The ambitious endeavour that is the Beckett Film Project will bring all 19 stage plays written by Samuel Beckett to cinema and television screens. The producers of the series have attracted a range of internationally renowned film-makers to the project - among them Anthony Minghella, David Mamet, Neil Jordan, Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema, Richard Eyre and Karel Reisz - along with young Irish directors such as Damien O'Donnell, Conor McPherson, Kieron J. Walsh and Enda Hughes.
The wealth of acting talent assembled for the Beckett films includes Julianne Moore, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Rosaleen Linehan, Stephen Brennan, Susan Fitzgerald, Barry McGovern, Sean McGinley, Michael Gambon, David Thewlis and, in what is said to be his last acting appearance, John Gielgud.
Eight of the 19 plays have been filmed so far this year and one - Neil Jordan's film of Not I, which features Julianne Moore - has been selected for screening in the International Critics' Week programme at the Cannes Film Festival next Wednesday. The other 11 films are at various stages of planning, with a number of them due to go before the cameras before the end of this month.
The producers are Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney, who set up Blue Light Films to bring the Beckett canon to the screen. Moloney, who established the Dublin-based production company, Parallel Films, with Tim Palmer in 1993, was co-producer on the feature film, The Last of the High Kings, and has been executive producer on such high-profile television series as Amongst Women, Falling For a Dancer and Ballykissangel, and he and Palmer produced the award-winning recent Irish feature film, A Love Divided.
Colgan has been artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Dublin since 1983, and his ideas for the Beckett Film Project began to form in 1991 when he produced the Beckett Festival, staging all 19 plays at the Gate, and later at Lincoln Centre in New York and the Barbican in London.
The film project has a budget of £4.5 million, raised from RTE, Channel 4, Section 481 investment and some American backing. The executive producer on the series is Joe Mulholland, the outgoing managing director of television at RTE. "Joe has been terrific and so supportive," says Colgan. "We are delighted he's staying involved with this project."
Colgan and Moloney hope that the Cannes screening of Not I will be the first of many film festival presentations of their Beckett films. "We would like to see the films in cinemas, too," says Colgan. "The owner of the Curzon Mayfair in London said he would give us the cinema for the week. I don't see why we couldn't take a cinema in Dublin for a week and have a festival of Beckett films there. And we are looking at the possibility of showing them all at Lincoln Centre in New York.
"Then there will be the television release of the films on RTE and Channel 4. And we intend to produce a boxed videocassette of the 19 filmed plays." Moloney adds: "We've got three feature-length films, one one-hour film, and 15 short films which can be grouped together, so it's actually more programmable than you might imagine."
The right to film the entire Beckett canon was awarded to Colgan and Moloney by the Beckett estate. However, given the meticulous precision of Beckett's stage instructions, and the fact that plays were written specifically for the theatre and not for the camera, both Colgan and Moloney anticipate a backlash from Beckett purists.
"This is going to come up all the time," says Moloney. "This is going to follow this project because there are people who will say we shouldn't even attempt to put these plays on to film. We're playing by the rules of Beckett's stage directions, and we're working very closely with his nephew, Edward Beckett.
"There is an important distinction between filming a play and making a film. The films will bring another dimension to the material and bring it to light in a way that I don't think theatre can do, frankly. I think it's a very good thing for the material and will bring new meanings to the work - and I think it will help people understand the work. Even Mr Beckett himself was involved in filming some of his own plays."
Colgan produces a 19-page document downloaded from the Internet which lists dozens of earlier productions of Beckett's stage plays for radio, television and the cinema - some of them directed by Beckett. One of these is Beckett's 1975 production of Waiting For Godot for the German television channel, ZDF, and it is just one of the 17 listed productions of that play alone.
`IT sounds arrogant," says Colgan, "but having known Beckett and having lived with his work, and unlike anybody else, having produced all of these plays at least once on stage, I think it would be better for me to do this than anyone else.
"When I did the Beckett festival in 1991 I had it advertised on those huge outdoor poster sites, and people said you can't put Beckett up there. I said, no, you have to tell people it's on. I believe this is the greatest writing of the last century. Bar none, including Joyce. This is the genius.
"And I believe he deserves the best interpreters, and if they are Neil Jordan or Julianne Moore or Anthony Minghella or Michael Gambon, then I think Beckett deserves them. And I hope they will have the effect of turning more and more people on to Beckett, and that we will bring Beckett to a much wider audience.
"We're not gender-bending. We're not cutting the texts. And we're very pleased with what we've got so far. We have turned down a lot of ideas and suggestions. We know exactly where you go and where you don't go. And what we're not doing is putting the plays on an empty stage and putting a camera in the fifth row and turning it on and going out to have a sandwich."