Kevin Liddy has been working on Country since 1993, when he sent the first draft of the screenplay into the Film Board, after completing his first short film, Horse. It's been a long and arduous process - when producer Jack Armstrong came on board, there were still three years of money-raising to go. "For me it was just a royal pain," says Liddy. "I made another short, A Soldier's Song, in between, just to do something. Then three weeks before we were due to start shooting, 25 per cent of the money dropped out, which was a complete head-wrecker, with a crew on board being paid and everything."
The production was rescued with the assistance of another producer, David Collins, but Liddy hopes that his next film won't be such a long haul. "People say that if you do the first one, and it goes well, then it's a bit easier to do the second one." He is currently in discussions with French company Pandora about directing a script set in South Africa next year: "But the next thing I do, I'd like to direct someone else's script. I never wanted to get into this writing lark in the first place. It was just that I wanted to do a short, so I wrote it, and then I did another one. But I always just wanted to direct, not to write. I'm not a natural-born writer, it's just force of circumstance."
He agrees that Country shares certain thematic concerns with Horse and A Soldier's Song, set as it is in a (geographically unspecified) rural community, and tracing the troubled relationship between a widower farmer (Des Cave) and his two sons. Simmering male violence, inarticulacy and hidden secrets crop up in all three films.
"That does go back to my childhood, where expressing yourself or having an interest in the finer things of life like music or art would have been viewed with suspicion," says Liddy. "One of the things I was trying to do this time was write a couple of women into the movie. But they're certainly visually quite alike, and they do share those rural themes. After Country, I think maybe I'll take a break from the rural stuff for a while."
He disagrees, though, with the simplistic proposition that films set in the rural Irish past are somehow less relevant or desirable than contemporary, urban dramas. "Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?" he asks. "I'm not partisan in terms of the urban/rural thing. There's nothing wrong with making a car chase movie. I like going to see those kinds of things. I suppose the thing is that they're less personal. That doesn't mean that personal films are necessarily any better - they can be as boring and naff as anything. But obviously Country is a very personal thing for me, which can be more potentially dangerous, because you're left standing there, and if you fail, you fail in a very exposed way. I know that this terrain has been exploited before, but so what? People still live in the countryside.
"This film isn't really for the 18 - 25 audience. It's more 25 65, but that's an audience as well. It doesn't all have to be Pulp Fiction stuff. I wanted to shoot this in a different way, a more Terrence Malick or European arthouse kind of way, to make it look like a real movie, rather than some kind of paddywhackery. I know some people will go `Ah Jaysus, not another rural Irish movie', but hopefully if it looks good and sounds good, then it will have a seductive power which can overcome all that."
Also, I suggest, there haven't been quite as many of those rural Irish films as some people suppose. "I agree. I don't think there's been that many of them. When I ask people to come up with a list of them, they only end up with one or two."
The closest reference point for Country, it seems to me, are the various adaptations of John McGahern's work, particularly Cathal Black's film, Korea, which explores similar emotional terrain to Country and shares its cinematic sensibility and love of landscape. "McGahern is a great writer and he's certainly an influence. I don't mind people saying that this is like Korea or that it's McGahernesque."
As it happens, Black taught at DIT Rathmines (now Aungier Street) in the 1980s, where Liddy studied film after moving from his native Limerick at the age of 16 to study acting. "I had inclinations to get the hell out from an early age," he says. "I went to the Focus Theatre, studied acting under Deirdre O'Connell. Then my mother told me that a cousin of mine ran a film course in DIT, which was in Rathmines then. I didn't know anything about that. There were no film schools. The only films being made were on 16-millimetre by the likes of Bob Quinn and Cathal Black. It's very different from now.
"I was at the programme launch of the Cork Film Festival, and there was Damien O'Donnell, Paddy Breathnach, Conor McPherson and myself, and we'd all made features, which is kind of healthy. It's better to be doing that and then you can argue about whether you liked them or not, rather than sitting on a barstool somewhere bitching about it."
Filmed partly in Northern Ireland and partly in the Republic, Country's setting is deliberately kept vague. It seems to be set somewhere around the Border at some point in the late 1960s or early 1970s. But there is no evidence of any sectarian conflict, not much sign of organised religion, or anything else that might specify the time or place.
"When I look at it, I don't even think it's necessarily an Irish picture, much less from some particular area," says Liddy. "It's `the country', and when we showed it to Spanish people at the San Sebastian Film Festival, they could absolutely relate to that. I wanted to keep that time-frame vague as well. I'd lean towards that period myself, because of my own memories, but sometimes it's hard to make contemporary films look good. The neons and the plastics are tacky."
"Because it's the kind of story which some people might think is a bit bleak, we wanted to give it a visual richness and elegance which would work against those qualities. But I'm not giving out about growing up in the country in this film. Country isn't some kind of searing social commentary. It's just not that kind of picture. It's a classical picture. Even the idea of the woman coming back to the family, and bringing a sense of warmth and an aesthetic sensibility. Some might call it a cliche, but I'd call it a classical story of a moment in a boy's life when his life changes."
Country is at selected cinemas
