At his studio in his home in Brooklyn, the Irish film-maker Paul Rowley is surrounded by synthesisers, drum machines and various other pieces of music equipment he has been accumulating. He’s in the middle of finishing two big projects. One is a Screen Ireland-supported documentary about Gays Against Guns (GAG), a strand of the anti-gun-violence movement in the US. The other is an Arts Council-supported film, Never Stop the Action, a vibrant, funny, moving film that plays out in real time (while taking some brilliantly surreal swerves), following two people on a subway train on their way home from an all-night party.
Rowley is one of Ireland’s most interesting film-makers. His work spans abstract video art installations, documentaries with potent political and social contexts, narrative drama, and increasingly, his own musical compositions. The 2007 film, Seaview, which he co-directed with Nicky Gogan, was a landmark Irish documentary examining the experience of asylum seekers in Mosney, produced by Still Films.
Rowley has been working on the GAG documentary since the Pulse massacre in Orlando in 2016. “It’s looking at the American gun violence epidemic through a queer lens and an Irish immigrant lens,” Rowley explains. His partner, the film-maker Gene Graham, whose brilliant 2018 documentary, This One’s for the Ladies, won a Special Jury Award at SXSW, is upstairs working on the edit of the GAG documentary.
While developing a television series supported by Screen Ireland based in 1980s Ireland, and also working on the GAG film, Rowley found himself immersed in two quite tough-going projects. Enter, Never Stop The Action. “For me, that was a project that I wanted to just be really fun,” Rowley says. “I was in between these other two projects that were really very heavy. So I wanted to do something experimental, playful, that in a way would bring me back to why I started making films on Super8 in the first place, just to remind myself that even though we’re often encouraged to, you don’t have to have a singular creative vision for your entire career. You can change all the time. People do that more and more now. In the old times, if you were an abstract expressionist, that’s what you did for your whole life. Whereas these days, there’s a lot more flexibility. So I wanted to get back to my roots with it a little bit, and have fun.”
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This lane-switching has contributed to the eclecticism of Rowley’s career, which is incredibly diverse both in projects and approaches. “Queer artists, we are queens of culture-jamming in our nature. When we’re kids, we’ve already learned that you have to switch signals, that you have to constantly rewrite narratives… I think that’s why with queer artists – and not exclusively, obviously – it maybe doesn’t phase us as much, why we adapt to that way of switching gears.”
His 2018 film, The Red Tree, tells the story of an elderly man returning to the island of San Domino, where, during Mussolini’s fascist regime, Italian gay men were exiled. “I’m really interested in locations,” Rowley says, “and how locations really resonate with things that have happened there in the past.” He travelled to the island one quiet February and spent days walking around. That film, Rowley thinks, is also an example of how his work tends to come together, “trying to capture abstraction with photorealism, with music, with politics, with history, to create this artwork that brings disparate ideas together and presents them to people in a way that’s coherent”.
What unites his recent projects? “Queerness for sure,” Rowley says. “There’s definitely a sense of politics as well. My politics are in it, my identity as a queer person, and I think the stories are all coming from a place of empathy. When I was making Seaview with Nicky in Mosney, we spent a lot of time there. You really learn that film-making is about empathy and ethics. Film-makers have this way of drawing on different ideas and stitching them together in a way that other people can understand, that they can relate to.”
Then there’s the music. Rowley comes from a musical family – his mother, a pianist, his father and grandfather both fiddle-players – but film-making took over for him early on, having also played piano and guitar as well as a line in DJing and being a club promoter. When the pandemic struck, he couldn’t go out and film, so he started making experimental tunes with a drum machine and a small synthesiser. This grew into a daily practice, including experimenting with a modular synthesiser.
It’s the magic of sound and image connecting at a specific moment. It could only be two frames long. But that’s when I get a thrill
“Now, as I have done for the last few years, I get up, and the first thing I do in the morning is go to the studio, and even if I’m half-asleep, record some beats or whatever, or play around with my modular synthesiser. It’s so good for your head. It’s great,” Rowley says. He now has thousands of demos, “and they’ve now started to make their way into the films, bit by bit. I’ve written a lot of the soundtrack for the Gays Against Guns doc. I’ve written all the music for Never Stop The Action. I wrote a soundtrack for Gene’s horror film last year, Born Again Reject. The two are coming together now”.
Later in the year, he intends to begin sifting through unused demos, and see what might come of them. “In the back of my head I always thought ‘it’s a shame I didn’t make that electro album in the 80s! It’s a shame I didn’t make that classic house 12-inch in the 90s!’… I’ve decided to put the time into music again.”
One can’t help but feel that in an already very established creative career, Rowley is hitting a new stride, exploring new creative territories and blending his approach to sound and image in a fascinating way. As he continues to chart this course, that combination core to his film-making remains enticing to him, and to the viewer. “It’s the magic of sound and image connecting at a specific moment. It could only be two frames long. But that’s when I get a thrill.”
