THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:James Morris, Windmill Lane Pictures chief executive
ON TUESDAY afternoon, James Morris was buzzing around his new studios on Dublin’s Herbert Place, proudly showing off his swanky facilities.
The chief executive of Windmill Lane Pictures shows me room after room of flat-screen televisions, high-tech computers, digital editing equipment and comfy-looking leather sofas.
There isn’t a cable to be seen. All the wiring is neatly tucked away, out of sight and out of harm’s way. Every desk is close to a window.
There’s a snazzy canteen upstairs and a balcony that looks out in the direction of the Pepper Canister Church.
The builders are still working away and you can smell the newness of the place. It won’t fully open for another few weeks.
Our whirlwind tour concludes in what will be the accounts office, where Morris settles down to explain the rationale behind the €4.7 million investment at this time of recession and the decision to quit the company’s iconic Windmill Lane base.
“One of the opportunities for the investment here is that we’ve created a platform to open up a strand of international business so that we can attract feature film and drama to postproduce in Ireland,” he says.
Such is the quality of the interactive technology available nowadays that studios such as Windmill Lane can offer post-production facilities to TV and film directors around the world – and all from little old Herbert Place.
“To a large extent what we’ve done in this building has taken the distance and the location factors out of the equation. Not completely, because you can’t do that completely, but it’s gone a long way to taking out the distance and the location factor,” says Morris.
“What we’ve created here is something we wouldn’t have been able to do in an old-style post-production facility, [which] is to bring in this new generation of data-based, very fast, flexible technology.”
The investment is a brave move in the current climate. Windmill Lane’s profits declined by 21 per cent in 2008 and Morris admits that the firm is hoping for a break-even result this year.
Work has dried up in Ireland as corporate firms pared back their spending on TV commercials and RTÉ slashed its commissioning budget for TV productions.
Fortunately, the company’s sale of its Windmill Lane studios four years ago, near the top of the property market, provided the funds for this year’s move.
“We did a sale and leaseback,” Morris says. “We put aside the funds at that time necessary to finance this relocation. We probably wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise – we couldn’t have funded it through debt now.”
Morris acknowledges that it is a “bit counterintuitive to be doing this in the middle of a recession, but I think it actually is going to give us an opportunity to work our way out of this by opening up that little bit of blue sky instead of just being locked into the local market”.
Windmill Lane recently secured postproduction work for two films: Last Word, a £4.5 million (€4.89 million) production starring Ewan McGregor and Eva Green; and La Mula,an €8 million budget movie about the Spanish civil war.
“We need to do more to develop a constant stream of [international] work rather than on an ad-hoc basis where if we’re fortunate that one of our Irish clients has this type of work . . . they bring it into us.”
Films are the icing on the cake. Morris admits that TV productions will be its staple.
He talks about shows like The Tudors, which was shot in Ireland but with post-production in Toronto, partly to avail of tax breaks on both sides of the Atlantic. "A lot of the projects that come here tend to do the post-production away," he says. "What we're saying is: do it here."
Every tax break is now under scrutiny and Colm McCarthy’s report on potential cuts in public expenditure has suggested large cuts in funding for the arts sector.
But Morris, who is also chairman of the Irish Film Board, believes investment in the creative sector must be sustained.
“We have a fantastic reputation in this country for creativity and the arts has an unblemished reputation,” he says.
Morris’s path into TV and film production was somewhat circuitous. He studied history at Trinity College Dublin – a “natural gateway”, he says with a chuckle.
“There was no work here so I went to London,” he recalls.
At the time, he had notions of a career in music – he played the bass and violin – and made an album with Shaun Davey called, somewhat unoriginally, Davey & Morris. Mint copies are fetching about £100 on the internet.
“Shaun and I signed a publishing contract in Dublin, got on a plane, rehearsed and made an album. But after that I decided that wasn’t the future for me.”
He ended up getting a job in an editing room in Soho around 1972 and his career path was defined.
“I worked my way up and became an editor within three years, working with a lot of great people. The commercials directors at that time were people like Alan Parker and Ridley Scott. It was a really great place to be.”
He eventually returned home, initially doing contract editing for RTÉ before branching out with college friend “Russ” Russell to form what is now called Windmill Lane Pictures.
“We started from 14a Herbert Lane, just behind that red door there,” he says, pointing out the window to a building across the road. “I borrowed £5,000 from some editors in London and we got started.”
In 1979, they built the premises on Windmill Lane in Dublin’s south docks and decided to add a music recording studio to the film editing facilities.
It was to prove an inspired move. MTV was just taking off and artists needed a studio to record singles and promos. U2, managed by Morris’s former college mate Paul McGuinness, recorded five albums there.
So did he think U2 would make it big?
"I had absolutely no doubt," Morris says, tongue firmly in cheek. "Funnily enough, I never thought about that one way or the other. But there was a period when they had [music producer] Steve Lillywhite in for the third album [War] and everybody suddenly realised they were going to go the distance."
The music recording business was sold to Brian Masterson in 1990, who relocated the business to Ringsend.
“I was committed to getting TV3 up and running and the fashion for studios had changed,” Morris recalls.
The TV3 licence was won in 1989, a time when independent broadcasting in Ireland was struggling to take off.
Having aligned himself to TV3, Morris was given the cold shoulder by RTÉ. “Once I’d identified myself with a competitor, then the work dried up. I was a little taken aback by this but I shouldn’t have been.”
After a couple of false starts, TV3 eventually found its feet with Britain’s ITV and Canada’s Canwest as its main backers.
It was sold in 2006 for €265 million to private equity group Doughty Hanson. Morris, U2 manager McGuinness and accountant Ossie Kilkenny netted €26.5 million between them for their 10 per cent stake.
“For most of its [TV3’s] life, most people wouldn’t have foreseen that outcome at all,” Morris says, “but we stuck at it over a long period of time. In the end, you have to look back and say the timing [of the sale] was good.”
Morris stepped down as TV3 chairman shortly after the sale was completed but still keeps a weather eye on the station.
“It’s doing extremely well in terms of audience share and that will come back to them in terms of revenues. I think it will probably start coming back at the beginning of next year.”
What is his perspective on the appointment of former RTÉ director general Bob Collins as the new broadcast regulator?
“Genuinely, I was surprised,” says Morris. “I’ve known Bob a long time and he’s a very suitable candidate in lots of ways, but I was surprised because I presumed it would be somebody from outside the industry in the interests of transparency and fairness for all the parties that are being regulated.
“He could turn out to be a good regulator. He should be judged on what he does.”
Morris, at 62, is at an age when many executives would be reaching for the pipe and slippers. A succession plan has been put in place in which Morris and his fellow shareholders, who include Dermot Desmond, will hand over ownership during the next three to five years.
But Morris doesn’t “fancy” retiring and is determined to establish Windmill Lane as an international post-production house. “I wouldn’t want to give up working completely.”
For now, at least, the show must go on.
ON THE RECORD
Name: James Morris.
Position: Chief executive of Windmill Lane Pictures.
Age: 62.
Family: Married with six children.
Lives: Dublin.
Hobbies: Reading and watching films.
Something that you might expect: "I watch quite a lot of TV, a lot of it by box set."
Something that might surprise: He is a keen fly fisherman, taking it up at the age of eight near the family home in Connemara. "I sneak away to do it as often as I can."
