Dublin director’s feature film debut’s a stunning success

By Michael Gray

Dublin filmmaker Damien O’Donnell, director of the British comedy hit "East Is East," currently showing on New York cinema screens, came to this city to promote the picture on the eve of the recent BAFTA awards. He arrived with modest hopes of winning in the five major categories in which his film was nominated — the formidable opposition included "American Beauty" and "The Sixth Sense" — but by the time he returned home to Dublin he had won the coveted Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film.

Though he received the prize for his feature debut, O’Donnell is no stranger to the awards racket. His hilarious short film "35 Aside," a 26-minute comedy made for Irish television with sponsorship from the RTE-funded "Short Cuts" program, won more than 30 awards worldwide, including the 1998 BBC New Directors Prize, and Best Short Film at the 1996 Quebec Film Festival. It has been shown repeatedly on English and Irish TV, and one such screening brought his film to the attention of an up-and-coming Anglo-Pakistani playwright named Ayub Khan-Din, the screenwriter for "East Is East."

"Ayub, the writer, was in the bath when ’35 Aside’ came on telly," O’Donnell said recently. "His girlfriend was watching it, and shouted out to him that there’s something good on. So he got out and watched the last 10 or 15 minutes of it, dripping wet. He got in touch with the producer, Leslee Udwin, and said, ‘How about this guy?’ They had offered the script to Stephen Frears, who suggested that they use a first-time director. So it just happened that ’35 Aside’ was on telly at the right time."

The opportunity to direct his first feature was not without potential pitfalls — the subject matter, a ribald comedy with serious subtexts about race and Muslim tradition in the half-English, half-Pakistani Khan family in Manchester, was far outside the young director’s own cultural experience.

"It was a bit of a challenge, and at one stage I was quite intimidated by the whole idea," O’Donnell said. "I had expected to be making another film in Ireland on an Irish subject with friends that I’d worked with before, and I ended up going to England and working with strangers on a subject I knew nothing about. And at one stage when that all came home to me, I sent a fax basically saying that perhaps I’m not the best man to do this film, you should consider somebody else. I went off to the pub and felt that

some huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders, so I started thinking about the script in a different context. I actually regretted what I had done, and I had this flood of ideas — I guess I had to take that action to release myself from whatever pressure I was putting myself under in order for my mind to kick in and start thinking creatively. So I went into the office in Dublin the next day and I saw the fax was still sitting in the machine, because I misdialed it and it hadn’t gone through. And I thought, ‘That’s a sign,’ so I ended up rewriting the fax and it became a 20-page missive, I guess, of what my misgivings were about the film and what I felt needed to be dealt with it in script. And it was basically very honest and open, and was used as a discussion document."

O’Donnell faced the daunting prospect of bringing to the screen a stage play that already had a durable life of its own in London and the provincial theaters of England, winning numerous drama awards along the way. Taking charge of the film, he got actively involved in casting, seeking to bring new faces to the characters in the Khan family rather than using the stage actors who had lived the roles for so long already.

Only Jimi Mistry, who played Tariq, the second son of the Khan family, and Linda Bassett, who played his mother Ella, long-suffering English wife of the irascible patriarch, George Khan (Om Puri), made the transition from the stage version to the screen.

"Linda Bassett, who played the mother, had already been involved in the play," O’Donnell said. "I was told that the writer had said that if this is ever made into a film, he’d like her to play the same part, so he was under a sort of moral obligation to fulfill that — which I didn’t necessarily agree with. But I looked at some examples of her work, and I thought, OK, why not? She’s actually very good; she’s as good an actress as Brenda Blethyn, if not better. Plus she’s as not recognized, and I always thought that was to the advantage of the film to have people that nobody knew, to have fresh faces."

Bassett’s performance earned her a nomination for Best Actress in the BAFTA Awards. Her co-star, Om Puri, the screenwriter’s first choice for the role of the overbearing dad, George, was also nominated, in the Best Actor category.

"Ayub had worked with Om Puri, and that’s why he suggested him," O’Donnell said. "I didn’t know who he was, so I got a few tapes, ‘Wolf’, ‘Ghost of the Darkness’,

‘Gandhi’, and ‘My Son The Fanatic.’ I hadn’t seen that, and I thought he was great. He was stunning, and he was playing the complete opposite role, but there was no doubt that he could transform himself. You can tell when you’re watching a quality actor on screen, you just know that this guy has a range that he can do. He’s also very real, very human in his performances, so I was very happy for him to do it."

Cultural similarities

Despite the wide cultural difference between the film and his background, O’Donell saw parallels between his life as an Irish teenager, resisting the old order imposed by his parents, and the Khan clan striving to get around their dad’s rigid doctrines.

"It’s like me when my dad put on seven old Dubliners albums stacked up on the old record player on a Sunday morning, they’d slap down one after the other," O’Donnell said. "They just seeped into your subconscious. You wouldn’t want to hear them, but they’d be played loud around the house, and eventually you’d find 15 or 20 years later that you’d know the lyrics to all the songs when you heard them again and you’d like it, and enjoy it.

The Khan kids were soaking it up like that, absorbing the parts of the culture they were exposed to. They’d make fun of it, but that’s what kids do. They make fun of anything their parents take seriously, especially among themselves."

Similarly, Dublin northside native O’Donnell identified with writer Ayub Khan-Din’s upbringing in the red-brick Victorian suburbs of Lancashire.

"Where Ayub lived in Manchester is quite a working-class area," he said. "The place where I lived in Coolock is the same, all corporation houses, so I could relate to that side of his family life, a big family living in a very cramped house, and the dynamics within that environment. There was a sensibility and sense of humor that I found very Irish. In fact, it wasn’t like dealing with an English person at all — there’s something quite Irish about him. I think his grandmother and grandfather on his mother’s side were both Irish."

As a British subject, the English-born Khan-Din was eligible for a host of award categories from which O’Donnell was excluded, and the writer’s script won him the BAFTA trophy for Best British Newcomer. The young Irish director is unfazed by his exclusion, commenting with a sly grin, "It’s a small price to pay for maintaining my identity."

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"East Is East" is currently showing at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. Damien O"Donnell’s "35 Aside" is available on video from The Cinema Guild at (212) 246 5522.