Pure Mule

kc66

Anyone know if theres going to be a 2nd series? I thought I heard last year it was in the making.
I think this was the best home grown series RTE have shown.

Mossy Monk

Am I the only to think that is the worst title ever created for a television show? It put me off it and I have never seen a single episode, but people do like it.

aequinoctium

i liked it

Morgans

Thought it was very good, and last I heard, probably on here, was that there wasnt going to be a second series. I think it would be nearly better that way.

I think the other questions is...will it ever be available on dvd....is it now?

bringitdown

I thought it was tarrrible bad. A big hape of sh....

Utopia Parkway

Pure Mule was pretty good. Well for RTE anyway. Certainly better than most of the other shows they made of that ilk.

Heard they were going to do a 2nd series but with RTE God knows when that could be?

Mossy Monk

Utopia Parkway wrote:

Heard they were going to do a 2nd series but with RTE God knows when that could be?

Never I heard.

Sandwich

How come decent Irish drama doesnt come out on DVD?

Pure Mule was reasonable, Love is the Drug was better, first series of Batchelor's Walk was outstanding. Id buy all three if I could get my hands on em.

ianrush

Pure Mule is coming out on dvd this christmas. Know this because they were recording commentaries for it recently.

wyndham

I heard somewhere that they are making a film in the same vein as Pure Mule at the moment, with many of the same cast members.

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From last weeks SBP


Eugene O’Brien’s hugely successful play, Eden, is being made into a film, but he is keeping quiet about his next TV project, despite the popularity of his previous show, Pure Mule.

Eugene O’Brien tells a story about his school days that sharply illustrates the determination that you suspect is key to his mindset.

At the age of 11, he was sent to Clongowes boarding school in Kildare for six years. Two days after his arrival, he packed his bag, vaulted over the wall and thumbed the 20-odd miles home to his astonished parents.

Ordered to give Clongowes a second chance, O’Brien humoured his parents and gave it two months. But he wasn’t staying.




‘‘This time, I planned it with military precision,” O’Brien says, with relish. ‘‘I ate a good lunch and told all the lads I was leaving - ‘Ah Christ, he’s going over the wall again!’ “

Arriving back a second time, O’Brien got his wish. He would stay home and attend the local school in Edenderry, Co Offaly.

Eugene 1, Parents 0.

That spirit of bloody-mindedness, which must have occasionally drove his parents to distraction when he was younger, has served O’Brien well in his adult years.

‘‘Ididn’t want to run with the herd,” he says of his desire to leave boarding school - and he never has.

Although O’Brien could easily have gone into his father’s property business - the family had a chain of supermarkets before selling to Superquinn in 1984 - at 39, the Dublin-dwelling writer and former actor has found success on his own terms.

His six-part television series, Pure Mule, which aired on RTE in late 2005, neatly avoided many of the cliches characteristic of so much Irish television, winning five awards at the Iftas.

O’Brien’s earlier play, Eden, meanwhile, was also a hit, dealing in superficially ordinary themes - marital breakdown, alcoholism and loneliness - but imbuing them with the kind of meaning that led to O’Brien winning the 2001 Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play.

Eden the play is in the process of being turned into Eden the film. Directed by Declan Recks and produced by David Collins of Samson Films, the film will star Eileen Walsh and Aidan Kelly in the lead roles of Billy and Breda.

O’Brien is also working on a film noir project, set in the Midlands, ‘‘with a Catherine Nevin vibe’’.

Although O’Brien claims he has had a ‘‘doss of a summer’’ - spending most of it at music festivals with his girlfriend - looking at his CV, you would be hard pushed to agree with that estimation.

When we meet in a Rathmines coffee shop, O’Brien has just finished the first draft of a six-part television project that he doesn’t want to talk about on the record, presumably in case things don’t work out.

O’Brien is tall and rangy, with a heap of hair, a few deep-set wrinkles and a sporty look that belies his job description.

He looks so unlike what I was expecting that I almost wind up interviewing another person. (Good thing for me that the distinguished-looking New Yorker-reader at table 14 was kind enough to tell me that his name was not Eugene.)

‘‘It’s a single man cafe,” O’Brien grins, when I finally locate him in the bewildering labyrinth of solitary men reading newspapers at tables.

O’Brien is easy to talk to, if occasionally a little reserved about work projects. It’s surprising that he should be so shy when talking about his new television series, given the success of his previous one.

Pure Mule focused on a market town in the midlands and the frequently debauched lives of Shamie, Scobie, Kevin, Therese, Deirdre and Jennifer. From the start, the show had TV critics dusting off the kind of adjectives they hardly ever use for Irish television programmes.

‘‘Pure Mule spectacularly raised the bar for Irish television drama,” said the Irish Times in a glowing notice, observing that O’Brien had created ‘‘a moving, scrupulously observed character-based drama, where despair resides in what is left unsaid, and where love is as tenuous and startling as the bloodied and carefully embroidered hanky that Shamie is left holding at the end of a violent and revealing Saturday night.”

Was O’Brien surprised by the success of Pure Mule? ‘‘I was, I suppose,” he says.

‘‘It was great, because you’d hear people talking about it. That was my dream for the show, that two fellows would be working on Monday morning and they’d say: ‘Did you see that ****ing thing last night?’ And that was what happened.”

Despite the bombast and controversial topics, the underlying themes of the series had a universal resonance.

‘‘Loneliness, inability to communicate, finding your place in the world,” O’Brien says, ‘‘these things are very basic. Not really knowing who you are.”

O’Brien has made little attempt to disguise the fact that his work is directly inspired by his hometown of Edenderry, with many of his characters being an ‘‘amalgamation of three or four people’’ he knows.

Asked if any of the locals were bothered by his portrayal of them or their homeplace, O’Brien looks uncertain.

‘‘I’m sure some people were very pissed off, but people would never say that to me,” he says. ‘‘The overall reaction has been very good, very positive.”

He’ll have the Offaly response to deal with again in the not too distant future: filming in Tullamore has nearly finished on the big screen version of Eden.

Although the original play was a two-hander, with frustrated couple Billy and Breda telling the story of their 11year-old marriage in alternating monologues, the film version, according to O’Brien, is likely to give more weight to Billy’s perspective - ‘‘Billy has more of a journey to make,” he says.

The film has had a long gestation process. It was in 2000 that writer/director Declan Recks, after reading and loving the script, made arrangements to have Eden optioned. Around the same time, the script was accepted by the Peacock Theatre in Dublin.

‘‘And then the play became this big hit,” O’Brien says. ‘‘Declan was writing the screenplay of it because I just couldn’t bear to go into it again. I needed to move on. But h e couldn’t make that much headway with it. It wasn’t working. After Pure Mule came out, he asked me to write it.”

Then producer David Collins got involved. ‘‘So the three of us kept working on it and developing it.”

O’Brien doesn’t know when the film might make it to cinemas. ‘‘Spring next year?” he ventures, and there’s a whisper of a prayer in the words. ‘‘We’ll be working to try to get it to festivals. In cinemas, you just don’t know. It mightn’t be that type of film. It might be just small.

‘‘You’d hope you could get a distributor to bring it out everywhere, but that only happens rarely. RTE will show it - they’ve given a third of the funding with the promise that they have first showing.”

O’Brien is hopeful that having Collins on the team may make a big difference to Eden’s fate - Collins executive produced John Carney’s Once, which won the Sundance Festival World Cinema Audience Award and has thoroughly charmed the US since its release there.

‘‘David is on the crest of everything at the moment with Once,” O’Brien says. ‘‘He has made some great contacts.”

It seems like a heady time for Irish cinema in general, with the success of films such as Garage and Once paving the way for other Irish filmmakers to break though to an international audience.

O’Brien, however, believes it’s more important now than ever for him to stay true to his own particular vision, and not to pander to anyone else’s notion of what his work should be.

‘‘We should be making the kinds of films that only we can make,” he says. ‘‘Films like Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage and Adam & Paul - no one else could be making those, they’re intrinsically Irish, with really good scripts. That’s the way to go.

‘‘There’s no point trying to write a hit. You can’t do that. We need to make these stories that are absolutely about us. Audiences can smell that authenticity.”

No compromise, in other words. Now all O’Brien has to do is figure out how to vault that wall.

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Davedubh

kc66 wrote:

Anyone know if theres going to be a 2nd series? I thought I heard last year it was in the making.
I think this was the best home grown series RTE have shown.

Instead of giving us a second series they blew all the drama money on legend ,which was hopeless.