Driving on, he pondered what sort of life the security guard might have; what material deprivation he had escaped, what pressures may have impelled him halfway around the world to a city in the chaos of an economic boom, what was pushing him from his homeland, what was pulling him here. As Gleeson let his mind wander, he began to imagine a back story for the smiling guard. In the fullness of time, this seed of an idea took him to Congo, where, cooped up in a hotel room, he bashed out a script for The Front Line, the follow-up film to his 2003 debut feature, Cowboys & Angels.
A heist movie of a sort, The Front Line’s vision of Ireland owes more to John Woo than to John Hinde. In it, asylum seeker Joe Yumba (the Cameroon-born French actor Eriq Ebouaney) is given a frosty welcome to Dublin by Detective Inspector Harbison (Gerard McSorley) at the immigration bureau. Claiming to be fleeing persecution from warring rebel factions in his native Congo, Yumba settles quickly into his adopted city. Having landed a job as a security guard at a bank, he is joined by his wife and young son, who arrive on a family reunification visa.
All seems fine until Yumba finds himself the reluctant inside man for a criminal gang led by the psychotic Eddie Gilroy (James Frain). All, however, is not what it seems.
Having made his breakthrough with the coming-of-age tale Cowboys & Angels, the Limerick-born Gleeson and his producer wife, the German-born Nathalie Lichtenthaeler, knew they had to strike while the iron was hot.
“I didn’t want to do a genre piece,” says Gleeson. “I saw The Front Line initially as a thriller, but Nathalie pushed me to lock myself in that hotel room for a week and write a script. I came out with this whole big story, the whole Congo thing. I did have to wonder where that came from, because it’s like a film of two halves. The trick was to hide the seam between the two.”
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For anyone looking for convenient signposts, the two halves are Spike Lee’s thriller Inside Man and Terry George’s drama Hotel Rwanda. One problem for Gleeson was that this connection only became apparent in retrospect. “When potential financiers asked me to list movies that The Front Line might be like, I just couldn’t think of any,” he says. “I couldn’t even list any strong influences for what I’d written.”
Gleeson’s influences as a writer and director are not so hard to trace. His grandfather opened up his first cinema in Limerick in the 1930s and his 75-year-old father still works daily in the family business, so it’s hardly surprising that he pursued a career in film or that his taste is populist.
“When I was at my most malleable, movies were all around me,” he says. “I was brought up literally in a cinema. My father ran four cinemas, and while the other kids were in nightclubs, I was working the projector or checking the tickets.
“Steven Spielberg, John Ford: I’ve always been drawn to the big film-makers. Gone with the Wind blew me away when I saw it on the big screen in 1981. [I] wrote down in my diary that night that I was going to combine my love of writing with my love of movies, and become a film-maker.”
As a teenager in the 1980s, he banged out and directed several plays, notably Class Control. However, it dawned on Gleeson that there was little chance of “a young nobody from Limerick making a film in Ireland”, and after failing to get on a film course, he moved to Scotland for two years to study communications.
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While there, he took a step sideways: working on oil rigs in the North Sea, with a view to getting enough money together to shoot a short film. And that’s where he spent the next seven years. “I was a twentysomething guy with money,” he says, by way of explanation.
An ad in a movie magazine eventually prompted him to pack his bags in 1995 and enrol on a course at the New York Film Academy, where he met his future wife.
“It was incredibly tough trying to get even a short film made,” says Gleeson. “Myself and Nathalie were often penniless, and then we had a new baby coming into the mix, too. For quite some time, all I could think about was the fact that my family were never keen for me to take this path. They knew just how tough a life this could be.”
His first short, Feels Like Home, was completed in 1999 and was followed in 2002 by Hunted, thus preparing Gleeson for his first feature, the story of a shy civil servant who moves into a flat with a gay housemate. Even as Cowboys & Angels started garnering praise from the likes of Variety and The New York Times, the hard times continued.
“Most film-makers will take on commercial after commercial to keep themselves afloat, but I’ve only ever managed to make one. That sort of work just isn’t in me, and that means money has often been incredibly tight. There was a better budget for The Front Line, so we actually got a decent wage out of it, but there have been plenty of times when a sensible person would have thrown in the towel.
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“I also realise that if I were to make a shamelessly commercial film — something like Man About Dog [his fellow Irish director Paddy Breathnach’s 2004 film] — life would be an awful lot easier, but I just couldn’t make a film like that. It’s not something I could feel comfortable with, because I want my films to say something. Entertain, sure, but give people something to think about on the drive home, too. That’s more important to me than money.”
Gleeson’s determination to do justice to the back story he had created for his African immigrant saw him heading out to the Democratic Republic of Congo for six weeks.
“I had called around quite a few aid agencies, but pretty much all of them turned me down,” he says. “You have to go through an aid agency; it’s very difficult to go out there on your own. People have tried it and not come back. Insurance was a problem for everyone, too, but from the moment I first spoke with John O’Shea [director of the Third World charity Goal], it was all systems go. ‘We can get you in where the killing is happening,’ he told me. John doesn’t mind what the medium is, as long as someone is talking about the situation. The film humanises the situation in Congo and I think John will be very happy with it.”
Whether the various financiers behind this €2m European co-production will be happy with their investment will be determined over the coming months. If The Front Line does well in Ireland, its chances of a push abroad will be increased dramatically.
“It’s tough for Irish films out there,” says Gleeson, “and it’s a very precarious position to try and survive as a writer/director in Ireland. You’re at the whim of the finance minister with every budget.
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“Something like Man About Dog certainly doesn’t seem to travel at all. Every country has its local heroes, but I think The Front Line is a much more universal kind of story. It’s great to be able to make a bank heist thriller with a strong political bite. It’s the kind of film that you can still make in Europe, thankfully.”
While the posters for The Front Line spring up around the country, and the critics start sharpening their pencils, the opinion Gleeson values most is still that of his father, Eddie. The fact that Cowboys & Angels didn’t do all that well in the Gleeson family cinema, however, underlines how difficult it is to sell Irish films to home audiences.
“Every small country struggles to compete with the big Hollywood blockbuster,” says Gleeson. “Having Cowboys & Angels — a film set in Limerick, made by a Limerick native — fail to connect with a lot of people in Limerick drove that point home for me. It made me realise that, to draw real numbers, you need a big name, a big marketing campaign or a big, easy-to-understand Snakes on a Plane kind of idea.
“Of course, I would love to work with a large budget and have a big name in there, too, but that’s not really an option at this point. So I put all my energy into the story and just hope that good word of mouth will do the rest. Besides, I just don’t think Eddie Murphy would look convincing as a security guard standing outside a Dublin bank.”
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The Front Line opens on Friday