Meet the Filmmaker: Paul Mercier, director of Prospect House at Cork Film Festival
Paul Mercier shows his Prospect House film at Cork International Film Festival.
Paul Mercier is a filmmaker from Dublin. His film Prospect House is showing at the Everyman on Friday as part of Cork International Film Festival. The satirical drama is one of the entries for the Best New Irish Feature award, supported by the Irish Examiner. Renowned musician and composer Mel Mercier – the filmmaker’s brother – provides the soundtrack to the film. Also a playwright, Paul Mercier was a founding member of the Passion Machine Theatre Company.
My first experience of film was way back in the 1990s. That was actually my first experience of the Cork International Film Festival too because one of my short films was shown there. It was all really an extension of what we were doing with the Passion Machine theatre company at the time.
In tandem with that we were doing, some films that started with shorts and eventually led to me and Anne Gately setting up a production company called An Pointe Productions. We’ve done three features since setting up the company and those films are connected to the work we were doing in theatre. This film is no different, owing a lot to that experience as well.
There’s things that you can do in one that you can’t do in the other obviously but in terms of practice the processes are different. Rehearsal is different. There isn’t the same freedom in rehearsal time with film as there is with theatre. I remember one actor saying to me during a film we made that it was great to be able to learn the lines, do it once, then throw away the script for good [laughs].
It’s about the process of storytelling but also how that story is filmed and how we go about creating a story just playing with truth. It’s also about our understanding and interpretation of history and heritage. What heritage means to us, essentially.
You could also say that it is about a group of activists, a combination of artists who get together to save the destruction of a house that is important to them for various reasons. They all have a different understanding of what that heritage is so they all have different reasons for wanting to save Prospect House.
They all then have opinions on what angle the story should be told from and that causes a conflict, if you get me. Somebody then has to crack the whip and make a decision on what sort of story will be told and in the making of that a sort of fiction is born.
