A banker of an idea for a movie

THE night of September 29, 2008, gave Ireland’s its longest-ever hangover. The infamous, ill-informed bank guarantee still casts a shadow over each new charge, each new stealth tax, each new protestation of the need for new ‘funding models’.

Wed, 29 Oct, 2014 - 00:00

Alan O’Riordan

It also gave the journalist, Colin Murphy, an idea for a play, Gauranteed!, which he has now adapted for the screen, with director Ian Power.

Guaranteed! began as a 600-word sketch, one of Fishamble’s Tiny Plays. Back then, Murphy was a theatre critic. His short play was commissioned for development by Fishamble. The result, via interviews and freedom-of-information requests, was documentary theatre. The performers carried scripts around the stage like civil-service memos. Its emergence at the same time as the Anglo tapes gave it a ready audience, willing to engage in the arguments, ready to hear the details Murphy had unearthed.

The film, entitled The Guarantee, is different, Murphy says. “A play can be driven by argument. You can get a buy-in from the theatre audience for that, for documentary theatre. But when an audience is coming to a film, they expect something else. This was written for television — the cinema release is a bonus — so you are writing with the remote control in mind, which reduces the number of times you can say ‘subordinated bondholder’.”

The more collaborative approach of film-making was, Murphy says, a learning curve. “With a film, you don’t have the same luxury of discussing things as in a play,” he says.“Films are hugely driven by character-led action. With the play, I retained control of the translation of journalism to drama. With the film, I’m still the writer, but it’s heavily collaborative. Essentially, you are the writer working to a boss, the director.

“Ian would say things that were impossible to argue against, like, ‘Look, you have no idea what it’s like when you get into an editing room, and this isn’t going to work when you get in there’. And when the director is saying that, you’ve either got to break with them or trust them. I think the film has, in the broad thrust, proved him right. In fact, there was stuff that I fought for in the script that he filmed, and he got into the editing room and it didn’t work. It was too flat. I totally accept that.”

Murphy praises Power’s eye for coherence and emotional clarity. “I think he felt I was bringing too much factual baggage to it. The challenge was not to throw that out, but to hone it down, to pare it down to the core story. I think it’s there. I think the core drama of a small group of people buckling under the weight of a crisis that they don’t understand, that is the core truth of it. That comes across well. The core debates around that: ‘what do we do with Anglo’? ‘Are the other banks in difficulty’? ‘Can we avoid a guarantee’? The essence of those debates is in there.”

The play was timely, and benefitted from the happy coincidence of the Anglo tapes. Murphy isn’t worried that the film has missed its moment; he thinks it can stand apart from its historical context. He tells the story of taking his script for proofing, to a cafe. “This gorgeous young waitress comes over and glances down, and says, ‘Oh, you’re writing a flim?’ I was like, ‘aha, 20 years I’ve waited for this moment’! ‘Well, I am, actually, yes’. She asks what it’s about and I say, ‘Oh, it’s about the bank guarantee.’ Blank. ‘You know ... Anglo Irish Bank?’ Blank ‘AIB?’ She says, ‘AIB the bank?’ I say, ‘Yeah, the big banking crisis six or seven years ago?’ She says, ‘I remember my dad saying something about that.’

“I thought, ‘great, fantastic’! While you need people to engage with the past in order to learn from it, you need unfettered optimism, too,” says Murphy. “I hope both audiences will see this, those who want to find it instructive, but also those who are just looking to see a good film. That it’s set in recent Irish political history might enhance it for some people, but it’s not a necessary part.”