Dreaming in flickering pictures

The question "who wants to write and direct movies?" is almost as redundant as "who wants to be a millionaire?" That's why 130 people have gathered for "Film-Making in Ireland", a day-long seminar run by the Department of Journalism at Colaiste Dhulaigh in Coolock.

We have come from all corners of the country to gather at 9.30 a.m. on a freezing, windswept, rain-lashed Saturday morning. From teenagers to pensioners, film students to punters, we're here to learn how it's done from the likes of Damien O'Donnell, director of the BAFTA-award winning East is East and playwright Aodhan Madden, who wrote the screenplay for Night Train.

In the early 1980s, Damien O'Donnell attended Chanel College nearby (Conor McPherson was a fellow student) and, when he was in fifth year, he came to do a night course in film and TV production at Colaiste Dhulaigh, returning post-Leaving Cert to do the Media Production course (there are several others on offer, including Multimedia, Animation and Film Production). Perhaps our presence in O'Donnell's hatching ground will bring some good fortune our way too. And at a snip - the day-long session only costs £30.

O'Donnell appears out of the rain, wearing what seems to be the film uniform of black jeans and a black leather jacket. I make a mental note to myself that if I want to get serious about this film business, I'll have to change my dress style. He gives us an important tip: never under-estimate yourself.

East is East was originally a stage play by Ayub Khan Din about a Muslim Indian who marries out in Manchester and then tries to impose strict Muslim codes on his wayward mixed-race offspring. When O'Donnell received his invitation to direct the film, he had "a crisis of confidence", so he sent off a fax declining the offer.

"Then I went to the pub and I thought about Alan Parker and The Commitments," he says. "It was the first time I had seen the part of Dublin I'm from depicted on the screen. How could Parker have done that? He's not from Dublin. I realised my only responsibility in East is East would be to tell the story as entertainingly as possible, just like Parker did. When I went back my fax saying "no" to the offer of the film was stuck in the machine. It had never gone through. So I wrote a 20-page proposal and faxed that off instead."

Life isn't a hassle-free ego trip when you're a movie director, we learn to our chagrin. "Making a full-length film with all the extra time and money that involves, you think you can do anything you want," O'Donnell continues. "But film is so big and expensive, you have to make compromises from the word go. The bigger the crew, the slower everything is. To film just eight or 10 minutes can take hours to set up. "We filmed East is East for 10 weeks, but it only amounted to two weeks of actual filming. And during those two weeks it rained every single day. The one day it didn't rain was the day we needed rain. And we had a Rolls Royce that kept breaking down." Troubles indeed.

O'Donnell is unimpressed by the quality of film scripts he is receiving and wants to write his own, so he is adapting Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth for the screen. "I used to think winning a BAFTA would mean I'd get better scripts, but no, I still get the bad scripts - and now I get them sooner," he jokes.

In his opinion, the reason Gladiator didn't work is that when filming started, the original script had been cut to 40 pages. "The script was so bad it had to be cut and rewritten at the same time as they were filming," he says. As if on cue, 30 of us go trundling off to a seminar on "Writing for the Screen" with Aodhan Madden, telling ourselves that if Gladiator got into trouble over a shortage of good scriptwriters, the industry is clearly crying out for new blood like ours. I note with satisfaction that Madden began his writing life as a journalist with The Irish Press: living proof that a nose for one kind of story can start sniffing in a new direction.

"You have all had your own tragedies and adventures, your own unique journey," Madden says. Oops, this is beginning to sound like group therapy. But no, Madden is psyching us up to a point at which, instead of beating ourselves over the head with fears about our lack of originality, we begin to believe that we all have a unique way of writing.

That's all very well, but I only get interested when he starts revealing the inspiration behind Night Train: a former colleague of his, a journalist, who gave up the drink and became obsessed with model railways instead. Madden went to visit him in two rented rooms he had converted to accommodate an intricate model train system. Downstairs lived the landlady with her middle-aged daughter. He realised he had a story on his hands, but one which was too visually complex to put on the stage. He then spent five years "of heartbreak and redrafting".

"When I first got the idea to write Night Train, it was in the mid-1980s, when there was no idea of an indigenous Irish film industry, no Neil Jordan/Jim Sheridan success story. I didn't even know how a film was made," he says.

After many approaches and false starts, he attracted a team of director John Lynch and producer Tristan Lynch (John's son), and the actor John Hurt. Hurt played the lead. The part of the landlady's middle-aged daughter, with whom the train fanatic falls in love, was taken by Brenda Blethyn. The film was shot in Dublin and Venice and on the Orient Express.

His next project, entitled Skerries, will start shooting next April. "Apparently George Clooney is reading the script and likes it. If he goes for the part, I'll have to be put in a padded cell for a week," he says.

Clooney would play a Hungarian immigrant who, having left Hungary after the failed uprising in 1956, finds himself in Skerries in 1962, embroiled in an affair with a Dublin woman, a character based on Madden's aunt.

"It's about a young boy who is going through the pain of growing up and finding out the truth of his nearest and dearest," he explains. "The idea began as a short story I wrote, set in 1962, in Skerries, where I spent my childhood summers." So perhaps what he said about each of us having his own unique journey does bear fruit after all . . .

The day barrels on, with a talk by laconic film-maker Tom Hall, who is writing a comedy series for BBC Northern Ireland entitled Bachelors Walk. Hall makes getting started sound ridiculously easy.

"Whatever I expected out of film school I didn't get, so I set up a production company with a friend," he says. "We lived at home and borrowed our mothers' cars. We made a film with four characters set in Dublin over a weekend, using friends of ours who were actors. It was an unusual story, about groovy characters who hang out in jazz clubs. We asked the Irish Film Board for money to finish the film and they gave it to us."

The result? November Park, which got an Irish Times Film of the Year nomination. For those with doubts that Hall's luck will ever come their way, Robert J. Quinn gives step-by-step instructions on how to make a short film, from finding an idea to writing the script and raising the finance. He shows us two shorts he made, The Black Suit (a witty six-minute black-and-white mood piece made for £10,000), and A Basket Full of Wallpaper, a 26 minute "Short Cuts" project based on a story by Colum McCann (budget: £60,000).

At the end of the day, we streel out into a landscape now immortalised in The Commitments and The Snapper, swelled with notions of our own potential. All that lies between us and immortality is that same old daunting hurdle: the blank page.