Interview with Joe Ahearne, September 2000 - Part 4 of 4

Interviewer	One question I'd like to ask you which is how did you actually get to be what you are doing now? Did you always want to be a writer/director? Tell me a little bit about your journey.
Joe	I'd always wanted to be a writer/director but some people do it very quickly, for some people it takes a long time. It's taken me a long time. I did a physics degree at university which was a waste of time. Then I did a film post-graduate course, which you learn about the technicalities of film-making. And that was a very good course run out of Bristol. Then after that I became an editor, so I worked as an editor on documentaries and some corporate things as well and after a few years I started to get work as a director on corporates and things like that. And that sort of taught me a bit about directing and you get to work with telly actors and so on, but the scripts aren't usually that great. And then all the time I was writing away, writing screenplays and, you know, I'd sometimes get to meet production companies and they would like it a lot but not quite enough, so they'd send you on to screen writing studios where you'd meet professional screen writers and producers and workshop things, and they were very useful. Then finally, I think about '91 or '92, I made a short film which I wrote myself which was about 10 minutes long and I financed it myself - it cost a few thousand which I'd sort of saved together over the years and then that was chosen for the London Film Festival and the Edinburgh Film Festival, so that was kind of my first proper calling card. Then a few years after that I did another short film which was funded this time by the BBC for something called Tartan Shorts. And that was shot up in Edinburgh, and again that was for the Edinburgh Film Festival and went to a few international film festivals. That film that starred Neil Pearson and Siobhan Redmond who were the stars of Between The Lines which was a very acclaimed show at the time, in about '94, '95. And that got me into World Productions, where I talked to them about the vampire idea and around about the same time I moved from Bristol to London and got an agent. And I was just finishing off my documentary work. I was doing, kind of, BBC Survival type programmes. Then, I think really the directing came largely as a result of the writing. You know, I wrote the pilot for Ultraviolet and as a result of that they gave me a writing gig on This Life and once I'd written one of those episodes they gave me another and then they let me direct some. Around about the same time I also did a short film for HTV with Susannah Harker who went on to do Ultraviolet. And then once I did This Life I pretty much went straight on from doing that to doing Ultraviolet, so I didn't kind of stop until the end of '98 and last year I kind of really took a back seat and just did a bit of writing and took quite a lot of time off.
Interviewer	Which leads us toŸ what you're just about to embark on, which we won't tell too much about, but we'll have a little tease. What is it that you're just about to do?
Joe	Well, we're in pre-production now for a feature length thriller for Sky and possibly theatrical release which is a kind of a Hitchcock type thriller. Don't know if I should say anything else, really.
Interviewer	Tell us a little bit more, come on, just a little bit more.
Joe	Alright... well it's about a group of people who steal a painting, a Goya painting, and in the course of the raid one of the criminals stashes the painting. But after stashing it he gets concussed and wakes up with memory loss, so basically they have a painting worth millions in a place where nobody knows where it is. So the other members of the gang first try and beat it out of this guy. They don't believe that he's really lost his memory, that he's working some scam. When they finally do believe that he's telling the truth, having beaten him up several times, they then try and go for more psychological methods and try and use hypnosis. But because they're amateurs and because they've been beating him up for the last couple of weeks they can't get it to work and they can't get him to relax, unsurprisingly. So they send him to a Harley Street hypnotherapist, wired for sound, to try and recover his memory. And at that point they fall in with a very beautiful and duplicitous woman, once she finds out what she's really being asked to track, rather than shop them to the police she joins the gang and that's where the fun and games begin. So it's kind ofŸ it's drawing on a lot of Hitchcock stuff. I mean, Spellbound and Vertigo and also more recently films like The Last Seduction and The Usual Suspects. So there's a lot of gangster stuff going on in the cinema at the moment, people have probably noticed, and it's not really in that mould. It's much more a kind of romantic thriller. A lot of the gangster pics out at the moment, they're about guys and there's really no look in for women at all. And this is really more about a woman who goes in and kind of trashes a team of criminals, really. She's kind of cleverer than they are. And we're hopefully shooting that in a couple of months, in October.
Interviewer	Excellent. Now on a personal level I want to know, what are your favourite films?
Joe	My favourite films? Movie films?
Interviewer	Yes, we'll have a few movie films and then I want to know about television programmes.
Joe	Right, well my favourite movie films are Vertigo, Psycho, Notorious, Mishima [A Life in Four Chapters], which is by Paul Schrader, Alien, what else? A lot of things by Brian De Palma, Dressed To Kill is one of my favourites and Carrie and Phantom in Paradise. What else? The Grifters by Steven Frears is one of my favourites and Accidental Hero, which is by him as well. Cat People by Paul Schrader.
Interviewer	Well that's bloody plenty. What about television programmes?
Joe	Ballykissangel, The Cops, Cardiac Arrest. No, actually television-wise, oddly enough This Life, not just because I worked on it because I was a fan before I knew I was going to work on it. I watched the first series and I thought it was great. Other TV stuff, well the BFI just had their top 100 list out recently and like anybody else Fawlty Towers and Dr Who, but that's going back a bit. Modern TV not an awful lot. Ally McBeal I think is great and Frasier I think is great. I'm also a bit of a fan of Big Brother. I think that was a great concept and it is kind of horribly addictive and compelling. And it's a bit shocking that people are tuning onto that rather than drama but I think the same thing is happening in America. Like people are watching the reality shows and there's not an awful lot that's catching the people's imagination sort of drama-wise.
Interviewer	Until our new shows come out. Thanks for your time Joe and good luck with your new project.

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