Northern Ireland seems a long way from your home town of Baltimore. What attracted you to Barry McEvoy's script?
I thought it was interesting to take a comedic fable and look at the troubles in Northern Ireland rather than take a more dramatic approach, which has been done.
Do you think the film takes a flippant look at the IRA?
I don't think it's specifically about the IRA. I think it's about people. It's about our humanity and our frailty. It plays out in that fashion. It drags in not only the IRA, but the RUC. In many ways it could apply to not only Northern Ireland, but what goes on in the Balkans, what goes on in the Middle East. Why can't we resolve the differences that we're always battling over? It's an age old thing.
The film was removed from US screens after only 11 days. Why?
"An Everlasting Piece" was pretty much thrown away by the studio, Dreamworks. I was very frustrated. This was a case where the audience never got a chance to know the film was there. There wasn't even word-of-mouth. The movie came out on Christmas Day, against a huge amount of films. Dreamworks was very lax in the way they advertised it. They never ran multiple reviews in their ads. They only ran one piece of blurb. We had extremely good reviews, which were never used. They never really pushed the film and it was gone in a week.
Were they running scared of the political content?
I don't know. I do know that this is not a movie Dreamworks should have made. I pleaded with them not to make the movie. We had independent financing, and I desperately wanted to do it as a small movie.
