The Irish film industry is a notoriously difficult environment to work in, but one couple seems to be making a singular success of it, writes Donald Clarke
If you were setting out to write a state-of-the-nation novel about thrusting, self-confident Ireland you might find yourself creating a pair of characters like David Gleeson and Nathalie Lichtenthaeler. Their sleek exteriors offer clean, reflective surfaces in which to admire our modernity. They have impressively glamorous professions: Gleeson is a director and writer of feature films; Lichtenthaeler is his producer. And, most importantly, they have, to use a phrase popular in Hollywood, intriguing back stories. Gleeson, the scion of a cinema-owning dynasty who grew up in Co Limerick, spent his teenage afternoons operating the projectors for the family business. After some years working on North Sea oil rigs he made his way to New York, where he enrolled in a film course. There he met Lichtenthaeler, a young German hoping to pursue a career as a producer. The two subsequently married and have remained personally and professionally entwined ever since.
"We are just film buffs," Gleeson says. "We met at film school. When we go out socially we go to the movies. I think that is why we have been successful. We are in a business meeting 24/7. As a result of always being in that meeting we can agree things in a day that might take a more conventional producer and director weeks and weeks." While further developing your state-of-the-nation novel you might feel inclined to have the fictional couple produce a film about some pressing issue of the day. Immigration, perhaps. Sure enough, Gleeson's second feature, his follow-up to 2003's Cowboys & Angels, focuses on the trials of a troubled individual recently arrived from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Featuring a strong central performance by the French actor Eriq Ebouaney, The Front Line sees its hero, a security guard at a Dublin bank, being blackmailed into robbery by a gang of borderline-deranged hoodlums.
Gleeson was inspired to write the film by a brief glimpse of an African security guard outside a bank. "I was driving past when I saw this guy," he says. "He looked very proud. I thought that any moment somebody was going to come along and call the poor guy a black bastard and wipe the smile off his face. I thought of him as this naive African, and then I suddenly thought: what if he isn't such a naive African? This is something I could write about."
Pondering the subject matter, Gleeson began, perhaps surprisingly, to identify with his potential protagonist. "I always thought of myself as an outsider," he says. "Maybe that was because I was up in the projection room when my mates were out in nightclubs. Maybe just a lot of creative types feel that way. We had also lived in Germany for a while, and I didn't speak German for the first few years. In that position you really can feel that the whole of society is against you."
The couple, who now have three children, may live by the sea in comfortable Malahide, but Lichtenthaeler must, I imagine, still feel somewhat like an outsider herself. "I do sometimes, yeah," she says. "I sometimes feel, even though it's Europe and I am white, that it's quite a different culture. I have lived abroad in France and the States as a single woman. But it's different when you move with your whole family and your husband. You arrive into a very different social environment. I haven't made that many friends. I miss my friends. I miss my family. But I do love it here. People are very warm."
There have, so far, been surprisingly few attempts by Irish writers to engage with the immigrant experience. Those stories that have been told have tended - properly, you might think - to be hypercautious in their representations of the new communities. The Front Line, more audaciously, dares to suppose an African criminal underworld in Dublin. Indeed, the picture begins with a police officer (played by the reliably solemn Gerard McSorley) explaining that "west Africans" will, in a few years, control the drugs trade. This came as news to me.
"That comes from an article that Paul Williams wrote for the Sunday World," Gleeson says. "That is where I was getting my research from. I have never consulted him about it. So I hope his sources are good. It said west Africans would soon be in control of the drugs. Whether that has come to pass I don't know. But there is a considerable criminal network in the west African community, particularly the Nigerian community."
The Front Line is, it must be stressed, generous and humane in its depiction of its principal characters. And the vilest personalities in the film are the Irish criminals. But Gleeson must have speculated that he might get in some trouble for envisioning the existence of an African mafia.
"Maybe I will get my ass kicked. Maybe you will kick my ass," he says, laughing. "It is a fact of life that every immigrant community brings in a criminal community. It happened with the Italian immigrants in the United States. It happened with Irish immigrants in the United States. The good man is represented by our main character. He is a profoundly good man."
Even in the current economic climate, it remains quite an achievement to finance an Irish feature film. Yet Lichtenthaeler has seen two of her productions make it into cinemas in just three years. The fact that Cowboys & Angels - which saw a shy Limerick boy mature through friendship with his gay roommate - was modestly successful in several territories must have reassured financiers that the couple were reliable folk.
"I was surprised by the way it was embraced in America," Gleeson admits. "I was startled by how gay audiences embraced it in particular. I was pleased, of course. I didn't necessarily see it as a gay film. But I was pleased, because they are a wealthy audience. The film ended up having great longevity on DVD. It was almost as if I had made a film in a different genre to what I had intended."
Lichtenthaeler's achievement in raising the budget for The Front Line is all the more impressive when you take into account that she gave birth during the process. It sounds as if she was juggling figures right up until the point of delivery.
"I love having children and I love movies. They are my two passions," she says. "I didn't complain when, the night before delivery, I was still reading contracts from sales agents. And then, when I came out of hospital, the first call I got on my mobile was from Hollywood, from Warner Independent, who were interested in the film. I find all that fun."
Still, it must be a worrying business, raising a family while working in the precarious Irish film industry. Lichtenthaeler and Gleeson may look flash and glamorous, but they don't have the security enjoyed by their less suave neighbours in, say, the banking sector. "Before we moved back here we had trouble making do," Gleeson says. "When we were living in Germany we were lucky that they had a very strong welfare state and Nathalie's parents were very helpful. One advantage, though, is that when you, as husband and wife, are director and producer all the money comes to the same source. We are reasonably comfortable now."
Now that Gleeson has an agent in Los Angeles and has two commercially released features under his belt, he feels reasonably confident that he will never have to take up being a projectionist again. And yet nothing is certain in the business. "All it takes is for the Government to change their policy towards film finance or for the Celtic Tiger to end and we are all out of a job," he says.
Let's not think of that. Gleeson and Lichtenthaeler, heroes of our imaginary novel, have done an impressive job of turning themselves into their own pocket film studio. They are already planning their next feature - inspired by David's years on the rigs - and appear to be having a whale of a time.
"Well, what's that phrase?" Gleeson says, smiling. "If you find a job you like, then you'll never have to work again. That describes my position pretty well."
The Front Line is on general release and is preceded by George, a 13-minute short film written and directed by John Butler and Rory Bresnihan.