Aidan Gillen selects his favourites for Triskel Arts Centre

ACTOR Aidan Gillen played John Boy in the RTÉ crime series, Love/Hate, and will be back on our screens as Charlie Haughey, in Charlie, later this year. Gillen has selected seven of his favourite films for showings at Triskel Christchurch from Jan 17-20.

Gillen limited his selection to an era “because there are 100 films I’d like to have picked. It would be a widely held opinion that the ’70s were a golden age, for American cinema at least, and I’d subscribe to that.” He attributes it to “something as obvious as America emerging from the darkness of the Vietnam era, while still reeling from the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.”

Gillen says these tragic events, “combined with the arrival of a more intellectual, film-schooled director, influenced by the European new wave, led to much self-examination and really great, character-led cinema from people like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. We wanted to show some Cassavetes’ films, but there were copyright issues.”