SITTING in Bewley's on Dublin's Westmoreland Street, Cathal Black looks relaxed and cheerful - not surprisingly. Korea, his first film in to years, has been receiving numerous awards and glowing reviews on the international festival circuit. Based on a John McGahern short story, the film stars Donal Donnelly, Andrew Scott and Fiona Moloney in a story set against a backdrop of Civil War rivalries and family tensions in the 1950s. Oh no - not another Irish film set in the 1950s?
"I knew that people would be asking why I'm doing this," says Black. "It's certainly not nostalgia. I think the dynamic of it is taking the 1950s and mixing them turning it around and examining memories of that period."
For anyone sick to death of a certain type of film set in that period, Korea should be a revelation, the first Irish film in a long time to intelligently use the language of cinema to explore the past. Black understands the contradictions and complexities of addressing a story like this from a modern perspective. "If you look at photographs from the 1940s and 1950s, the people's faces look shyer and more withdrawn. You have to ask yourself how do you impose modern day film technology on to something like that and come out with something that has some kind of meaning?"
With the most evocative landscape photography seen in an Irish film since Thaddens O'Sullivan's December Bride, and a lush score composed by Stephen McKeon and performed by the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the film is unabashedly romantic, something Black seems almost uncomfortable admitting. "No, I'm not, actually. I wanted to make something that was a lot gentler than what I'd done before. There were things that came through in the performances of the two young people, and Donal certainly brought other levels to it, that made his character more sympathetic."
But Black's films, often described as "bleak" or "controversial" by critics, have always had a romantic, elegaic vein running through them.
"It is something I seem to go for," he agrees. "The look, the lighting and the mood are important to me. We could have gone for a much grittier approach with Korea, but I thought the story was gritty and dark enough and I wanted to bring a certain style to that. The landscape where we shot has its own quiet, oppressive beauty. There were times when I thought we were almost getting too pretty, but the story pulls against that."
Born 43 years ago Dublin, Cathal Black spent the first 10 years of his life in Phibsboro. His father had gone into Guinness's as an apprentice at a very early age and worked his way up through the ranks. When Cathal was 10, his mother died. Soon after, his father was promoted and the family - three brothers and a sister - moved to Galway for six years. "All of that, was quite traumatic. My father also remarried, which wasn't very successful."
His father is dead now, but Cathal feels the family is "closer now than we were a few years back. I think I tended to be, not the black sheep, but the strange one in the family".
He hated school, attending St Vincent's Christian Brothers in Glasnevin, the Jesuits in Galway, then Cola isle Mhuire back in Dublin before leaving at 16. "I got different jobs, everything from selling shoes to working in a photographic studio.
From the age of 12, Cathal had been experimenting with photographic equipment and 8 millimetre film. "Myself and a friend called Terry Byrne knew a man up the road who had a camera that was still in its box. He didn't know what to do with it, so we used to relieve him of it now and again.
In his teens, he made two films which won awards from the old National Film Institute. "I don't even know where they are now. One film was strongly influenced by the films of Ingmar Bergman, who I admired enormously.
His interest led him to a job in RTE as a cameraman. "I felt paralysed by the place. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey talks about the fog machine being turned on every morning - that's the way I used to feel about RTE." After 16 months, he walked up to the office one day and scribbled his resignation on a piece of paper. I was on the studio floor and just thought `I can't take this anymore'. A few people thought I was crazy, that I should just say `Yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir" and take the money, but I couldn't do it."
He knew his father was bitterly disappointed when he quit the "pensionable job" and went on the dole. "There wasn't much support for the notion of being a film maker at that stage. I remember my father used to say it was a phase I was going through. At times I tried to give it up, but I kept drifting back."
Around the same time, he had met Joe Comerford, who was making his own films. The two began collaborating on Comerford's films, which formed a crucial part of the first faltering steps towards independent film making in Ireland. Three years after leaving RTE, Black made his own first "real" drama, an adaptation of John McGahern's short story Wheels. "I admired a lot of McGahern's work, and Wheels was probably close to a lot of what I was going through at the time in its treatment of the relationship and expectations between parents and their adult children."
RTE refused to show the film - he recalls being told that "the pictures were too dark to reach all the way down the country". He suspects that the use of the word "fuck" in the dialogue might have had more to do with it.
There were similar problems with Our Boys, a powerful drama documentary exploring the legacy of violence against children in Christian Brothers schools. The drama doc style of the film he describes as "a sort of primitive shorthand, because we couldn't afford to make a fully fledged feature". But in form as well as content, Our Boys was a subversive revelation in the context of Irish cinema. For 10 years, RTE refused to show the film.
"One controller of programmes I went to at one stage told me that they didn't show films like this during a time of recession It transpired that he hadn't seen the film, but had been advised not to show it.
"The kind of repression I felt as a kid - probably because of losing somebody at such a young age - a lot of that is evident in Our Boys, the sense that you could file something away and say `I won't forget this', setting the record straight - mind you, what's been happening recently makes Our Boys look like a tea party."
His next film, Pigs, set in a squat in Dublin's inner city, was Black's first production with a proper budget, financed by the newly established Irish Film Board.
"Pigs was a script nobody really liked. I think the Film Board just wanted to keep me working. But when they saw the finished film, they realised what I had been trying to do."
Pigs got a mixed critical reaction, written off by some as a bleak exercise in urban alienation. What they overlooked was the rich seam of black humour running through the film, along with Thaddeus O'Sullivan's glowing cinematography. The film was pigeonholed as a "brutal portrait" of Ireland's new urban wastelands. The fact that it was also a haunting and magical semi fantasy seemed to escape attention. "I saw it as a sort of strange, dark opera, but I think a lot of people felt that it was too dark and too bleak. The reaction seemed to be `we don't want to hear or see those things'. It was criticised from the other side for not being political enough - if I was making a film about dispossessed people I had to proclaim how awful this situation was. Some of the negative reviews made me feel as if I wanted to give up for a while."
WHEN the Film Board was shut down by the incoming Fianna Fail government in 1987, Black was one of those cast adrift. For the next seven years, he spent most of his time trying to hustle or develop projects, none of which made it to the screen.
"The only place to go for money was England or America. Also, I found that there weren't the scripts or writers out there. I think we're really only beginning to get those now." He found himself teaching on the new film courses which started springing up in Dublin in the late 1980s, an experience he feels was extremely positive. But there was to be a 10 year gap between Pigs and Korea - that must have been a nightmare?
"I think I teamed more about film by not doing it. It teaches you to be patient. There's a lot of compassion in Korea, which I believe I learned from that experience. I thought this might be the last one I ever do, so I might as well put my heart and soul into it.
"One of the peculiar things about this country is that we don't nourish or cherish our talent. It's a very brittle thing, because all you're dealing with is ideas, and they can very easily be badly damaged. It's a fragile, schizophrenic existence, and it needs a bit of protective energy around it."
He's living in Dublin with his partner, RTE researcher Teresa Smith, who "has been incredibly supportive of me through a lot of bleak times".
"I never got a real sense of stability," he says towards the end of our conversation. "I always felt like I was moving, with my mother's death and then from Dublin to Galway and back to Dublin and my father remarrying. So I'm attracted to the notion of anchoring things in personal memories and folk memories. I think that's what people abroad who've seen the film like about it.
"For me, the film is more like a dream than reality, so it should be elusive and shifting. The easiest thing in the world is to hit hard and be superficially controversial. It's far harder to get under the skin of people's lives and neither condemn nor applaud, just quietly observe.
