Usually, it's not hard to track down a film crew when it's shooting on the streets of central Dublin. The circus of electrical trucks, prop vans, catering wagons and the rest of the paraphernalia is hard to miss. But strolling up the banks of the Grand Canal in the heart of Dublin 4 on a sunny, late-summer Sunday afternoon, you could be forgiven for missing the Bachelors Walk unit entirely. A couple of cars, maybe 10 or 15 people - and that's it. Welcome to the brave new world of low-budget digitally-produced TV drama.
Bachelors Walk is one of the first fruits of RT╔'s much-anticipated new dawn for TV comedy. Produced for Network 2 and the proposed new British digital channel, BBC3 (scheduled for launch in the new year), it's a romantic comedy drama "about three Irishmen in their 30s who live in a crumbling Georgian house on the quays", according to Tom Hall, one of the three directors of the eight-part series, along with brothers John and Kieran Carney.
John Carney and Hall have worked together before, on the striking no-budget dramas, November Afternoon and Park. While most aspiring young film-makers take the short film route, and then try to raise the finance for a fully-fledged feature, Carney and Hall just went out and did it, shooting on video and telling the kinds of stories that had been all too rare up to then in Irish film - contemporary, urban psychological dramas and social comedies. Unimpressed by what their film-making peers were making (and not afraid to say so), their own films were remarkably stylish and visually ambitious. If, at times, that ambition over-reached itself, or the tiny budgets showed up in the rough edges, they were clearly still people to watch.
Now they are suddenly in the mainstream, or so it appears. It is one of those odd consequences of the differing time-frames in film and television production that Bachelors Walk, which only completed shooting at the end of August, goes out on television only a week after the cinema release of John Carney's first fully-financed feature film, On the Edge, which was shot almost two years ago. Where Bachelors Walk is wry, comedic and light, On the Edge is an intense exploration of teenage depression, starring the latest young Irish star, Cillian Murphy, and set in a psychiatric institution for young would-be suicidees (although it also has plenty of moments of dry humour).
You might be forgiven for expecting John Carney to be happy about such an achievement, but interviewing him about On the Edge - which previously went by the far more striking title of The Smiling Suicide Club - is an unusual experience for this writer, who (for the first time ever) finds himself trying to persuade a director that he has made a better film than he thinks. Carney is dissatisfied with the final cut of the movie, and critical of himself for - as he sees it - caving into the demands of his US financiers, Universal Pictures.
"I think it's OK," he says of the film. "But I'm the kind of person who prefers to make things on his own. In this case, I felt a pressure to make the thing as successful as possible, and made too many compromises in the editing."
So is this the old story of Hollywood philistinism triumphing over the creative process?
"Actually, Universal weren't overbearing at all," says Carney. "In many ways they were very easy-going, but in post-production they were quite tough. They changed the title, which I think was a big mistake. They enforced a lot of music. They felt in America that the female character was stronger than the male character, which to me was total baloney - I thought Cillian was brilliant.
"They're happiest if they can get as many links to Girl, Interrupted as they can. They don't want originality, they want Girl, Interrupted crossed with Rushmore, neither of which I've seen. In the original edit, there was humour and all sorts of serious stuff we were never allowed explore. There were too many test screenings, and we paid too much attention to them. The thing was, we actually got very good ratings in American screenings, but it wasn't the across-the-board good that they were looking for. For girls between 18 and 25 it was the highest rating they'd had all year. But they wanted to get the 17-year-old boys, who hated it. It's just about justifying everything to their boss, and showing they've done all these things.
"It shouldn't have been a young film, it should have been an adult film about young people. I do feel I should have stuck to my guns more. In the end, there's only so much you can say about a film that you haven't had the chance to run properly with."
On the Edge was produced in Ireland by Jim Sheridan's company, Hell's Kitchen. "The question is: what do you do with a film about young people considering suicide?" asks Carney. "Having Jim Sheridan there was a help in many ways - although in some ways it was probably more confusing, which may be a tribute to him. He's had a couple of very successful films, so obviously I'm going to listen to him, although sometimes he'd just be wrong about things. When it comes down it, he's into reaching as many people as possible, but his way of reaching that point is quite interesting."
Such candour is refreshing in the usually ultra-cautious and bland world of film publicity, but Carney is doing himself a disservice. Despite some of the flaws he's so conscious of, On the Edge is in many ways an admirable piece of work, with several memorable performances, particularly from Murphy and from Stephen Rea as a psychiatrist struggling to understand him. It avoids patronising its audience and has a powerful emotional impact in its key scenes.
Judging from the only episode completed so far, Bachelors Walk is equally promising - a wistful, engaging comedy of thirtysomething Dublin loafers looking for love. "The lead character, Raymond, owns the house and rents rooms to his deadbeat mates," explains Kieran Carney. "The series starts with his ex-girlfriend returning from America. He's been kind of treading water since she left. They've all been treading water, professionally, emotionally, every way. It's not that they're arrested adolescents, it's just that the qualities that were prized when they were in college have no currency in the marketplace.
"They're slightly out of step with their generation, so they're regarded as falling way behind, even though at an earlier stage they would have been seen as full of promise."
Raymond, played by Don Wycherly, is the second-string film critic at a newspaper. The series synopsis states: "His journalistic ambitions seem destined to be thwarted by the fact that the senior critic on his paper is firmly entrenched. This rival has become something of a hate figure for Raymond. He moans that while he's out in Cannes interviewing movie stars, Raymond is reviewing the new PokΘmon movie in the UCI Blanchardstown."
Having checked with my colleagues, I feel bound to point out to the directors that this characterisation is the purest fantasy, but Hall, who has dabbled in film criticism himself, is undaunted.
"The lifestyle of a film critic is quite easy-going, if you're not that ambitious," he says, blithely ignoring who he's talking to (you really have to admire the way these guys call it as they see it).
"Raymond wants to be a more serious writer. Through his 20s he hasn't had to build a career, because he was fortunate enough to inherit this big house, which has had a negative effect on his progress into adulthood, because he didn't have to go out and earn the money to buy property. The other two are like millstones around his neck. Simon Delaney plays Michael, an alcoholic barrister who had a promising career at one point. He leaves the house every morning, supposedly to go to work, but ends up in the pub doing the crossword. But it's all played for laughs. The question we asked about every scene was: how do we make this funny?
"The third character is Barry (Keith McErlean), who has lived there for six years and paid no rent, but is indulged by the others. He's one of those characters who's always picking up on some new project with the same gusto he had for the last one. You know those guys you meet for the first time in years, and they tell you everything about what they're up to, and it's kind of gibberish but sounds impressive. Then you meet them six months later and they've got an entirely new spiel, and you realise they're full of crap."
Kieran Carney is clear about what Bachelors Walk is about. "It's three men looking for love. They want romance and somebody significant in their lives," he says.
He was unhappy with RT╔'s autumn schedule press release. "Someone in the RT╔ press department had written about it as an affluent, trendy Dublin thing, which it isn't at all. It's not About Adam. And it's not Men Behaving Badly."
For John Carney, the question now is what to do next. "I suppose I could try and go and make a career of it and become a director for hire. But I don't know if it would give me much pleasure. It certainly wasn't my original dream. Making films isn't as much fun as it was when myself and Tom were doing it with our friends.
"I would respond better to making films for less money with more control and I think the next film I make will be really good. I feel that I have that in me."
On the Edge is released on Friday. Bachelors Walk starts on Network 2 on Monday, October 1st