Meet The Filmmaker: Paul Duane, director of All You Need is Death

The Cashel man's film has been nominated for the Best New Irish Feature Award at Cork International Film Festival

Thu, 26 Oct, 2023 - 02:00

Darragh Leen

Paul Duane’s All You Need is Death shows as part of Cork International Film Festival (Wed 15th Nov, The Everyman).

The folk horror is one of the entries in the inaugural CIFF Best New Irish Feature Award, supported by the Irish Examiner. It tells of a pair of folk song collectors who secretly record a forgotten, taboo ballad and unwittingly release something dark and terrifying.

What was your introduction to film?

I grew up in Cashel. There’s no artists or filmmakers in my family or in my background, it was just from when I was a kid I watched a lot of stuff on TV. RTÉ used to show a lot of silent movies like The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and all that stuff got to me at an early age. The first film for most people of my generation was a Disney movie, it was The Aristocats. I remember when I told my Dad that I remembered seeing it he didn’t believe me because I was only two. But the first time I remember watching a film and realising what it was a director actually did was Taxi Driver.

What made you actually want to become a filmmaker?

I went to art school to become a painter and they happened to have a film course, it was a completely half-arsed film course that was put together very spontaneously. But we got hold of cameras and started making films so I suppose it was really just by being among a group of people who were actually doing that that I started to think that this could be something I could actually do. I then made a short called Ink in the late 1980s and sold it to RTÉ for £1,500. So, that had me hooked on filmmaking.

Ben Stewardson in All You Need Is Death.

What would be your one wish for the film industry in Ireland?

I wish they’d stop thinking about the Oscars. There’s just an obsession here that a film isn’t any good unless it gets nominated for an Academy Award. We’re a part of Europe, we should be looking at the kind of films people make in Eastern Europe, in Germany, in France and not just the things that the Americans consider to be good cinema.

Any recent releases that've tickled your fancy?

I’ve just come back from travelling to film festivals and I’ve seen so many astonishingly good films from all over the world, mostly from places outside the English-speaking world. They blew me away completely. I saw the new Takeshi Kitano movie Kubi which is a masterpiece. I saw a French film from Bertrand Mandico, he just did a female version of Conan The Barbarian which is one of the maddest things I’ve ever seen, it’s called She is Conann. The big prize winner at Sitges this year was a fantastic horror film from South America called When Evil Lurks. This is what the future of cinema is.

What were the touchstones for you while making this film?

It’s about Ireland in 2023 really, because it’s got a load of the new Irish musicians in there, Ian Lynch from Lankum did the score, Darragh from Lankum is in it, Sean from the Deadlians, Roisin from the Mary Wallopers.

There’s all these bands that I love that have contributed in one way or another to the film. So there’s a lot of present day Irishness in it and that’s more of the influence than anything else. My thing with folk horror is the one thing that is never used in ‘folk horror’ is folk music. So I wanted to do something that I’d never seen anyone do before which was make a folk horror that accentuates the folk.