Irish Film Institute -BLOG: MAKING TALKING TO MY FATHER – BY DIRECTOR SÉ MERRY DOYLE

BLOG: MAKING TALKING TO MY FATHER – BY DIRECTOR SÉ MERRY DOYLE

My lat­est film Talk­ing to My Father was funded by the Arts Coun­cil’s — REEL ART Scheme and pre­miered at the Dublin Film Fes­ti­val 2015. It has now been invited to screen at the Amer­i­can Archi­tec­ture and Design Film Fes­ti­val and will have an exclusive the­atri­cal run at the Irish Film Institute from Friday October 16th (visit the film page for more information).

The film Talk­ing to My Father came about through an unusual set of events. The archi­tect Simon Walker  shared office space with my pro­duc­tion com­pany Loopline Film. Over the years we had end­less con­ver­sa­tions about the golden era of Mod­ernism in Ire­land and I wanted to make a film with Simon at the helm that explored this era. I filmed sequences with Simon explain­ing how archi­tec­ture and art was used by the gov­ern­ment of the day as a kind of brand­ing of mod­ern Ire­land. I intended the start­ing point to the time  Michael Scott erected an elab­o­rate pavil­ion for the New York World’s Fair in 1939 as a sym­bol of a new, mod­ern Ireland. Then I dis­cov­ered the film I actu­ally wanted to make was elsewhere!

Talking to my Father

Loopline Film offices in Lad Lane Dublin closed after our land­lord lost his shirt dur­ing the bank­ing cri­sis. One of the rooms in Lad Lane was rented by my friend the archi­tect Simon Walker. We found much smaller premises on Bag­got Street and when Simon moved in I saw that he had boxes and boxes of archi­tec­tural doc­u­ments relat­ing to the life’s work of his father Robin Walker.  He filled me in about Robins life as a young archi­tect, which included study­ing with Le Cor­busier in Paris and a stint work­ing along­side Mies van der Rohe in Chicago before return­ing home to Ire­land in the late Fifties to work along­side Michael Scott who later made him a part­ner in Scott Tal­lon Walker. Scott Tal­lon Walker were at the fore­front of Ire­land’s rapid expan­sion after years of aus­ter­ity and emigration.

As a part­ner in Scott Tal­lon Walker, Robin Walker became a key agent in this nation-building process. The film accom­pa­nies Robin’s son Simon, also an archi­tect, on an explo­ration of some of the most inter­est­ing and iconic pub­lic and pri­vate build­ings pro­duced dur­ing this rich period of cul­tural opti­mism and civic idealism. Simon, though a great admirer of his father’s legacy, also remem­bered with sad­ness the early sev­en­ties when his father with­drew from the world of archi­tec­ture and to some extent his family.

I was intrigued and began to think of how this might become a film. Our con­ver­sa­tions became the basis for a short pilot I made for a sub­mis­sion to the Irish Arts Council’s — Reel Art Scheme. For the pilot I sug­gested that Simon write a let­ter to Robin and this device worked so well that the film became a reality.

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The first film­ing took place in Bothar Bui the beau­ti­ful villa Robin built for his fam­ily on the wild Beara Pen­nisula in South­west Cork.  Simon’s sis­ter Sara looks after Bothar Bui and main­tains its upkeep by rent­ing it out. It is a very pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion for artists and archi­tects and for a few weeks the Walk­ers, their many friends and an army of young chil­dren inhabit this paradise. The magic of this won­der­ful archi­tec­tural mas­ter­piece was cap­tured in all its glory by my long­time cin­e­matog­ra­pher Paddy Jordan.

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The thread of Simon’s let­ter was the con­duit for the film’s jour­ney into Robin’s archi­tec­tural legacy . As we began our jour­ney to film Robin’s work, Simon told how his fathers func­tional approach to archi­tec­ture did not appeal to some and con­tro­versy dogged his early build­ings like the ‘Opera House’ in Cork and his ‘Bord Failte Head­quar­ters’ in Dublin. In one scene Simon took his stu­dents to the now empty ‘Bord Failte’ build­ing and shed light on Robin’s intent to cre­ate har­mony between his cre­ation and the Geor­gian build­ings that sur­rounded it.

This core tenet of Robin’s approach to site is stun­ningly demon­strated in our sequence at ‘The Week­end House’ in Kin­sale. This mod­ernist mas­ter­piece stands on pil­lars over­look­ing Kin­sale Har­bour.  The house went through a period of decline until the Healy fam­ily bought it and set about restor­ing it to Robin’s orig­i­nal design. Iron­i­cally they chose Simon Walker to over­see the work and this led to one of the best scenes in the film.

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Simon’s journey unearthed many other magical architectural encoun­ters with his father’s legacy. He con­veys how Robin’s Open Vol­ume plan for the Restau­rant at UCD has been blocked up with par­ti­tions and his rad­i­cal plan for the stu­dents to sense free­dom in the build­ing is now sadly oblit­er­ated. The same image is con­veyed when Simon vis­its Robin’s Art Build­ing at Maynooth Col­lege. The build­ing once sat like a jewel on the land­scape but is now unloved and uncared for and can hardly be recog­nised as it is swamped by new ugly struc­tures all round. Robin’s clar­ity of design can still be seen in all its glory when we wit­ness Saint Columba’s Sci­ence Block and his cam­pus at Wes­ley College.

Robin’s with­drawal from archi­tec­ture coin­cided with the oil cri­sis of the early sev­en­ties when the ideals and ideas of the Mod­erns was aban­doned for a more spec­u­la­tive approach to pub­lic build­ings. Robin left the stage and con­cen­trated on writ­ing which are con­veyed through­out the film by read­ings from the actor Patrick Bergin.

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I designed the film as a lone jour­ney by Simon into his father’s life and I delib­er­ately avoided ‘talk­ing head’ inter­views and let the build­ings speak for them­selves. The orig­i­nal music com­posed by Stano and the haunt­ing sound­scape by Philippe Fau­jas fuelled the mag­i­cal atmos­phere of the film. We were also gifted to be able to fea­ture the great poet Sea­mus Heaney recite his poem An Archi­tect which he wrote after Robin’s pass­ing as a gift to  his wife Dorothy Walker. The film’s pri­mary focus was  to bring out the human story of Simon reach­ing across two eras to under­stand his father’s work and to mir­ror his own feel­ings about how today’s soci­ety is will­ing to let these build­ings dis­ap­pear as if they have no value.  I hope this film helps to high­light the impor­tant work that Robin and his con­tem­po­raries have con­tributed in Ire­land’s first major begin­nings in nation building.

Sé Merry Doyle

Talking to My Father is exclusively released at the IFI from October 16th 2015. Click here for more information.

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