PICTURE PERFECT

Triona Campbell Bernardo, founder of Campbell Ryan Productions

Irish film productions are bursting at the seams with talent, Linda Pearson talks to Triona Campbell Bernardo about how far the industry has grown.

Dublin based Campbell Ryan Productions Ltd was established in 2000 by Triona Campbell Bernardo for the production of the feature film ‘The Crooked Mile’ which was the first Irish / Jersey Channel Islands co-production and the first feature outside of North America to win the Tribeca First Look Award in New York. With an award winning film under their belt, the company has since produced television shows for TG4, TV3 and RTE and sold shows to ARTE France, YLE Finland and SBS Australia.

UNIQUE CASTING METHOD

This month will see ‘Final Punishment’, an Irish-Portuguese Co-Production Film, co-produced by Campbell Ryan Productions and BeActive Productions in Portugal, being shot on location in a prison outside of Lisbon. What’s unique about this, apart from it being the first Irish-Portuguese horror film, is the way the cast are being recruited. It involves on-line casting, the first of its kind in Ireland. The on-line casting initiative requires the candidate to record a good scary scream on their phone, post the video on-line where the scariest scream will be shortlisted for auditions, to be voted by the on-line community. Amazingly, over 7,000 horror fans from all over the world have participated in the on-line casting for the feature film.

According to Campbell Bernardo, “what we’re doing with Final Punishment is building the audience even before the camera starts to roll. Over 7,000 people have applied online to try and audition for the film. We’re building that community of people who will eventually become the people who buy the cinema tickets and dvd's. For us, the marketing of the film is synonymous with creating a successful film. We don’t just make a film, hand it to the distributor and hope things will go well. We start our marketing from before we even put people in front of the cameras.”

FOREIGN CONECTIONS

This successful entrepreneur, who also founded PACE Entertainment Ltd and is currently Executive Producer on several drama coproductions, describes how she needed to look abroad and partner with foreign film companies in order for Campbell Ryan Productions to survive. “It became apparent after our first year that we were going to have to start looking at building connections and partnerships abroad if we were going to be able to survive. In Ireland, RTE is the biggest producer and commissioner of entertainment products and unfortunately there are only so many production companies and so many hours on RTE’s schedule. We were looking at doing feature films and RTE are fantastic at commissioning independent films but it doesn’t have a policy for commissioning feature films,” comments the producer.

LOOKING AFTER BUSINESS

Campbell Bernardo recently married Nuno Bernardo of BeActive Productions, co-producers of Final Punishment, so there are a lot of coproductions in the pipeline such as Sofia’s Diaries for Sony in London and GameLab for Disney in LA. It’s also a help that her husband is, according to the determined business woman, “a Portuguese television producer and a genius in terms of online marketing.” However, she also says the business side of the company is just as important as the creative productive side and, as with any business, needs to always be remembered and prioritised.

“A lot of people get carried away with the notion of film but it’s a business like any other business and you need to be watching your profit margins and how your turnover is doing and be up to date with your tax returns. These are things people think are less creative but in fact they are just as much a part of the business as everything else,” explains Campbell Bernardo.

FROM THEN TO NOW

With Oscar winning Irish films like My Left Foot, and modern films like Intermission and Cowboys and Angels, Irish film has come a long way from the stereotypical take of Ireland being all about sweeping green landscape and nostalgia as can be seen in The Quite Man. This experienced film producer explains how far it has come and how Ireland is bursting at the seams when it comes to emerging and existing talent.

“There’s no comparison between where film production started and where it is now. Irish film has been hugely successful and mainly because of such fantastic talent in Ireland like Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan and Noel Pearson. As a country we’ve produced more than our share of creative talent in that area. In our productions we try to use an all-Irish cast, like we are doing with Final Punishment, and we are bringing them to Portugal to shoot there. There’s a wealth of talent in Ireland,” commented Campbell Bernardo.

“When I first left college there was no film industry in Ireland at all. Now we have the Irish Film Board which has been set up by the government and which is having continued success under Simon Perry who has been very instrumental in trying to broker a more European attitude in terms of filmmaking. We always found them to be fantastically supportive and were the original investors in most of our early productions,”concludes the producer.