WHEN the film of The Van was shooting in Dublin last year, Roddy Doyle described it in movie shorthand as Thelma & Louise With Chips. "I was being flippant when I said that," he said this week. "Everything in film now has to be compared to other films, much more so than happens with books." In addition to adapting his novel into the screenplay, Roddy Doyle makes his debut as a producer with The Van, which was made by Deadly Films, the production company he set up with Lynda Myles, who also produced the movies of his earlier novels, The Commitments and The Snapper.
"It was a great experience," he says. "Being co producer is really a glorious term for nothing particular. I was in on decisions from the word go and I knew what was happening, but the burden was on Lynda's back all the time. It was a very educational experience in that I know an awful lot more now about making films. It's what I wanted."
He recalls seeing Alan Parker's film of The Commitments for the first time and how his initial reaction was one of sheer relief. "I hadn't a clue what it was going to look like," he says. "I really didn't have a notion. I'd been on the set twice on brief visits and it seemed like a foreign world to me. I decided that I'd like to be involved with film making again, but not as innocently. I think I was lucky with The Commitments. It could have been shite and I could have done nothing about it - except go around for the rest of my life with that humiliation hanging over me.
"Getting involved in production was great in another sense, too. When I gave up teaching, which I did very happily and I'd never go back, the one thing I missed to an extent was the social side. When I'm writing a novel, which I am at the moment, I'm completely on my own - you don't really share it with people. Film, though, is a very collaborative experience."
When he was adapting The Van for the screen, he set himself two basic rules. One was to change the families again, as he did for the film of The Snapper. Having the whole Rabbitte family with the same neighbours would have moved the movie into "sequel country", he felt. The other rule was to capture the spirit of the first third of the book without having the first third of the film devoted to one man and then two men doing nothing, as he puts it. It's about 100 pages into the novel before the Bimbo character is made redundant; in the film it happens in the first scene.
Roddy Doyle declares himself delighted with Donal O'Kelly's performance as Bimbo in the movie and even though the name of Jimmy Rabbitte Sr has been changed again, he had no doubts about casting Colm Meaney, who had starred in The Commitments and The Snapper, in the other leading role of The Van. "As I was writing the script," he says, "it was by no means certain that Colm could do the film because, as you know, he's committed to going up into space on a regular basis. He is such a powerful actor and so natural for that role. He's got a natural comedian's ability to time his facial expressions perfectly, but he also carries the darker side so well like in that scene where they're paring down for Christmas and his face expresses what would take several pages to do in a novel."
The backdrop to The Van is the euphoric summer of Italia 90 when World Cup fever swept Ireland like never before. That wonderfully heady and good humoured atmosphere is recreated vividly in Stephen Frears's film of Roddy Doyle's novel, which captures the impact of Italia 90 on the homes and pubs of Doyle's fictitious Barrytown. The film deals specifically with two unemployed friends, Larry (Colm Meaney) and Bimbo (Donal O'Kelly), who have the foresight to see the event as an opportunity for private enterprise. They buy a grease caked and engine less chip van and position it outside the local pub for after match profits.
"I started writing The Van in 1989 and I was personally looking forward to the World Cup, but I didn't see it as an important part of the novel," Roddy Doyle says. "I watched the World Cup in a pub, in the Bayside Inn, and after the first game when we drew with England, I started writing the World Cup into the novel. Then, gradually, once it started, it was clear that it was more than just football. It became a national pastime.
"In fact, the pub scenes during the World Cup were the first scenes we shot in the Foxhound Inn in Kilbarrack. It was a great way to start. It was very hot on the set, very sapping, but the extras lived it every time. When it came to take 17 of them watching David O'Leary's penalty going in they were up and crying yet again.
The post production of The Van was rushed to get the movie ready for its world premiere at the Cannes film festival in May and Stephen Frears took the film back into the editing suite after the festival, tightening up scenes and taking out about four minutes of footage in all. "It's much tighter than it was, particularly in the last third, and it a huge difference," says Roddy Doyle.
HE says be hated the Cannes experience. "I really, really disliked it enormously. I think I could have enjoyed it had I been there as an observer, but I was bang in the middle of it. It's not because it was so hectic, because one expects that, but because it was just shallow. The standard and variety of the films in the competition seemed very high, but I didn't get a chance to see anything except The Van. That I really enjoyed - I'd never seen as big a cinema screen. The curtain just opened and opened and opened. And the response was great.
"But that nonsense about going up the steps beforehand! I'm sure that just after the war any excuse for a bit of glitz made a lot of sense. But what really annoyed me going up those steps was that there seemed to be some kind of pecking order and there was someone behind me actually pushing me up the steps because I wasn't going fast enough. I was holding my wife's hand because I wanted her to share the experience, so it was very uncomfortable for both of us."
The later stages of The Van, when the tone darkens and the close friendship between Larry and Bimbo collapses in a feud, is the bridge between the hilarity of Roddy Doyle's first two novels and the much darker themed television series, Family, which followed the novel of The Van. "I remember when I sat down to write The Van very early on," he says, "and I was writing about a man who was middle aged and beginning to feel it and he was redundant and he felt that in many, many ways. He left like Patrick Kavanagh talking about all the women that love young men he's angry because he's missed out on all that and so many other things. So the tone was there from the beginning.
"I often find that if I have the luxury of writing two things at the same, time, a novel and a script, that I like, the balance. I could be writing something dark for film, say, and at the same time having a ball writing a novel. When I was writing Family I was also writing the early stages of Paddy Clarke, which was very enjoyable in many ways trying to capture the absurdity and innocence of childhood at the same time that I was doing the treatment for the four Family stories which, were quite grim all the way through.
Many people have tried to acquire the film rights to Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won Roddy Doyle the Booker Prize in 1993. "I have the rights to it and I'm not interested in doing anything with it just at the moment," he says. "I think it would be difficult to adapt because the novel is in the first person and if you take away the kid's words, you lose most of it. I suppose you could do it in the same style as My Life As A Dog, where you would use voice over and contrast it with the image. One of my big fears would be to spend 18 months to two years working on it and then not be able to find a child who could carry the entire thing.
He also retains the rights to his most recent novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, which he regards as "unfilmable" at this stage. "It came out of Family, so my heart wouldn't be in it," he says. "And when you take out her words you're left with a story that's been told cinematically before - brilliantly in Once Were Warriors and Ladybird Ladybird, and they're two hard acts to follow."
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors raised many eyebrows when it was published, not least because it was spoken in the first person by female character and written by a male novelist. Does Roddy Doyle anticipate such reactions, or does he enjoy constantly surprising people? "I've never felt under any pressure to produce what people might expect me to write. When I'm writing, a novel is always a couple of years' work. It's the day to day thing. I'm just filling a page and going over that page, and the consequences of what one is doing, the idea that there's a readership there down the line, doesn't arise.
"I actually enjoyed reading the reviews of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors - good, bad and indifferent, including that classic in The Irish Times. I thought that one was breath taking. I started laughing when I was reading it, particularly when the reviewer asked his teacher friends had they ever caught anybody masturbating in class. And then he was wondering what they did with the blood they robbed from Pelican House, which, of course, was just a joke after Paula says robbing's in their blood as if somehow she was being literal about them robbing blood from Pelican House. I burst out laughing at that stage."
RODDY Doyle's next projects, a screenplay and a new novel, will be his first period setting. He recently finished the first draft of his screenplay based on Liam O'Flaherty's Famine. "I feel very passionate about it," he says. "The Famine has been intellectualised backwards and forwards, but with the exception of The Hanging Gale on television, it's never been looked at emotionally, to bring you closer to the experience of a family going through it. We all know the statistics, but very few of us know what individuals went through. There's precious little of that in any of the history books I've read - it's all about House of Commons debates, Poor Law changes - surprising, really, because it is quite recent."
Once again, the central character is a woman - "this marvellous woman, Mary Kilmartin, who's very pragmatic; whereas her husband sometimes talks' about Irish freedom, she just wants food". He is keeping the original story intact, he says, but given the size of the novel - around 440 pages - there is some inevitable paring down of the source material. And some significant, changes.
"I've made the story a bit more complicated," he says, "in that in the novel the land agent is English, and, this agent, this bolloks, will be Irish in the film. It will make us watching it squirm a bit because it's so easy to blame the English. Of course some of the things they did at the time were appalling, quite outrageous - like in 1847 when Trevelyan, the treasury department guy, declared the Famine to be over. But an awful lot of what happened, like the enforced evictions, were organised by Irish people."
He is about to work on his second draft of the screenplay and then do as many drafts as are needed. The eventual film will be produced by Andrew Eaton, who also produced Family. Meanwhile, he has started work on his next novel - much later than he expected after completing The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. "It took me about a year and a half to get Paula out of my head," he says. "I sat down to start a novel several times, but I couldn't. I kept hearing her voice all the time. Finally, after coming back from holidays in August, her voice was gone and I started a novel with a completely different character - a new narrator."
The new novel has the current title of The Last Round Up, but that could easily change. "The narrator is called Henry Smart," explains his creator. "He's this old man who was born in 1902 and he's a liar and a chancer and claims he's been around for most of the major events of this century. It's great fun. He's now five, growing up in the slums of Dublin. The book is at 1907, so it's a long haul. It's early days yet.
"In The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, every word had to be true. What one was trying to do was to fool people that it wasn't a novel, that it was the real thing. This one is the opposite - the guy's a liar, he's larger than life and his language reflects that. I can pick and choose where he is. The only solid decision I've made is that he's going to be in the GPO in 1916."