Culture That Made Me: Gerard Stembridge, filmmaker and Scrap Saturday creator
Gerard Stembridge in Schull. Picture: Orla Lavelle
Gerard Stembridge was born in 1958 in Limerick. In 1989, his satirical radio comedy series Scrap Saturday, which he created with Dermot Morgan, began broadcasting to wide acclaim.
In 2000, he wrote the screenplay for Ordinary Decent Criminal which starred Kevin Spacey. He has directed several films, including Guiltrip and About Adam, and written several novels.
He’s a patron of the Fastnet Film Festival, in Schull on May 22-26. He will host a horror symposium on Saturday and the festival’s awards ceremony on Sunday.
My early teenage years were mostly consumed with mystery stories from Agatha Christie. She's not a particularly good stylist or prose writer, but she wrote fantastic plots and stories. Books say something about yourself. I loved the Poirot books, the character and his oddness. Reading mystery novels makes us feel smart because it's like getting the crossword puzzle right. Am I smart enough to spot this or is she outsmarting me again?
As a teenager, I read Joyce’s Ulysses. Freely I admit I pushed myself through stuff, thinking at stages, What in God's name is this about? But fundamentally the Leopold Bloom character got my attention. I began to get into it, following the character’s mind and understanding how his brain worked day-to-day; the famous stream of consciousness. Even though I was closer in age to Stephen Dedalus’s character, he did nothing for me. I found it so heavily intellectual and opaque, a lot of vocabulary was beyond me. But the Bloom stuff flowed; what kept me going was following his journey.
Flann O'Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds became a favourite novel at one point. I read it at a time when forms of comedy were attracting me. Funnily enough, my love of Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen has not persisted. It was a teenage delight. I adored him and just laughed and laughed. Then into my twenties he receded from my mind and stopped being interesting to me. Maybe it was because then I started writing comedy myself.
Spike Milligan was another one from that period. To the teenage brain, it was a constant reversal of expectations. I'll quote you a line straight away. His description of a room: “The curtains were drawn, but the furniture was real.” That line made me laugh out loud – the unexpectedness of it. He had a style to upend expectations so that the sentence started one way and then reversed itself in a way that made for an automatic laugh. I devoured his stuff.
Watching Sunset Boulevard gives me immense pleasure. It has a tone to it. It has great comedy. It has fantastic performances. Billy Wilder creates a certain atmosphere. It’s a film you can watch and appreciate at different levels – it's good old gothic horror about what can happen to you to as a writer if you're not careful; it’s a metaphor for Hollywood and how Hollywood operates; and it's also a fantastic story about the dangers of aging and trying to preserve your youth. It has this great line, “There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.”
An actor I've watched recently and love is Sandra Hüller, a German actress. Recently, she's been in The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. Just those two films – the variety she showed, particularly Anatomy of a Fall because she’s virtually the entire film. It’s impossible to take your eyes off her. The way she held that tension: Am I guilty? Am I not guilty? What exactly am I thinking?
People make a distinction between stage acting and screen acting, but within screen acting there is a difference as well. With Sandra Hüller, she understands in screen acting the audience is encouraged to get right inside the mind of somebody. She doesn’t necessarily show you the message on her face or with a gesture, but it's going on somewhere behind her eyes.
A book that changed my ideas about writing is Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. It was published in 1915, less than a year into the First World War. On the face of it, it's a straightforward story about two couples doing the Grand Tour in Europe who keep encountering each other. It’s the first example of something that's since become a requirement in literature: the unreliable narrator. It's a Victorian story told in a modernist style where the narrator keeps correcting himself, saying, “Oh, no, actually it didn't happen that way. It happened this way. I didn't remember it correctly.” I remember reading it thinking this is extraordinary. This is the way people are, how their life works, how memory works. It made me realise something important to consider when you're writing – the whole business of who’s telling the story.
A great play that immediately pops into my mind is Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I grew up in one-channel television land, watching all kinds of things. I ended up one night watching Mike Nichols'film version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
It was incredible. I was glued to it, and I was like 14. Obviously, I was watching a movie but it very strongly stuck with [the format of] the play. I often think back on it, watching the two great stars having a go at each other. It’s a great play.
Plays on television obviously influenced me almost before plays in theatre. I remember seeing an RTÉ production of The King of the Castle by Eugene McCabe. Niall Tóibín played the lead role. Louis Lentin directed it. I remember thinking, what a fantastic play and what a brave choice from RTÉ at the time, because of course it had a controversial subject matter – basically this aging farmer who couldn't produce an heir trying to persuade a visiting journeyman who he knew would be moving on to impregnate his wife, and people would think it was his child. Imagine that play on Irish television in the 1970s.
When I started directing theatre, Shakespeare was my first great interest. Shakespeare is such fun for a director – you can do all kinds of things conceptually, period-wise, you can cut it, you can shift it around. Whereas, say, a Beckett play has iron rules governing it. Shakespearean plays are full of rich characters. His language is important because it’s not just pretty language for its own sake. He was lucky to be writing at a moment when something was happening with language – it was breaking through into a different understanding of the world. It was the first time English was being explored as a literary language. He established a way of using language and a way of attaching language to character that has stayed with us.
