The Making of "One More Shot"
I was introduce to Micheal West at the Galway Film Fleadh in Claddagh Palace in 1991. Michael was there to premiere Three Joes, a short film he’d written for Lenny Abrahamsson, featuring Domnic West, Gary Cooke and Mikel Murphy in their debut film. My film, There’s a hole in the Ozone Layer just above Clonboo, with Rachael Dowling and Vinny Murphy premiered at the same event
Michael and I, discovered a shared love for Hollywood screwball comedy, especially, Preston Sturges. We wrote a treatment for One More Shot in the afterglow of the film festival and set the very intricate plot around the Claddagh Place and its quirky charm. In truth, we imagined setting the film amid the unique, buzzy chaos and conviviality that characterised the film festival at that time. We wanted to recreate that atmosphere as background to our screwball comedy.
It was originally written for series of TV half hours, for a producer who soon realised it the series was a daft idea in first place. I had a but forgotten about when the Irish Film Board was reestablished and together with RTE came up with the daft idea of doing a series of half hour shorts. One More Shot was selected for the inaugural Short Cuts, IFB/RTE’s short films series.
When it came to making the film we looked for a similar old cinema in Dublin, where there were only a handful still functioning. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find one that was suitable. We struggled with rewriting to install the plot in a different location but the story was inseparable from the original location in Claddagh Palace. We had no choice but to take the production to Galway.
By the time the film was financed the Claddagh Palace had been closed and was derelict. Delays in getting the production had pushed us from an original late summer shoot date all the way to Christmas. In darkest winter the old cinema was rat infested and as dank as a crypt. Extras were hard to recruit and harder to keep. The production had no trouble recreating the chaos but conviviality was scarce, as the night shoots drained the crew moral. The screwball plot worked very well but in late December, it was hard to conjure high summer on our budget.
RTE and IFB soon discovered that film festivals are how you sell short films abroad, and very few accept half hour films. We had told them that before they commissioned the films.
