The fine art of film writing and other stories

The West Cork Literary Festival's more casual approach pays dividends, writes Brian O'Connell, but don't mention the drugs.

A literary invasion commandeered Bantry at the weekend, with the 10th annual West Cork Literary Festival offering a quietly unassuming and casually instructive programme of events. While it may never scale the heights of Listowel Writers' Week, the west Cork festival is content to steer its own course, with informality and access to authors, the stars by which it navigates.

But other events in Bantry last week threatened to steal the limelight, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by opening speaker Frank Delaney, who arrived from the US. "My phone has been hopping all week with calls from Upper West Side friends asking to bring back a little something from my visit," cracked Delaney. The slightly nervous ripples of laughter suggested that the majority of attendees were quite happy to switch the focus from narcotics to the novella. Yet it wasn't an entirely sober affair. "You don't have to drink wine sensibly here," pitched in festival director Clem Cairns, and indeed they didn't, as the opening stretched well into the morning and raucous academic debate greeted the first catch of the day.

Kicking off the festival proper on Monday morning was Eoin McNamee, who drew a respectable crowd to the Bantry Bookshop to hear him read his short story North of Riga, published in the Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2006/07. McNamee chiselled a fascinating story of violent realism from the cultural tensions of his locale. Yet what made his tale distinctive was its less obvious points of reference, lent authenticity by personal observation.

By way of introducing the story, McNamee relayed a recent development in community relations in his hometown of Kilkeel, Co Down, where "Catholics and Protestants joined forces against the newly arrived Latvian population", and, as McNamee wryly remarked, "this was seen as a breakthrough in community relations". He wasn't afraid to mix it up either, choosing to read from his latest book, 12:23, which succeeds in constructing a fictional narrative around the death of Diana Spencer in Paris a decade ago. "Being a novelist can be a ruthless business," he told us, "especially when dealing with other people's lives. Yet you have a duty."

The previous night, a packed library was on hand to witness Kevin Myers reading from Watching the Door, A Memoir 1971-1978, which fuses personal and political observations of the Troubles. "The last time I did one of these," he recalled, "was at Blanchardstown when two people turned up. And both of them had got the wrong date." Reading from descriptions of his early days in Belfast, he recalled how he was often mistaken for an undercover SAS officer - which would have been fine, had he not been accompanying IRA members at the time.There was quite a cinematic feel to the passages read, and news that Hollywood has expressed some interest in adapting the memoirs came as little surprise.

Someone who knows all about deal-making in Tinseltown is screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, whose adaptation of John Le Carré's book The Constant Gardenerhas won him numerous awards. Caine steered the first of many workshops on offer throughout the week, outlining the most important aspects of any script in three words - structure, structure, structure. "The five-act structure is gone," he told us, "and modern cinema is dominated by shorter scenes and more of them."

Caine is currently writing a screenplay for his friend "Dickie" Attenborough, and for any budding screenwriters wondering how to introduce characters into a scene, he imparted his golden rule - "characters should enter late and leave early; simple as that".

By way of highlighting the way things should be between a screenwriter and a production, he relayed an incident from the making of The Constant Gardener. During a lunch break from filming, Ralph Fiennes was studying the script alone and called Caine over. Pointing to a passage in the text, he asked, "What am I thinking here?" That, said Caine, is how the screenwriter/production relationship should ideally operate.

"There has never been a worse time to be a screenwriter," he noted. "The reality is that the industry is dominated by money providers who are obsessed with demographics, with the majority of films aimed at the 15-30 age groups." Caine argued that writers don't seem to be allowed a vision in the mainstream of modern cinema.

Following probing from the dedicated and informed attendees (including a relaxed Christy Moore), Caine went on to give a scathing assessment of the film Inside I'm Dancing, which he wrote the screenplay for. "On a scale of one to 10, where one is absolutely rubbish and 10 is magnificent, I would give the end result on that film somewhere around 5.5," he said. "Without the director, Damien O'Donnell, I think it could have come in round the seven or 7.5. He just wouldn't see that film as I saw it. In the end, I couldn't control him and the studio backed him over me. The American Academy called and asked me for a copy of the screenplay and I had to ask which one? Because there's the one that was filmed and there's the one I wrote."

Despite the somewhat pessimistic outlook, Caine held out some hope for the future of cinema and gave some solid advice to writers. "Every year about 50 good movies get made. I don't know how it happens, given my experience of the industry, but it does. My advice to screenwriters out there though would be that if your story lends itself to a novel, then write it as a novel, get it published and adapt it after, if necessary."

The bottom line for Caine though was this: "If God came down from high and offered me half the talent I have for twice the luck, I'd take it every time."

Other highlights were Clair Wills's studied assessment of the literary and cultural response from Ireland's writers during the second World War, which was relayed during a public discussion with freelance journalist John Draper. Jeanette Winterson's only Irish appearance this year didn't disappoint, with a wide ranging and passionate talk and a confession that her "religious and Pentecostal mother told [ her] that the devil had led her parents to the wrong crib". Sticking with the religious theme, Frank Delaney's lecture, delivered from the pulpit of St Brendan's Church, came across too much like a well-rehearsed sermon of dated literary anecdotes, dusted off and adapted for the occasion.

Later on Monday evening, the festival club colonised the Organico Cafe for the noble pursuit of "read dating", which wrapped up an engaging first day. For the uninitiated, read dating involves moving around a room and discussing your favourite book with a stranger, who in turn talks about their preferences, within the four-minute timeframe. At the end, pairings are made based on stated preferences, and the hope is that no one is left on the shelf.