Ireland in Seattle

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Seattle legend Dan Ireland, co-founder of the world-renowned Seattle International Film Festival. Dan ran the Egyptian Theatre in Seattle for years, and has worked as a producer on films since the 80s. He now lives in L.A. and directs his own films. I managed to catch up with him as he visited Seattle with his latest film, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont). Dan has worn so many hats revolving around the love and creation of film, conversation could be endless. We discussed the Oscars, SIFF, his current release, and the emotional rigors of growing old and losing ones you love.

Dan Ireland: There’s an old cliché that the older you get, you remember twenty years ago… but you don’t remember twenty minutes ago. And I don’t think that I’m that old, but I used to have a photographic memory. It was always hard to pull one over on me… now it’s pretty easy. “Oh really did I say that?� That’s one of the joys of life…

PJH: My church in Seattle has a lot of twenty somethings so it’s very strange as I’m turning thirty-three, it’s like I’m the older guy now.

DI: I was always the youngest guy in the group, and now I’m the oldest; I always gravitated toward people that were older than me—I don’t know why—but ever since I was 14, even my friends… I’ve always loved people that were able to get to a plateau in their life and be optimistic and wonderful and have that sort of celebrated life and this wisdom; there’s a little Ludovic Mayer in me for sure, there really is. I lived in Vancouver in an apartment building, and I was the youngest tenant in this amazing building right on the ocean. I use to go to sleep with the waves crashing against the shore, and all my neighbors were people in their late sixties, seventies… I just loved their spirit, and I was sort of the kid on the block so they were all entertained. I’ve always been fascinated by older people because there’s a wisdom that they have that you don’t, but there’s something that you can always share— and when I read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, that was the thing that resonated with me: the way it was able to take away a line of age and boundaries when you erase it and come down to the core, just two human beings who are at different points in their life but have a commonality that really brings them together. It was something that resonated in me and I’m really blessed it came into my life, at a time that was perfect; it came to me on my birthday. It is, and probably always will be, the greatest birthday gift I’ve ever gotten in my life.

PJH: And so you got the rights to the film, or first to the screen play, or…

DI: When I read the book I was smitten. And I wanted to do it and I’d had an experience with my mother a few months before, where she was really ill, and we didn’t know if she was going to make it or not… and she did make it. You know, things come to you and there’s a reason, and this film had a life of its own, and this might sound ethereal but I think the project chose me… it landed in my lap and within two months I was on a plane going to London. I’ve never had a film happen that quickly, I’ve never had less money to make a film, and I’ve had never had anything where I just immediately dove into it and it consumed me for a couple of years, right up to the movie poster. I’ve been involved in everything, every step of the way.

PJH: And you never even went to film school…

DI: No, but I created my own “film school� (the Seattle International Film Festival) and it was a lot more fun to learn about film that way, to go out there and just dive into it, and I’m still doing it.

PJH: The first Film Festival was in 1975?

DI: ‘76 actually… we opened the theater December 13th in ‘75. We opened up with The Gang's All Here which really set the stage for the rest of the adventure there.

PJH: You say your twenty-year memory is great; what are your recollections of the first Film Festival? Chaotic, a blur like somebody’s wedding day, or—

DI: We didn’t know how the reception was going to be cause it was our first year and the moment we opened our door it was mind blowing—it happened from day one and our opening picture was a German film called The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum and it was a winner; we had the respect of the audiences and the film critics at large in Seattle at the time. That year we got to introduce The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Grey Gardens, which is now going to Broadway as a musical… It's really wild to look back…

PJH: Have you always loved film and just drifted with the currents, or was there always a goal in your heart to direct your own film?

DI: No, no I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going... It was the sum total of being a producer and taking it on the chin for… um… certain films that I had no control over. There was a point in my career where you have to take responsibility, and if you produce a movie you have to stand there by your director&mdasj;good, bad, and indifferent—and when they take it on the chin, you take it on the chin. I took it on the chin for a couple of directors that really didn’t give a damn and I had actors coming to me during the shoot going “What do I do? What do I do?â€� I never wanted to get into the director’s sphere, but on a couple of films where the actor was like that, I knew the script and I would work with them a little bit; it only happened on one film really…

PJH: You don’t have to name it, I’m not going to push you…

DI: I use to think it was the worst experience of my life, and through a chain of people and events it led me to the novel of The Whole Wide World, which led me into my world as a director, so you know, everything has a purpose if you look at it, and [now I see] how it led me and forced me to make decisions and inspired me to tell a story I felt no one could tell better than me. As a director, you’re going to have to live with your film for a couple of years at least, in fact a couple of years immediate and then a whole lifetime, so at the point you give birth to it you’ll get people that respond to it, people that don’t, and people that are passionate about it one way or the other. The most important thing as a filmmaker—for your survival and continued mental heath—is that you have to be happy with it; if you’re not then, then you have to look deeply within your life, see what you’re doing, and either find a new profession or remind yourself why you got into it. On my second picture I went through a brutal time… I had to re-cut it, and I didn’t want to make the cuts, and I had an option of taking my name off the film, which would have been an incredibly big disservice to the actors that I had asked to put themselves on the line, and so I took the hit. From that point on I understood a lot more of the depth and the complexity of what I had to do, and what my profession was.

PJH: Mrs. Palfrey had a meager budget. Did you get excited that a $6.5 million film won Best Picture this year? How did you feel about the nominees? A lot of controversy over…

DI: Oh, I was thrilled that all five nominees were indies, they’re all from that world. It was great, you know, and always, I think your own personal favorite choice is whatever it is and…

PJH: What was yours?

DI: Brokeback Mountain. Hands down. It was a movie that crossed so many lines, yet remained such a beautiful vision of a story, and the fact it was gay was incidental. It’s a story about love and loneliness… it’s just beautiful, I loved the film, I thought it was so beautifully handled, acted, so poignantly directed and beautifully shot, it was like a resonant movie that lived within me, for it haunted me, it’s a movie that stayed with me, and you know I like Crash, but it comes at you with a baseball bat with issue, issue, issue, issue, issue, and I love the performances, I think they are remarkable… [but] I thought it underlined everything a bit too much for my taste… But you know what? That is the whole thing of being subjective, and movies are, and the Academy… I always think they try and dare to be different; everything was leaning toward Brokeback with the BAFTAs and Spirit Awards and they could sniff that. Crash sort of like came in from nowhere and they love to do that, they love to throw it off. You look back at films that have won the Oscar for Best Picture, and you look at the nominees sometimes and you’re just like “WHAT? Where did that come from? How could THAT win over THAT?� But it does…

PJH: So, so you do… One thing that we always try and challenge people with when we teach of film and spirituality classes is this misconception that films are just entertainment—which, if you actually look up the definition, is deceptive: they’re calling it something it’s not, they’re assuming it’s mindless diversion. Even you in some very small ways are defiantly inserting some worldview and some vision—you’re trying to transmit how you feel about things through your film. What do you feel is the general idea out there with filmmakers like yourself? What are your goals?

DI: If I can tell a story that touches me… moves me in some way, that I’m passionate about and that I feel that I can bring a point of view to that isn’t necessarily on the page—or perhaps you find it along the way—that’s so rare and its so great and—great question, by the way… The best way I can describe it is, if you’re an actor and you’re doing a take, what I look for is to see that the artist is lost at the end of the take, so they’re not like the actor giving you the “performanceâ€� just waiting for you to call cut. They’re there, and it’s alive and it’s real. Anything you can do to infuse that in the frame… if I don’t get it, my instinct will tell me and I’ll keep going until I get it.

When we were out shooting that last scene [from Mrs. Palfrey] in the hospital, it was raining and I saw all these people sitting around in the rain… older people just sitting there. They’d wheeled themselves out from the hospital to where we were, and it just got me. I wanted that last shot, because it’s about life. I thought [later, “Should I rip this out of the film? Is this too heavy-handed?� And that’s where you have to be objective, because you don’t want to get accused of being syrupy; but there was just a little tiny thing where she just looks up and goes, “Hello love,� and [Ludo] just meanders on; it’s a little manipulative and shameless perhaps in one way, but in another way, I saw it, it was there, it was there, and I wanted to capture that…

PJH: And the scene when Joan wakes up and says her husband’s name…

DI: That was tough…

PJH: That was probably one of the toughest moments for me sitting there with my wife…

DI: If you want to know what that was… that was me and my mom. Three months before, my mom was like on her death bed, and she survived, thank God, but I flew up from LA to the hospital when she was laying there on morphine and out of it. So anyway, that was tough to shoot, that was the toughest thing I’ve ever shot because it had to be right, and I didn’t want people thinking I’m trying to pull for tears… It was just it was something that happened with me and my mother, and yeah…

(Dan took a moment to compose himself here)

DI: Oh God, it’s so hard sometimes, you know? I lost my father in 1997, and it was tough… But I didn’t know him like I know my mother; he was an enigma in a lot of my life and I loved him, with all my heart, but my mother… that was my drive…I’m sorry I’m not usually like this… That was what told me I had to do [the scene] but you know as much as it ripped me apart to do it, it was so liberating.

PJH: Sorry, I didn’t mean to go all Barbara Walters on you…

DI: No, it’s okay. I’m usually stronger about it, but doing that scene was like hell; the poor actors, poor crew… I was so precise and demanded everybody, you know, silence and intensity and keeping it right, because I was keeping myself in check… And for Rupert, it was a challenge, it was his first full-blown movie role, to have that emotion…

PJH: And it works because its an…

DI: It’s real. He’s a beautiful actor, I love him, I love him; he needed help there in that last scene when he walks in and finds her, after she’s passed, and I brought my computer that day where I have all my iTunes, and I had Donnie Hathoway’s version of “Growing Up,� so when I let Rupert listen to that it was like bam, from eight takes of him getting so frustrated that he couldn’t go there to like letting him listen… I just said “take your time, you come back, when you walk through that door, just when you walk through that door, you’re right and we’ll go.� And you know what, he listened, and just walked through the door and looked at me, and I just went “action�… that whole last scene of him discovering Mrs. P, you just, it was beautiful… And you can’t get that from an actor a lot. You can get it once. That scene with Joan when she’s listening to him singing, that was take one, and I knew I’d never get it again so I immediately ran to my cinematographer and was like, “Send it to LA immediately, and tell me that it’s in focus and that it looks okay!� because I couldn’t ask her to do that again, I just wanted to be an observer in that moment, but I was praying… It’s always scary when you have one take because if it’s out of focus… And on this budget, if you didn’t get it that day, that was that.

PJH: Well it’s a pleasure to have you back in Seattle, Dan. Thanks again, man, for your candor and vulnerability…

DI: By all means. It’s just like a thrill to come here, trust me. And thank you for… I haven’t gone there for a while, so thank you… really, it’s uh… Wow, liberating.