The critics at Cannes were unusually unanimous. "East is East is a wonderfully funny and moving directorial debut from Damien O'Donnell," wrote David Hunter in the Hollywood Reporter. The movie is "exuberantly performed and directed with verve by first-timer O'Donnell", noted Sheila Johnston in Screen International.
"O'Donnell's film is funny without being patronising, warm without being sentimental, and strongly characterised almost always, but not quite without recourse to parody," commented Derek Malcolm in the Guardian. "Though it tackles a serious subject in a broad, defiantly non-p.c. way, the pic's sheer cheek and big-hearted approach is likely to turn this into a solid specialised hit if the enthusiastic response by audiences at Cannes screenings is anything to go by," wrote Derek Elley in Variety.
Critics and buyers go to Cannes in the hope of making discoveries, and first-time film-makers go there in the hope of being discovered. So everyone was happy with East is East, which was sold for distribution throughout the world after that remarkably positive response at Cannes. Even before the festival started, Harvey Weinstein, the shrewd supremo of Miramax Films, made a pre-emptive strike and paid up $2 million for the US and Australian rights - before even seeing the film.
For Damien O'Donnell, the movie's 32-year-old Irish director, the buzz at Cannes was so infectious that he didn't even mind too much when a bureaucratic bouncer refused him entry to a black-tie screening at the festival - because O'Donnell was wearing a grey necktie, he was sent all the way back down the red-carpeted steps.
A serious comedy of generational and cultural conflicts in early 1970s Manchester, East is East deals with the failing attempts of a strictly traditional Pakistani immigrant (the excellent Om Puri) to force his seven offspring to conform to his values, and the crunch comes when he organises arranged marriages for two of his sons.
This ostensibly gentle but ultimately hard-edged plea for tolerance rarely reveals its origins as a stage play by Ayub Khan-Din, who adapted it for the screen. That this wise, hilarious and touching film juggles conflicting emotions with such ease and skill is greatly to the credit of Damien O'Donnell, whose work is remarkably assured for a first feature film.
This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has admired O'Donnell's achievements in short films, especially the awards-laden Thirty Five Aside which, like East is East, is rich in quirky visual ideas. East is East has its first Irish screening next Friday night, as part of Galway Film Fleadh.
However, making the film was an entirely different story. "It was horrible," O'Donnell says when we meet in Dublin. Starting with his first day on the set: "I tripped over a cable and fell flat on my face. In front of the whole cast and crew. That blew the myth about the mystique of the director.
That was only day one. "It rained all the time. It was the worst October weather in Manchester for 30 years. We stayed in this miserable hotel. We had all sorts of setbacks. The days were getting shorter, and we were under pressure to get enough daylight. I had a real baptism of fire. I really enjoyed making the short films I had done, but there was so much more pressure involved in making a feature film. It was quite an ambitious shooting schedule, and we went over by a week."
Before shooting started, the movie's Irish production designer, Tom Conroy, had spent a long time looking for the right place to shoot it. "We ended up shooting in this place called Oakenshaw," says O'Donnell. "I remember coming back from looking for locations one night and there was a report on Newsnight about the most rundown areas in Britain, and Oakenshaw was one of them. Another day we were looking for a location for the chip shop and these guys came out of a van and started attacking a house across the road with swords and a gun. It's a very strange place. You could buy a house there for £3,000 but no one would buy one."
O'Donnell says he felt very alone during the shoot. "Especially when things started to go wrong. I felt very adrift. The irony of it is that it has turned out successful and all these people who were threatening me I'd be fired if I didn't get my act together are now saying how good the film is. There were so many bad experiences the whole thing was a trauma. I think I've repressed most of them now.
"But there was a terrible atmosphere on the shoot. Everyone was uncomfortable and there was a lot of tension. Some people weren't talking to each other, including me, and there was a lot of paranoia. Maybe the worst thing for me was when I was told they were sending a creative producer on the shoot, to supervise the production and make sure we got everything shot that we needed to shoot.
"That was terrifying, but it turned out to be a godsend. He was hugely experienced and he was totally supportive of me. Suddenly we had overtime and the shoot was extended for five days. It was very, very nice to get to the end. I got quite rebellious towards the end because there was only a week to shoot and I knew they couldn't fire me then.
"Then, one day towards the end of the shoot I turned up an hour late. It was very embarrassing. I slept it out, I was so exhausted, so depressed. When I arrived the whole crew was standing there and everyone was watching me like hawks, watching every move I made for the rest of the day. But I shot everything I was supposed to get that day."
Looking back on it all now after the elation of Cannes, he says he's very happy for the film. "I'm glad it's a success. I have my own problems with the film, but that's based on the experience of making it. The pain of some of it." Even though it's so full of warmth? "That's the thing," he says. "The cast were fantastic. They were like a refuge for me."
Growing up in Coolock in Dublin, Damien O'Donnell says that Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark had "a huge influence" on him, and encouraged him to want to study film-making: "I went to Chanel College and I remember the career guidance counsellor trying to talk me out of a career in film because there was no industry here. This was the 1980s, so I think he was quite right at the time. He persuaded me to study journalism instead. "I tried to get into the journalism course at Rathmines, and they kept saying no, so I thought I'd go back to what I had a desire to do, which was film, and they kept turning me down for that as well! I eventually got in after doing two years in Colaiste Dulaig."
His most successful production at college was, he says, the election video he did when he was running for president of the students' union. "I made this kind of tongue-in-cheek profile of me as a candidate, which seemed to be well received. We showed it in the canteen on the day of the vote. There were about 100 people there - and I won by 100 votes, so I like to think the video persuaded people."
At Rathmines he hooked up with Harry Purdue, John Moore and Paul Fitzgerald, and the four of them went on to form their own production company, Clingfilms. "They were all in my year, but then I took a year off when I went into the union, so they finished a year ahead of me," he says. "In their final year they did Jack's Bicycle, which John directed. And Harry directed Cold For June, which was probably the best short film to come out of Rathmines. Unfortunately the films I was involved with in my final year were really unmemorable. But I wrote Booth the following year, which Petra Conroy directed, and I really enjoyed that."
Clingfilms worked on a range of pop videos, most memorably the very clever promo for Endless Art by A House. "We spent many a year struggling, doing pop videos on very low budgets," O'Donnell says. "We did one for The Four Of Us, which involved little chickens and two fluffy white kittens, which never got shown in the end. And we did one for an English band called The Good Strawberries called Afrodizzyjack. Someone concocted a story that it had been banned by the BBC, but I don't think it ever got near enough to the charts to grace a television screen."
After "falling out with consecutive record companies", they focused their attention on making their own short films. "John had written the script for He Shoots, He Scores. We had this wild idea that we were going to shoot it in colour in Spain - on the back of whatever pop video we did next. We wanted to shoot it in the desert where all the spaghetti westerns were made. But no pop videos came along - so we shot it off the South Circular Road."
They entered this strange and haunting film for the Berlin Film Festival, where it deservedly won an award. Around this time Bord Scannan na hEireann and RTE introduced the Short Cuts scheme and Damien O'Donnell submitted Thirty Five Aside. "I had written only about 12 or 15 pages and they wanted half-hour scripts, so I had to pad it out and make up more scenes. As it turned out, I think those scenes are probably the best in the film. We got the award and we started filming within a month, in April 1995. We showed it at Cork and got a good audience response, but no award."
An inventive and hilarious picture of one unfortunate schoolboy's misadventures, it went on collect more than 30 awards at festivals all over the world. "Basically, it was autobiographical," O'Donnell says. "I just sat down one day to write the script and it all came out. "I'd written a script earlier, a Woody Allen type of thing, with the kid as the narrator, so I came to it and took all his dialogue out because it's very hard for kids to be convincing when they've lots to say."
One of the major awards it won was the best short film prize presented on the BBC 2 series, The Talent, by a jury chaired by Alan Parker. That screening caught the attention of Ayub Khan-Din, the playwright of East is East, who felt O'Donnell could be the director to bring the play to the screen. He contacted the film's producer, Leslee Udwin, who sent the screenplay of East is East to O'Donnell.
Initially, O'Donnell was unsure about making a movie in an environment about which he knew so little - the world of Pakistani immigrants in early 1970s Manchester. "They told me they were asking me because they liked the visual style of Thirty Five Aside and they felt that would complement the verbal comedy of Ayub's script and make it more interesting visually," he says. "Then I thought about people like Ang Lee and what he did with The Ice Storm and what Alan Parker did with The Commitments, which was the best presentation of northside Dublin I'd ever seen on the screen, and that's where I'm from, and he came from-outside and just captured this. So I felt there was no reason why I should feel intimidated by doing the reverse and going over to Britain and making a film about Asians. Ayub's screenplay is very autobiographical and he's a walking encyclopaedia on the subject."
At the time O'Donnell had been offered two episodes of Ballykissangel, and he turned them down to do East is East. "Then I had this big crisis of confidence," he says. "I wrote this letter, saying basically that I had changed my mind, that I didn't feel I was the right person for East is East. I remember putting it in the fax machine, pressing `send' and going out to get drunk. As I was sitting there in the pub I calmed down a bit. So I went back in, and the fax hadn't been gone through. I thought `that's a sign', so I rewrote it. "I wrote this mini-thesis of about 20 pages saying what I felt was wrong with the script and raising the questions I had about it and what I needed to know about it. It became a kind of discussion document that got the whole thing rolling. We spent a few months on and off working on the script. Ayub was very open about it. The play had been very successful, so he wasn't protective about the script. It must have hurt him, because I asked to take out a lot of the jokes and moments from the play which I felt were too theatrical. It was a struggle occasionally, but it was a creative tension."
The most startling line in the film comes when one of the sons has so deeply assimilated himself in English youth culture that he declares, "I'm not marrying a fuckin' Paki". O'Donnell says that line was taken directly from the play. "I wouldn't have used a line like that otherwise," he says. "But that's Ayub's line and that's his life, and he can get away with that."
Damien O'Donnell would like to do an Irish movie next. Before making East is East he made another short film, Chromoperambulator, an imaginative and handsomely designed and shot time travel tale starring Charles Dance and Bill Paterson, and he is working on a screenplay based on Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth for producer Ed Guiney of Temple Films.
"It will be more a work inspired by the book than a strict adaptation of it," he says. "I think it would be a very hard book to transfer loyally to the screen. So I'm going to offend Flann O'Brien fans everywhere, probably."
East is East will be shown at 9 p.m. in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, next Friday, and it will be released here in the autumn.