BEHIND HOLLYWOOD LINES

From Dundalk to Tinseltown, Irish director John Moore has shown the moneymen that he can make big-buck action films with the best of them. He tells Donald Clarke about massaging egos and making movies on rugged locations

You may not have heard of him, but, after Jim Sheridan and (still, just about) Neil Jordan, John Moore - who looks disconcertingly like a youngish Brendan Grace - may be the most powerful Irish film director working today. Neither Behind Enemy Lines (Navy pilot Owen Wilson crashes in war-torn Bosnia) nor Flight of the Phoenix (commercial pilot Dennis Quaid crashes in arid Mongolia) made bucket-loads of money, but, in both cases, the Dundalk man proved himself able to successfully manage substantial budgets while cossetting the egos of some of the world's more volatile movie stars. Such safe hands do not stay idle long in Hollywood.

So what do they make of John Moore in Bel Air? They must be amused by the fact that, at 35, he still doesn't have a driving license.

"Oh God, they think that I am from Mars or worse," he cackles. "We never had a car growing up. We never had that thing they have in America: 'You're 16. Have a car.' But, you know, a strange thing happened in that I have started to like Los Angeles and I started to miss it when I go away. There is a homogeny of life in LA - the climate and so on - and if you start to enjoy that, you are maybe in trouble."

Moore made the journey from Louth to Los Angeles dizzyingly quickly. While studying at DIT, Rathmines, the budding film-maker joined forces with East Is East's Damien O'Donnell and the late Harry Purdue to form the partnership that later became Clingfilms. After a few years spent drying their socks on radiators and eating spaghetti hoops from the can, the boys suddenly found themselves in the midst of a commercial boom. "I grabbed that Celtic Tiger right by the tail," Moore says with characteristic brio.

While O'Donnell was winning prizes with his much-admired short 35-Aside, Moore began to develop a career as a commercials director. His big break came when he was offered an extravagant, bombastic spot for Sega. He was headhunted by Fox and, just barely into his thirties, found himself pointing his megaphone at Wilson and Gene Hackman in Behind Enemy Lines. He doesn't look like the sort of fellow who easily gets intimidated. But still.

"I can remember working as an assistant cameraman on a picture in Ireland with Morgan Freeman," he says (let's spare the director's blushes and not mention the title). "The director was a lovely sweet man. Morgan came on set and this guy explained, 'We are going to move past your reflection, then down here and finish on you'. Morgan just said, 'Why?' And the whole set froze. Any answer would have done, including 'I'm the director and I say so'. And from that day the guy turned into a small, grey man. It was like a Tyson knock-out."

Moore's point being that a director can get away with anything as long as he, at least, appears to know what he's doing. It helps that he has a special interest in the various concerns of his first two films. By the time he came to shoot Behind Enemy Lines, he had already visited Bosnia and he still maintains an interest in the aftermath of the Balkan conflict. "Look, I could stand most of the bad reviews the film got. But the ones that said 'this guy has obviously never left LA' really bugged me."

He is also obsessed with aircraft, gadgets and - conveniently, as things worked out - John McTiernan's Predator. John Davis, who used that Schwarzenegger vehicle to barge his way into the movie industry, was the producer of both Behind Enemy Lines and Flight of the Phoenix.

"Yeah, and John has the actual Predator in his office," Moore enthuses. "You are a huge fan and you go to meet him and there it is in the office. I met the Governor twice at John's birthday parties. I did the unforgiveable and got blind drunk and began quoting bits of Predator back at him, only to be greeted with a blank stare and the fixed grin he had been practising since he decided to run for election.

"It is very funny. I met him this year when he was the governor and he was much more controlled and together. Whereas two years previously he had been much more relaxed and easy-going."

You can see why Hollywood producers might believe in John Moore as a director of brash, mainstream pictures. A big man with an enthusiasm for big things - jet planes, war, invisible lizard-beasts from beyond the stars - he is never likely to be confused with Todd Solondz.

Flight of the Phoenix, a remake of a 1965 Robert Aldrich picture, whose title took the definite article, allows Moore to be manly all over the place. When Quaid's plane ditches in the desert, he enlists the help of his passengers - weird aircraft designer Giovanni Ribisi, cowardly nerd Hugh Laurie, plucky gender-ballast Miranda Otto - to knock together a Heath-Robinson flying-machine out of the debris.

The picture was filmed in Namibia and had its share of catastrophes, none more serious than the one that befell respected Irish cameraman Ciaran Barry.

Moore explains: "We had this model of the plane that had a 22-foot wingspan and weighed about 800 kilograms and we were propelling it at 80 miles-per-hour. We had a camera at one end and the idea was the camera would smash into the sand dune and stop short. The thing was so well built that, when it hit the dune, it went straight through like a bullet."

Barry was encased in a hide - a protective structure round the camera - but the plane smashed it to pieces and hurtled straight into the unfortunate operator.

"It broke both his legs. And it broke his tibula. There he is on the ground and he was lying very still, so I really thought he was dead. We are in the desert and it is getting dark. He came-to eventually and there are people trying to get morphine drips into him and so on." A terrifying ride to the nearest town followed. "It was the longest two hours of my life," Moore says solemnly.

He, nonetheless, remains committed to shooting on location.

"If you do a job in the studio you have your crew talking about the parking, about the football, about the ESB bills. When you have a crew on location, the first couple of weeks are hard and then it is all about the work.

"A couple of weeks in on this picture everyone realised theywere all in the same particular boat. One of the actors wanted to leave after the first few days. 'I cannot be here for the next four months,' he said. Well, there's the door mate. We will survive. Don't do anything in anger. He decided to stay. But we were lucky. Dennis is great crack. Giovanni is great crack."

Moore seems to take an interest in every aspect of his films' production. Indeed, one of his old colleagues suggested to me that John might be something of a workaholic. He owns up that, while visiting Ireland over Christmas, he successfully lobbied a contact in the advertising industry to secure him a gig there and then.

"I finally figured out what it is to be a workaholic," he muses. "People use that phrase in a self-congratulatory way. But I think it describes someone who has got such low self-esteem that, when not working, they lose definition. What is the statute of limitations between being a director and being just an ordinary bloke? Is it 50 days of not working? How long do you have to be not working before you turn back into an ordinary bloke?"

He has just described a concern of all self-employed people. "I like to work because I fear that lack of definition. Directors are awful people - horrible, diseased, stressed-out people. I was never very fond of them when I was working for them."

Has his attitude changed since he has met more people in the profession? "I met Tony Scott and I thought he is a great bloke." Tony Scott? The cigar-chomping director of Top Gun? Really? "He was fantastic. But you look at his background. He comes from photography and he therefore has a craft. I am resentful of directors who didn't do anything before receiving the esteem that comes with this job."

Though Moore is in discussions to make yet another get-me-out-of-here thriller - The Last Mission sees an ex-Navy SEAL commander being taken hostage in the Philippines - he is desperate to develop a script focussing on the US army's assault on Falluja. Given the opportunity, he displays an extraordinary knowledge of that grim episode in the recent Gulf War.

"This is the Tet Offensive of that war. I have talked to a few reporters and one guy in particular who had the ignominious honour of being the first reporter in Saddam's spider hole. What struck me most was that 75 percent of marines fighting there were Hispanic-American, and I think a lot of them thought, if we do this we will get our citizenship and that's that.

"There is also a photograph that is very powerful. It is this image of a group of Marines and they have video cameras on their helmets. Their company commander is blocks away watching it all on television. They are all terrified and just over there is a 14-year-old Iraqi in Adidas sweat pants with an AK-47."

It could be a spectacular film. But, equally, it sounds like the kind of project that scares major studios to death. "Well yes. What am I going to do? Kick in the door and say you have had your schlock from me. Here is Faluja."

Despite playing the Hollywood game effectively, John Moore still sounds rather equivocal about the movie business. What did he mean, I wonder, when he said earlier that feeling at home in LA rather worries him? "You become less Erm, well, you just become less. You are not talking with people about politics or other things that matter. You are letting opinions go by that you shouldn't. You are nodding at people. Listening to stupid people because they are important. Rolling with the punches a little too much. And that is because there is fancy food and the view from your house is too good."

Oh dear. Do they still welcome him home in Dundalk or does he now reek too strongly of Rodeo Drive? "Oh, they are all still very nice to me," he laughs. "If it all stopped now, I still got one great thing out of it: I got my mother to LA for the premiere. And Dennis Quaid, because he is a gentleman, said, 'Is this your mother?' And he put his arm around her and we got a big snap of him and her together. They published it in the Dundalk Argus.

"My mother will never have to buy a drink again. That was really it."

Flight of the Phoenix opens today.