Pat Shortt;
The British & Irish Film Festival Luxembourg (BIFFL) 2024 Autumn Edition is taking place from Wednesday 11 to Monday 30 September, with the core festival starting on Monday 16 September and closing on Saturday 21 September.
Ahead of the film festival (now in its fifteenth year), Chronicle.lu had the opportunity to sit down with Pat Shortt, one of the special guests who will be present for a Q&A session at the Opening Screening on 16 September. Pat Shortt is an Irish actor and comedian, and the director of the short film Warts and All, which will be screened at the Cinémathèque in Luxembourg-Ville, following a screening of Farah Nabulsi’s The Teacher.
Chronicle.lu: Your career has taken different directions from stand-up comedy to acting and now behind the camera. Please tell us about this change, or rather evolution in your role as storyteller. Or maybe you view your role rather differently.
Pat Shortt: I started out as a musician. I went to art college in Limerick, where I met up with John Kenny, who was a comedian, and we both were musicians as well. I kind of started playing music with him. He was doing stand-up comedy and a mix of music and when I started working with him, I was doing the sound and lights and playing a bit of music. I suppose I often look on that as my apprenticeship in the entertainment world, because at the very young age of eighteen, I started working with John, we developed characters and wrote comedy and developed a style of comedy that was quite unique. We developed two characters called “D’Unbelievables” who were two musicians in a show and that just caught the imagination of the Irish people. The characters were rural Irish characters, “indigenously Irish” as one reviewer called it, and we became a big success in the ‘90s in Ireland. Out of that, we were very big on the comedy circuit. I got my first TV role in Father Ted as Tom as some people would know. [...] Myself and John both [had] an interest in film. I also did my first film with Mia Farrow at that time and Brendan Gleeson and Patrick Bergin called Angela Mooney Dies Again. I was very young at that stage to do that role. [...] Brandon Gleeson and I became very good friends from then on, and we've done about seven or eight films.
Myself and John we brought out videos [of D’Unbelievables] every Christmas or every second. We started with a live video of the live show in the theatre. But then we decided to step away from live video and film a video that was more based around a script that we had written for a live show and make it more like a film, except it was an hour long with a very low budget. [...] That was my first interest really in directing. After that I started getting the odd film role while still retaining my music and comedy and doing live tours and then I started a TV show called Killinascully in Ireland. […] It was written pre watershed and designed for family audience and it was a comedy, but a very Irish comedy. And I was a year or two into that and I was approached by Lenny Abrahamson, Mark O'Halloran and Ed Guiney, whose head of Element Films, to do the film Garage. That was in 2007 and that really changed everything for me. It became a huge hit in Ireland and some people say it was a change in Irish filmmaking, from the point of view of an Irish film telling you a very Irish story and not trying to be global, not trying to be big, looking into ourselves. In fairness, [they] had done it before with a film called Adam and Paul, a beautiful film about two drug dealers on the streets. [...] Garage was about a guy living on his own in a garage in County Offaly in rural Ireland. It's a simple and sad story about him being bullied and all the rest, but it was very much an Irish story told from an Irish perspective, and I think that's what people mean by calling it a gear change in Irish film. [...] From then on, I started getting roles in movies and as an actor. [As] a comedian, you're always thought of as being a comedian, a character, and sometimes we don't look outside of that. That was something that I didn't fall into, thankfully, but I could have, and I think Garage was a big part of that and it allowed me to be more versatile.
Chronicle.lu: You mentioned D’Unbelievables. In that, and some of the other material you have done solo as well, we can see just how much you enjoy riffing off an audience. For example, when you brought D’Unbelievables over to Luxembourg at Melusina, you took the audience up to the bar during the interval and it became part of the whole show. It must be very different going from that buzz of riffing off a live audience to the more calculated behind the camera side of things. How do you feel about that? Is one better than the other?
Pat Shortt: They're different disciplines, and you have to understand that difference. A film that I did called The Flag would probably be the closest to some of the live work I've done. Where the producers and directors wanted me to kind of bring that energy on to the film. But of course, with film you shoot it from one angle, then you’ve got to shoot from another angle. You've got to recreate that energy and performance each time. We wouldn't have had the luxury at the time of a three-camera shoot. I found that very, very difficult because you had to really go back in and you know it’s one thing doing a dramatic performance which could be difficult too, and then recreating for the mood shot, the wide shot or whatever. But when you're doing an almost ad lib character, then trying to recreate that is different. When you're in front of a live audience, there's a couple of different factors. One, you’re doing it once, there, for everybody. Two, you get an instant reaction from an audience. Whereas on film you get no reaction. You might get the crew sniggering and laughing and giving you the thumbs up after the first take, but by take 10 they’re not doing that anymore!
Chronicle.lu: Moving forward to the here and now: Warts and All. How did you became involved in the project and did you initiate it or were you invited onto it?
Pat Shortt: Lee Crowley is the producer working with Avenue Productions, who produced it. Lee and I had been working on a different movie, looking at scripts and this that and the other. He sent me a script and asked me would I look at it and maybe give it a script editing, put more comedy into it, tell him what I thought about it. I think in truth, he was just estimating if I was interested in it. I read it and I thought it's just a beautiful film. It's a lovely warm love story, and it's a very interesting approach. As I alluded to earlier on with D’Unbelievables, then with seven years of Killinascully and two years with another series called Mattie, I had written, produced and worked very closely with the directors. I did have an inkling that I'd like to follow that line. I'm also very conscious of what a director has to take it on. [...] There's all the pre-production, all the work with the costumes, lighting, sound, and then post-production. It's a huge project that I didn't take on lightly because of other projects I had on the go, but I did like the script a lot. I just thought that Michelle Lehane, who wrote it, did a lovely job. She was the lead actress as well. I read it and read it and thought what I'd do with it, and then I went back to Lee and told him I'd love to do it. I think it's a nice story and it's different for me as well. I think some people might think I may be more in your face comedy, slapstick and all that kind of stuff, and I wanted to take on a subject matter which is more like a love story and push myself a little bit in that area, and I really, really enjoyed doing it. I’m a great believer in learning from the best, and for this genre I took particular inspiration from Richard Curtis, who directed Love Actually.
Chronicle.lu: When and where did you do the filming?
Pat Shortt: We did it in different locations around Galway city. It’s actually an area where Lee lives. We discussed what we might need for locations, and he had a locations guy who went out and did a load of research before it and found those beautiful scenes. I wanted to make it intimate as well. When you go out into Ireland, every backdrop is beautiful, and it's costing you nothing- you don't have to build it! So I always like to push things outdoors as much as possible. Starting scenes will always have to be done indoors, but there's a couple of things in the movie where we had them up on the hill just to get that beautiful experience and that lovely intimate moment. And then that cosiness in an Irish bar after they came off the walk. The other thing which I got from Richard Curtis was his use of music. I found it fascinating. [...] There's a great musician who I have collaborated with a lot, Darragh Dukes, and he did all the music for Warts and All. It's just beautiful. The costume designer collaborated with my wife, who has a vintage clothes shop and she supplied us with a lot of the costumes, which just looked great and fitted the music and scenes really well.
Chronicle.lu: Audiences will be able to see you in the screening of The Banshees of Inisherin on 26 September. Will we see you back in Luxembourg next spring in your next film? Also in front of camera in Dead Man's Money, when BIFFL plans to include it in its Spring Edition?
Pat Shortt: Yeah, I'd love to. We've just been accepted to Los Angeles Newport Festival as well, and hopefully Luxembourg. It's a lovely film. I had such a great time making that film. It had a fantastic cast and a great director. I’d love to be back out in Luxembourg.
Chronicle.lu: One final question. Do you have any future plans in directing a short film or feature film?
Pat Shortt: I've nothing at present. I am talking to someone about a short film that I'm looking at but I'm slow to jump in to anything. I've got some other projects on the go at the moment, music and comedy, and a TV series for next year which I’m working on, so I've a lot going on. I don't have any plans at present, but I think I will end up directing.
Further details about the BIFFL 2024 Autumn Edition: https://chronicle.lu/category/film-festivals/51283-15th-british-irish-film-festival-luxembourg-2024-autumn-edition-to-comprise-20-screenings
