Arts Life

The Innocent Eye Test by Mark Tansey makes John Vaughan smile every time he sees it.

John Vaughan

What I do: I am a screenwriter and short film maker.

Favourite Café: Café Mexicana in Cork, I’ll go there any chance I can get.

Current listening: No such thing for me, I’ve got close to 500 albums, so every day has a different sound.

The last gig I attended: The RTE Concert Orchestra conducted by the late Ron Goodwin performing his greatest scores. A special night for me as I actually got to meet him afterwards.

The last book I read: Moscow 1941 by Rodric Braithwaite

The last exhibition I attended: The Art of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum London. Impossible not to be moved at such beauty in the face of such horror.

My favourite film: Too many to count, if I started this article would be a novel.

My favourite writer/artist/musician: I love comics, so my favourite comic book writer would, at the moment, be Michael Carroll at 2000AD.

My favourite artist: A tie between John Cooper, the late Mike Western and Joe Colquhon, all of whose work I read as a kid.

My favourite work of art: The one that always makes me smile, even thinking about it, is The Innocent Eye Test by Mark Tansey.

My favourite venue: Any cinema on a Saturday night.

The writer/artist/musician I would most like to meet: A wise man once told me: “Never meet your heroes.” But I think I would have loved to have met John Ford!

Bio: As a short screenwriter and film maker, John has been nominated on countless occasions for different awards and his films have been shown at festivals across the world. His last film, My Dad, shot for RTE, took the Best Picture Award (Short) at the Action On Film Festival in California.

Upcoming: John’s film, Victory?, a science fiction thriller set in Cork two years after an Alien invasion, will be broadcast from Feb 13-19 on the RTE Storyland website. Viewers can watch and vote for it at www.rte.ie/drama/featured/storyland.

Interview: Marc O’Sullivan