In its Berlin Film Festival special supplement, Variety carried a spread on its choice of 10 European directors to watch, among them the Irish playwright-turned-film-maker Conor McPherson, author of The Weir and the I Went Down screenplay. Accompanied by producer Rob Walpole, McPherson arrived in Berlin for Tuesday night's world premiere of his first feature as a film director, Saltwater. Adapted by McPherson from his own play, This Lime Tree Bower, the film, which is set in an out-of-season Irish seaside resort, features Peter McDonald, Brian Cox, Conor Mullen and Brendan Gleeson.
"I like showing stories using actors, and so doing it on film is not really that much of a different universe," McPherson told Variety. "It's still drama, you know." His latest screen drama is Endgame for the cycle of filmed Samuel Beckett plays, and it features Michael Gambon and David Thewlis. McPherson has also been signed by Neil Jordan and Stephen Woolley's production company, Company of Wolves, to direct the tentatively titled Actors' Project for the US major, DreamWorks, in early summer.
There was a furore at the Berlin festival in 1979, when the Soviet bloc delegation vehemently protested against the screening of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter. That dispute was recalled this week when The Deer Hunter was screened as part of the festival's 12-film tribute to Robert De Niro.
This week in Berlin, over 150 Austrian directors and film industry professionals issued a statement against the participation of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in their country's new coalition government. This did not stop several European film reviewers declaring they would be boycotting this year's Vienna Film Festival. Now that should have Haider really quaking in his boots.
Joachim Krol and Franka Potente, of Run Lola Run fame, in Tom Tykwer's new film, The Princess and the Warrior
Director Tom Tykwer, whose Berlin-based Run Lola Run has been the most successful German movie in years, has finished shooting his new film, The Princess and the Warrior, which features his off-screen partner, Franka Potente - who played the flame-haired Lola - as a nurse whose life revolves around the psychologically disturbed inmates of a mental hospital. The film, which was shot in Tykwer's hometown of Wuppertal in the industrial Ruhr valley, is described as "a high-octane tale of love fighting its way out of the ruins of modern life".
"BBC Films Goes Irish" read the headline in Berlin's bilingual daily festival magazine, Moving Pictures, which noted how three of the recent projects funded by BBC Films are Irish - Conor McPherson's Saltwater; Gerry Stembridge's About Adam, which was launched at the Sundance festival last month; and Kieron J. Walsh's When Brendan Met Trudy, an original romantic comedy now in post-production, written by Roddy Doyle, Asked about what Moving Pictures termed "the Beeb's new-found obsession with things Irish", BBC Films supremo David Thompson explained: "There's a particular vitality and modernity about Irish writing and a hell of a lot of wit."
At the historic Babelsberg Studios near Berlin, Jean-Jacques Annaud, the ever-ambitious and imaginative French director behind Quest For Fire and The Bear, is filming Enemy at the Gates, a $90 million drama set during the second World War. The international cast is headed by Joseph Fiennes, Ed Harris, Rachel Weisz, and Jude Law, an Oscar nominee this week for The Talented Mr Ripley.
Warner Bros received a rap on the knuckles from Berlin festival director Moritz de Hadelin when the stars of Three Kings, among them George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, caused a 25-minute delay by turning up late for the movie's festival screening. "The public in the theatre was utterly furious for having to wait so long," he said in a letter to Warners. In Ireland, a 25-minute delay at a premiere or film festival opening or closing night would be unthinkable. A delay of an hour or more would be much more likely.
After the critical and commercial failure of his recent biopic of the brilliant French film-maker Jean Vigo, who died tragically young, British director Julien Temple has gone back to his roots in the 1980 feature, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, for The Filth and the Fury, a documentary on the Sex Pistols - this time with the focus firmly on the band rather than their flamboyant manager, Malcolm McLaren.
In Berlin, Temple talked about showing his new film to an audience of 20-year-olds. "A lot of them thought it was fiction. They thought Jubilee was a tube line and that Sid Vicious was imprisoned for shooting the audience during My Way. It's astonishing how alien that era is for them."