Pat Collins has directed close on 30 films, from shorts to documentaries, to features. His first film Michael Hartnett, Necklace of Wrens won the Jury Award at the Celtic Film Festival in 2000. Since then he has directed Talking to the Dead which centred on the Irish funeral tradition. This was followed by Oiléan Thoraí, which won the Best Irish Documentary Award in 2003. The French company MK2 picked up Abbas Kiarostami – The Art of Living for international distribution in 2004.
He has directed documentaries on the Irish writer Frank O’ Connor, the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and the Connemara-based writer and cartographer Tim Robinson. His film John McGahern: A Private World won Best Irish Documentary at the Irish Film and Television Awards in 2005. The feature documentary Gabriel Byrne: Stories from Home was completed in 2009 and the film essay What We Leave in Our Wake in 2011. He completed his first feature film Silence in 2012.
More recently he directed feature documentary Living in a Coded Land which won Best Irish Documentary at Dublin Film Festival 2014, and Coco Television's three-part series 1916, documenting the 1916 Rising.
You use the word craft. Is that how you see it? That it's more of a skill learned over time rather than an innate talent?
It's a craft, but it's not like sculpture. Filmmaking is a collaborative thing. You need a lot of people to be working well to make a good film. Whereas if you're a sculptor or a painter there's nothing between you and the work itself except the actual material and the tools that you are working with. With film it is a craft, but a different type of craft. You need different types of skills to make a film work. You need a fair amount of ignorance as well, not taking no for an answer. Determination, perseverance and all those types of things. I do think it takes a long time to learn it. Some people emerge fully-formed at 23 or 24. I'm definitely not one of those. The type of Orson Welles. He made some good films after Citizen Kane, but his whole life was trying to live up to that.
You seem to like to work with certain people time and again. Are those relationships the key to a long career?
I've always worked with some...2 or 3 camera people and 3 or 4 editors over the course of twenty years. You pick different editors for different jobs. Some editors are more suited to one job or another. I've always been very lucky with the editors that I've worked with. I've got to the stage with them that we're comfortable. The camera then is hugely important and the sound is very important to me too. When you get a sound recordist like John Brennan, who I've worked with for years and years and years, maybe 16 years, it's about developing an understanding and once you reach that level of understanding it's kind of difficult to think about working with someone else. You feel like you'd be starting off from scratch again. Even with something like Song of Granite, working with Richard Kendrick and even though we'd talked about it beforehand, when I was looking back at some of the rushes it was surprising just how lovely some of it looked. Sometimes you look at rushes and you're disappointed, but this was one of those rare occasions where I was really luckily and every frame was beautiful. Richard and I are the same age, and I've a natural gravitation towards people of a similar age or background or similar outlook. Then Tadhg O'Sullivan has done a lot of work with me over the last 6-7 years. With What We Leave in Our Wake, Living in a Coded Land, Silence, and now Song of Granite. Each one of those is probably between 4 and 6 months. With something like Living in a Coded Land, it was shaped so much in the edit. I went out and shot and brought it back and the whole story was shaped in the edit. I actually gave Tadhg a writing credit when we were finished, because as well as the writing job because of how much it was shaped in the edit that the actual content of onnections, Connections that are feelings or where a fragment of something links two different subjects. It's much more crucial then when you're working in the edit that you are working with someone who can take that on. And the relationship with the editor for documentary is much more crucial. It's much harder, I think, to be a documentary editor, because something that you shot on the first day could be linked alongside something that you shot on the last. Usually with a feature film everything is contained within the one mood or the one location. Whereas in documentary everything can side alongside each other. You can make connections that you wouldn't see in the script or when you are shooting. It's a much more creative process in documentary editing, it's almost like writing. It's the most difficult stage too. You always go through different stages with the edit. You want something great and you think you have it one week.. Then the next week it's not working at all. You go through such peaks and troughs in the edit. One week it's your best work ever and the next it's the worst thing that you've ever made.
CinÉireann / December 2017 33