m sor­ry to hear what’s hap­pened to you.’ He shrugged. ​‘I had it com­ing. I was try­ing to get some­thing for noth­ing.’ Where but in Ire­land would you ever hear such an admission?”

Huston’s final love let­ter to his adopt­ed home also prove to be his swan song. In 1987 he released what amounts to the finest cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of James Joyce, The Dead, writ­ten by Houston’s son Tony and star­ring daugh­ter Anjel­i­ca. Joyce remains a writer of resilient resis­tance to the screen, with lit­tle in Huston’s visu­al style that would sug­gest the lucid moments of poignan­cy and grace that appear here. It’s a film dipped in a whiskied glow, a keen­ly felt minia­ture of cel­e­bra­tion and sub­tle pow­er – a dev­as­tat­ing mono­logue, a stair­way song – with a suit­ably Hus­ton­ian sense of doomed mas­culin­i­ty. The film ends with a pas­sage from Joyce, a mono­logue on death and tran­sience played out across snow-swept tableaux of that enchant­ed landscape:

“Snow is gen­er­al all over Ire­land, falling on every part of the dark cen­tral plain. From the tree­less hills, soft­ly upon the bog of Allen, and far­ther west­ward, soft­ly falling into the dark muti­nous Shan­non waves. One by one we’re all becom­ing shades. Bet­ter to pass bold­ly into that oth­er world in the full glo­ry of some pas­sion than fade and with­er dis­mal­ly with age…”