Paul Fraser on his Saipan film: 'Keane felt he got the Irish team to the World Cup'
Paul Fraser, screenwriter for the Saipan film, will attend the Catalyst Film Festival in Limerick.
He has collaborated closely with top British filmmaker Shane Meadows and directed a family drama filmed in Cobh. But Paul Fraser’s forthcoming screenplay aims to get to the heart of one of the biggest talking points in Irish sporting history.
Saipan - due to be released later this year - tells the story of the remarkable falling out between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy on the eve of Ireland’s 2002 World Cup campaign. When Irish production company Wild Atlantic Pictures first planned to bring the film - starring Cork actor Éanna Hardwicke as Keane and Steve Coogan as McCarthy - to the screen, they approached Fraser.
As the English screenwriter prepared to pen the screenplay, he delved deep into the events leading up to one of the most memorable falling outs in the history of Irish sport. He was approached to do so by Irish producer Macdara Kelleher.
“I’d met him a few times over the years. He said: ‘I've got this story I want to tell’. In the UK, he was massive, Roy Keane, and anyone who knows football also knows who Mick McCarthy is. So it's a story that's international as well as huge in Ireland. It was just massive, and I think divided the nation.
“Going into the research for what the Irish team were doing, I went back to Jack Charlton times. When he qualified for the USA World Cup (in 1994), England didn't qualify - and so we all collected and followed Ireland.”
Fraser, who visited Saipan’s sets during filming last year, aimed to piece together the details behind why the player and manager fell out so dramatically, and revisited a remarkable period in Keane’s career. “(Roy), he felt like he single handedly got the Irish team to the 2002 World Cup. He played every game apart from the end game.”
Saipan will no doubt be a talking point when Fraser comes to Limerick on April 4th to conduct a masterclass and explore the craft of screenwriting as part of the city’s Catalyst Film Festival. The festival focuses exclusively on films that address under-representation on screen and behind the camera - gender equality, diversity and inclusion are core to their programming.
“They do a lot on women in television and film. They do a lot based on working class in film and TV. That's my background. That's my world - the stories I like to talk about and write about.
"So that's something I'll be touching on. But I like to give people something to do as well, generating stories and how people can find the story from within, touching on a couple of practical exercises.”
Fraser’s career spans nearly three decades. He's written numerous films for other directors as well as making his own features and shorts. He has also directed music videos for the likes of Arctic Monkeys and Plan B.
But his collaboration with Shane Meadows is one of the most significant, and one which started as a childhood friendship. As emerging filmmakers, they collaborated on a trilogy of films about life in their hometown - Twenty Four Seven, A Room for Romeo Brass, and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. Fraser would go on to co-write two of Meadows’ best-known films: Dead Man’s Shoes and Somers Town.
The two were childhood friends growing up in Uttoxeter (“famous for biscuits and JCBs”,he says) and he remembers how they used to make up sketches in a bid to make passers by laugh outside the town pub, spending any earnings in the chip shop.
In their teens, they started to get more technical in their storytelling approach. “They had a petrol station down the hill from where I was living and they rented out the old VHS cameras, where you put the cassette in and then straight into your VHS player.
“We used to get it on the Friday and it was closed on the Sunday, so you got it free on Sunday. We used to do silly little things with it, like put it on a skateboard, and think we'd done an amazing tracking shot because we'd watched a bit of Scorsese. We just played, nothing connected to it as an actual job, or anything like that.”
On leaving school, Fraser took a travel and tourism course which he didn’t enjoy. “I went and helped in the local drama school, doing some lighting for them. One of the teachers, somebody stepping in being amazing for me, said to come and do this performing art course.
“I was laughing at kids being oak trees and then six months later, I was being a tree. As part of that I did a little bit of writing, a little bit of performing, theatre. Shane was doing his film stuff.
"At one point, he came in and said: ‘I’ve been offered a bit of money are you interested to do some writing?’ We were thrust into writing Twenty Four Seven because Shane found us the opportunity. We somehow got Bob Hoskins to play the lead character, he says, adding they brought their script to a theatre where Hoskins was performing. From then on, it was just the next job and the next job and the next job.”
Why is it important to him to tell the stories of working-class people? “It's partly to do with growing up, and what we would see and what we would watch. You'd go to the main street and see people arsing about and having the crack and getting into trouble or whatever, but there was humour associated with it.
“I felt that a lot of the stories from my world, obviously like the soaps in the UK, were always quite down and grumpy and not celebratory, and we wanted to tell stories that reflected our upbringing, which was just having a laugh all the time, and humour. Obviously darker moments in life, but we felt that that was something absent in our type of world and our type of stories.”
In 2010, his own directorial career brought him to Cork, where he lived and worked while filming the family drama My Brothers. He has fond memories of that time. “It was brilliant. We stayed in Cork, filmed in Cobh. Will Collins wrote the script, and he'd won the Galway Film Festival pitching competition. For that, he was awarded money to get a script editor. That's how I got involved in the project. (It was) one of those things in life, where you casually say: ‘I'd be interested in directing it’. Andrew Meehan at the Film Board (now Screen Ireland), he jumped on that, and I ended up directing it.”
- Catalyst Film Festival comes to Limerick from April 3-5, with a packed programme of events, programmes and guests. See catalystinternationalfilmfestival.com
Paul Fraser will lead a masterclass at this year’s Catalyst festival. These are some of the areas he'll be discussing.
“Writing is a long process. Don't write something and think that it's done. Think how can I do it again? How can I make it better?”
“If you want to be a screenwriter or get into film and television, it's a collaborative process. Embrace that. Talk to your mum, talk to your friends, talk to anybody about your film and get people to look at it.”
“Don't give up. You'll have times where there's nothing happening for you. If you keep going, something will come.”
“You’ve got to do that off your own back and find a way to find the time. The more you do, the better you get.”
“Not everybody has read a screenplay, and they're sitting in a room wanting to be screenwriters. Print and read them. Try and get a copy of the original pre-shooting script.”
