TRAILER: Adam & Paul Watch the trailer for Lenny Abrahamson's comedy-drama.

"I feel like I'm out on parole," quips Irish director Lenny Abrahamson when he thinks back to his days spent working in TV advertising. "I hope I don't re-offend and have to go back in..." It was the Irish Film Board that finally offered him a taste of creative freedom, greenlighting his tragi-comic drama Adam & Paul. The film won an Audience Award for Best First Feature at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2004 and was nominated for an Evening Standard Film Award after its brief UK cinema run in 2005. Hopefully its DVD release will now allow it to reach the audience it deserves.

Following one day in the life of two Dublin junkies, it was a tricky pitch for the director. "I think if the film board hadn't come in, we wouldn't have gotten the money," Lenny recalls, "because the premise didn't suggest a slamdunk at the box office. Also, I hadn't directed a feature before, but I'd done a lot of work in commercials and made a short [3 Joes] that was quite significant. So, although it looked like a difficult sell on paper, they did have a bit more confidence in me because of that. They also did get the script."

Abrahamson - who won Best Director at the 2004 Irish Film Awards for his efforts - wouldn't entertain the idea of relocating to England with English backing because "the characters are quintessentially Dublin", and "there's also this strong Beckettian influence that ties it to the place". Still, with just 400,000 Euros and a 24-day shooting schedule, it was a daunting prospect to undertake a largely outdoor shoot on the streets of a major city. Abrahamson knew he had to have the support of local people. "We found that if we just approached people, told them what we were doing and dealt with them respectfully, we got amazing cooperation. I think, ethically, it's vital to do that anyway, but practically it's really wise. I've seen big films come in military-style and erect a perimeter fence around themselves for security, and that's one way of doing it. But I think the other way is better."

Ballymun, a crime-ridden housing estate in Dublin's Northside, is just one of many precarious locations where the director did a lot of networking. "It is a notoriously difficult place to work," he admits, "but we got on really well with the residents. They were really supportive of what we were doing. We had night shoots out there where we recruited maybe one or two locals for security, just people who knew the area, and we had no trouble."

For the most part Abrahamson had the proper permissions from local authorities to shoot in these areas, but on occasion he did have to bend the rules a little. "We dealt with the city council in a very straight-up way, but we did nip in and out a few times to shoot in places where we probably shouldn't have," he chuckles. "One place where we shot, and I won't say where it was, but they wanted an awful lot of money. It was just crazy, but a bigger film [Inside I'm Dancing] was shooting very nearby on the same night. They paid all the fees and had the right to be there. Their security thought we were a small second unit, so we quickly nipped in and shot our scenes and left very quickly."

It is a notoriously difficult place to work, but we got on really well with the residents.

Working with a small, easily manoeuvrable crew obviously had its advantages, but shooting on the streets at night threw up other hurdles. "We were so small we didn't have the capacity to do full-scale night shoots," Lenny reflects. "We had to go where there was light already and then maybe slightly augment it ourselves. The scene on the illuminated bridge, when they're really wasted? Apart from the fact that it's a really striking location [Dublin's Millenium Bridge], we shot there because it's free light."

That's the sort of compromise Abrahamson wasn't used to making, having worked on TV ads with extremely healthy budgets. With second feature Garage due to shoot this summer - it's set in rural Ireland and looks at the flipside of the Celtic Tiger economy - he cheerfully asserts that there's no going back now. "Coming from shooting commercials where you have all the toys and all the money, everything feels a bit sterile," he says. "It's great to have constraints, and in a way that is liberating because you don't have that big machine behind you all the time."

Adam & Paul is released on DVD from Monday 10th July 2006.

Stella Papamichael | Published 06 July 06

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