David Gleeson's vibrant début film is set in a modern, stylish Limerick far removed from 'Angela's Ashes'. Donald Clarke visited the set
'Every country has a city that has a negative image," David Gleeson, director of Cowboys & Angels, says. Citizens of Detroit or Birmingham will sympathise with Gleeson when he gently bemoans the way his own native city is constantly badmouthed by (not that he puts it this way) oily jackeens.
But is the Irish public really ready for an upbeat youth comedy set entirely in Limerick? "Well the thing is that Limerick's negative image might actually work for us," he says. "At least people feel something about it, whether they love it or hate it. They have an opinion and I think that will help us." As somebody who spent 10 of his formative years in Limerick, I appreciate that the city has a great deal more to offer the visitor than gangland fisticuffs and starving McCourts. But I never remember it as being a particularly glamorous location. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to stroll on to the set of Cowboys & Angels and discover a herd of mile-high fashion models trundling up and down a catwalk to the accompaniment of thumpy young-person music.
"That girl is in the Guinness Book of Records," the film's sparkly female lead Amy Shiels says. "Her legs are 45 and a half inches long. That's the longest legs in Europe." The towering mannequin looks our way. "Yeah, we're talking about your legs again. Ha ha!" With apologies to Amy and the long-legged woman, nothing or nobody on the set is quite as sleek-looking as Cowboys and Angels' director, and even he is a little less glossy than the film's German producer, Nathalie Lichtenthaeler. The husband-and-wife team have the sort of neatly creased, polo-necked, well-conditioned look that you didn't find in Limerick in the days when my friends and I used to discuss punk band Peter and the Test Tube Babies outside Todd's.
Their story is an interesting one. During a film course he attended in New York, Gleeson took part in an exercise where he and his fellow students all wrote a short film script, each of which was then passed around the class for comment. One of his classmates was Nathalie Lichtenthaeler.
"There was this one script that I really liked," she explains. "I loved the writing. And then the next day at the seminars I discovered it was written by David. So, I went up to him and said: don't make this as a short film. It really should be a feature." Romance followed.
Lichtenthaeler appears to possess formidable capacities of will. Not every young German would, on the basis of a few short pages of dialogue, be prepared to commit years of her life to making a feature set in an unfashionable corner of a strange country.
"I am an adventuress," she says calmly. "I am a gambler. It was quite exciting. I would always have preferred doing this to simply making a German film. I could have done a German language film, but this is much more interesting." The script, which after a few title changes became Cowboys & Angels, tells the story of Shane, a confused young civil servant who finds new vistas opening up when he moves in with a colourful, gay art student named Vincent.
Gleeson warily admits that there is a fair bit of himself in Shane. Like the hero of his film, the director spent some time working in the Department of Agriculture in Limerick and he was slightly disconcerted to find himself shooting in the same office a decade and a half later.
"The Limerick co-ordination office have pulled out all the stops," he says. "We have shot in all the dream locations. I actually shot at my own desk in the Department of Agriculture. It felt like I was shooting the David Gleeson story."
Gleeson has celluloid in his genes. His family owned cinemas in Co Limerick and one of his most formative experiences occurred while viewing a re-release of Gone With The Wind. "I walked out of the cinema and said: That's what I want to do," he explains. Like Shane, he felt stifled during his time in the civil service and longed for escape.
He studied in Aberdeen (of all places), worked on oil rigs, went to New York, returned to the oil rigs, and now, after a great deal of wheeling and dealing with investors, finds himself back in Limerick, shooting bits and bobs of his old life. How has the city changed? "There are enormous changes," he says. "I haven't really had an apartment here since 1988. The biggest change is that Limerick now has a sex industry. Or do I mean Ireland? There are lap dancing clubs everywhere. But there is much more nightlife. It is now a colourful, upbeat city." I suppose it is. Nobody is likely to mistake Limerick for Barcelona, but, over the last few years, a fresher, hipper energy has begun to emerge from the city. The Shannon, once only glimpsed from bridges and through the gaps between crumbling warehouses, has become properly integrated into the cityscape and (according to youths of my acquaintance) there is now a reasonably stimulating club scene.
Allen Leech, one of the country's most exciting young actors, who plays Shane's flamboyant gay buddy (and, for the record, no, he isn't), was pleasantly surprised on his return to the city.
"The first time I came down here I was doing this play for the Red Kettle Theatre Company," he explains. "And about four people came to see it. It was during the lorry strike and all you could hear were car horns. I was staying in this horrible hotel and I just thought: God, this place is a dump! And then I came back to discover it is a happening town. I think the rebellious nature has gone out of Dublin and there is still a desire to rebel here." Michael Legge, who plays Shane, already has a complicated relationship with the city. The Newry-born actor played the teenage Frank McCourt in Alan Parker's torrentially damp Angela's Ashes and, considering the decidedly mixed reception that both the film and McCourt's book received in Limerick, I wonder how the locals have taken to him.
"I was quite hesitant and cautious about that before I came down," he admits. "But everyone has been really nice about it. The one thing they have said is that it doesn't rain quite that much here. But, for the most part, people have been really lovely." As we speak, Legge, his hair teased into a squat pyramid, is wearing an outrageously camp furry coat and more make-up than Anne Doyle. Packed into Limerick's Market Bar, we are filming a scene in which Shane, having decided to abandon the civil service, celebrates his emancipation by spending an evening as a catwalk model at the art school's fashion show. The surreal atmosphere is heightened by the fact that the film crew all appear to be speaking another language.
"Well, Nathalie is from Frankfurt and we got a fair bit of money from Germany," Gleeson explains. It transpires that the deal dictated that they use substantially German crews. "The money we got we have to spend in post-production in Hamburg. And we got all our trucks from there. If you look they are all left-hand drive." The combination of German and Limerick accents on the set, combined with the waves of dry ice out of which tall women loom monstrously, is really quite discombobulating. But the extras seem to be taking it in their stride.
The shooting of Cowboys & Angels has caused real excitement in Limerick. Indeed Lichtenthaeler, who reckons that the cooperation she has received from various city bodies probably knocked 30 percent off the already tiny budget, was rather taken aback by the enthusiasm.
"Four or five hundred came to the two days of extras casting," she says, wide-eyed. "Young people wanted to be in it and they were actually amazed they were being paid for it." And the local gardaí were very helpful when the filmmakers needed to shoot a scene in the cells. "They literally handed the station over to us," Gleeson explains. "If we have any prisoners in we will move them, they said. We even built a set in there to stop us having to move back to our unit base. All the police were going about their business as we were shooting."
To illustrate the impact the shoot has had, Lichtenthaeler shows me a thick wad of cuttings from local newspapers. The producer's glamorous looks have proved attractive to editors and she seems to have been photographed at every street corner in the city. If Lichtenthaeler stayed any longer she would surely have found herself opening fêtes and turning on the Christmas lights.
Tomorrow, Limerick plays host to a gala première of the film, which has now secured limited distribution in the US, and Gleeson will discover whether this is a picture of the city the good burghers recognise. "It was never my intention to do a film about Limerick," he says. "But I think it does give a very positive view of the city." I think that may be what you call cautious confidence.
• Cowboys & Angels is released next Friday