We’re not in Ardee any more: meet the Irish director of the Angry Birds Movie

When, a little over a year ago, the film version of 50 Shades of Grey emerged, more than a few reports swooned at the intelligence that EL James's smutty novel had sold 125 million copies. That certainly put pressure on the film-makers. Ha! Fergal Reilly, a hugely experienced animator from the great county of Louth, is about to make his feature debut with a project based on source material acquired by three billion users.

“Did I say ‘six billion’?” he corrects himself. “I meant ‘three’. I doubled it there.”

Yes, quite right. Angry Birds games have been downloaded only three billion times. (To put that in perspective, the population of China is about 1.4 billion.) David Cameron, Salman Rushdie and Dick Cheney have played the game.

"David Maisel, the man who first decided to bring the property to Hollywood, saw his 80-year-old mother playing the game," Reilly says. "As the producer of Hulk and Iron Man, he thought: there's something here; we have something that can appeal to my elderly mom and my young neighbour."

You can see the sense in this. The game has obvious brand recognition. And those birds – eternally at war with unfortunate pigs – are also funny in themselves. Look how annoyed they all seem. There are definitely the makings of an amusing animation here.

“The characters in the game don’t really have a personality,” says Reilly. “They have traits. The yellow triangular bird goes fast. The red one is just the standard bird. The black one blows up. The trick was how to create characters and a world that would relate with audiences. I found it more freeing than stifling to work in that world.”

Millions will surely (ahem) flock to see how the translation has worked out. How did Reilly – raised just outside Ardee – find himself at the helm of an entertainment juggernaut?

He always enjoyed drawing. As a kid in the 1970s, he sucked up contemporaneous comics and animated TV shows. He was educated at the famously posh Gormanston College in Co Meath. After doing the sums, we conclude that he must have been there at about the same time as Rory O’Neill, then not yet Panti Bliss.

“He was a year ahead of me,” he says. “And also Mick O’Hara, who went on to create Zig and Zag. It was a boarding school. Its philosophy was based on the classics. And religion. The only artist I could find who had come out of there in the previous 30 years was Jim Fitzpatrick. Who was this guy? Man, this guy can draw! Rory and I would always get thrown the art projects to do.”

Interestingly, O’Neill, O’Hara and Reilly all ended up in Dún Laoghaire College of Art and Design. Reilly initially studied graphic design, but always suspected that he didn’t want to spend his life “pushing type around reports for banks”. When he was still at college, David Brain, who had been working with Walt Disney since the 1960s, rode into town looking for artists to transform into animators.

“He looked at my work and said: ‘You don’t want to be a graphic designer. Do you? If you get a brief from a bank, you start throwing acid at the paper and you’re throwing sawdust over your letters. You’re looking for an illustrative solution. Would you like to try animation?’ ”

Escape to LA

Scarcely able to believe his good fortune, Reilly was spirited to Los Angeles, where he found himself working on features such as The Prince and the Pauper and The Rescuers Down Under. He also worked on commercials such as the famous Fido Dido campaign for 7 Up. What happened next will ring bells for many who travelled to the US in those years. Reilly reckoned he would go home, finish college and then come back to the US.

"That didn't happen because I had no visa," he says. "Remember those days? I had a special visa when I went over the first time. But then I couldn't get back." It sounds like the Angela's Ashes of pre-millennial animation.

"I decided to go and work in Europe for a while and then I got the Morrison Visa. Then a friend, Nick Ryan, sent me a clipping from The Irish Times saying that Warner Brothers were setting up an animation studio in Dublin. That never happened, but I phoned them up and asked if they might be interested in an animator. They said: 'Come over. Show us your portfolio.' I booked a one-way ticket to Los Angeles."

Reilly was soon collaborating with Brad Bird – later to direct Pixar projects such as The Incredibles – on the much-adored The Iron Giant.

You might not have heard of Fergal Reilly before encountering this article, but he is one of our most successful cinematic exports. Remember that fight on the train between Doctor Octopus and Spider-Man 2? He did that. As well as animation and visual effects, he works on story development and has taught at the California Institute of the Arts and the Rhode Island School of Art and Design (which is, for animators, a little like lecturing at both Oxford and Cambridge).

For all that, nobody would mistake him for anything other than an Irish man. Fond of his hat, a bit beardy, he has resisted the advance of any Californian vowels.

“I have lived in LA for the past 21 years. I loved it right from the beginning,” he says. “There are a lot of Irish people working there now. There are people in Disney and in Pixar. So there is a community there, which is really nice. We’ve grown from people who had boyfriends and girlfriends to people who have wives and families.”

Meanwhile, Mum still lives in Ardee. Is he greeted as conquering hero whenever he returns? “Ha, not really. ‘Oh that fella works for Walt Disney, you know?’ There was some of that. Maybe a little bit.”

They don’t gush much in Louth.

• The Angry Birds Movie opens on May 13th

VIDEO TO SCREEN: A YEAR OF CROSSOVERS

Video game adaptations are, perhaps, the most derided of all movie genres. Who would willingly endure Super Mario Brothers or Mortal Kombat a second time? This year, however, the big guns are out.

The Angry Birds Movie
(Fergal Reilly and Clay Kaytis)
The most popular "freemium" game of all time gets the big-screen treatment from Sony Animation. Jon Vitti, writer on The Simpsons during its golden era, pens the script. Released May 13th

Warcraft
(Duncan Jones)
What would Jones do after the excellent Moon and Source Code? He devoted three years to a take on the multiplayer online role- playing game World of Warcraft. Looks epic. Sounds expen- sive. Released May 30th

Assassin's Creed
(Justin Kurzel)
From Shakespeare to stealthy action-adventure. The director of Macbeth and its two stars, Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, trade the Thane of Cawdor for murky doings in 15th-century Spain. Released December 26th