JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL:Critics have been raving about 'Margaret', Kenneth Lonergan's unsettling post-9/11 New York film. Don't expect gratitude

There have, in recent months, been few odder stories from the world of film than the one surrounding Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret.

The lengthy, unsettling drama was filmed as long ago as 2005. By 2007, the director and the studio were engaged a complex dispute concerning the duration of the final cut. Letters were exchanged. Lawyers were hired. Eventually, late last year, the film was grudgingly pushed out on a limited number of prints. In the UK it played on just one screen.

Then a sort of minor resurrection took place. Critics raved about Margaret. A petition was set up urging Fox Searchlight to push the film for awards recognition and to make stronger efforts to secure reviews.

“It was a very interesting experience,” Lonergan says. “It got a few good reviews at first. Then when it opened in the UK it got better reviews than I would have given it, frankly. Then there was that petition and it had a second wave of really positive reviews. It’s ruined everything for me. We’re not supposed to like critics. Now I owe them.”

Lonergan is in Dublin for a screening of Margaretat the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. The film, now shouldering a weight of good word, opens in the Irish Film Institute today. Unfortunately, Lonergan is not allowed to comment on the post-production shenanigans. He admits, however, that the delay in release has added an interesting colour to the picture.

Following a teenager as she bounces angrily about New York, after witnessing (and possibly causing) a fatal traffic accident, the picture is undeniably overshadowed by the events of 9/11. Shot seven years ago, it now plays like a period piece.

“It really does seem that way,” he says. “And that surprises me. The city has changed so much. Mayor Bloomberg has rebuilt so much of New York to make it look like any other American city. In one scene two characters walk towards Lincoln Centre and the camera pulls back and you see these anti-terrorist barricades. But I did want the event to be recent in the minds of the characters. Hey, everything becomes a period piece eventually.”

If the dispute between Fox and Lonergan really did concern the length of the cut, the studio ultimately got off lightly. Lonergan’s original script ran to 375 pages. To put that in perspective, a page normally takes up around a minute of screen time. The current cut is a relatively digestible two and a half hours.

“I was thinking that it would be interesting to write a first draft without censoring or editing myself at all, without having any concerns about practical movie-making,” he says. “As a result, I had the best time I have ever had when writing. Within the beats of the story I allowed myself to write scenes that were 30 pages long. Then I got the script all bound up in Morocco leather.”

If you met Kenneth Lonergan on the street, you wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that he is a writer. Wearing old-school spectacles, a wee bit unshaven, dressed in a creased polo shirt, he looks as if he's just emerged from a long, solitary period of keyboard-hammering. To date, the NYU graduate is best known for This is Our Youth, a hit play on both sides of the Atlantic, and his fine 2000 film You Can Count on Me. He also wrote the script for the Robert De Niro comedy Analyse This.

"Yes. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a cynical exercise, but I wrote Analyse Thisas a way of doing something that I could live off. You can make a killing as a playwright, but you can't make a living. My roommate eventually said: 'You're an idiot. Write a screenplay.'" He admits that, until the murky post-production battle over Margaret, things had gone quite well for him in the movie business. You Can Count on Mecame together relatively easily and went on to win a sack of awards. On that project he got to work with Matthew Broderick, a buddy since high school.

"We are from the same sort of background," he says. "We even have the same number of letters in our name." That sounds like something they worked out when stoned in college. "Oh, in high school. Hey man, we're, like, the same height. Ha ha!" The protagonist of Margaret– named, counter intuitively, Lisa – appears to have been based on that earlier version of Lonergan. As played by Anna Paquin, she is stubborn, difficult and impulsive.

“I feel as she does about difficult situations,” he says. “I just want to plough through them and I am as unsuccessful as she is when I take that particular approach. So in that way I think we are very similar. It’s weird because these are characteristics I only know I have because others have told me about them.”

Well, being difficult seems eventually to have paid off. Once abandoned, Margaretis now among the era's most celebrated pictures. What an odd, odd story.