Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

My behind-the-scenes feature at The X Factor from Saturday’s Weekend magazine in the Irish Independent

Sunday evening in the northwest London suburb of Wembley is usually only about one thing: ‘The X Factor‘. The show’s home, Fountain Studios, is nestled in the shadow of the colossal Wembley Stadium, an imposing physical and psychological presence for the poor creatures trying desperately to win the public vote to get to the point where they might, perhaps, maybe, with a little luck, sell out that very stadium with a triumphant tour in the future.

Tonight, though, the venue has been taken over by some 80,000 American Football fans who are there to cheer on the Chicago Bears and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

That background event seems appropriate for ‘The X Factor‘ this year, however: an American cultural touchstone trying to gain a foothold in the British consciousness, just as Simon Cowell is attempting to sell British television’s biggest show to an ambivalent American public.

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My interview with playwright and screenwriter Beau Willimon about his new movie The Ides of March from today’s Irish Examiner.

DID you hear the one about the young, struggling writer whose play was snapped up by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars before it had even debuted on a stage? This isn’t the start of a fairytale or a joke but rather the real-life trajectory of Beau Willimon, whose 2004 play Farragut North has been adapted into the new political thriller The Ides of March by George Clooney.

“It was the case that after a number of years of working in total obscurity I was being vaulted into a whole other realm in a matter of days,” the 33-year-old laughs. “It’s crazy. A great kind of crazy.”

Willimon wrote Farragut North — named after a Metro stop in the centre of power in Washington DC — after working in the press advance team of Howard Dean’s insurgent but unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

Last week I was at a press conference that George Clooney held to publicise his new movie The Ides of March as part of the London Film Festival. Below is a feature in today’s Independent based on that.

He may have been a tad too expensive for their heavily scrutinised campaign budgets, but the seven candidates looking to be elected president tomorrow could have hired Hollywood star George Clooney as a political consultant.

Gorgeous George was in London last week to talk politics as part of the London Film Festival screening of his new movie The Ides of March, a deeply cynical story exploring the behind-the-scenes backstabbing, double-dealing and selling out involved in an insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

After what has been the nastiest presidential election this country has ever seen, the timing of Clooney’s new movie couldn’t be more perfect.

In the course of a press conference in London last week, the actor, writer and director was made aware of the forthcoming presidential vote in Ireland, and asked if he had any advice for Gallagher, Higgins, Davis et al.

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Read extended version of interview here at movies.ie

At least if the polls are to be believed in advance of Thursday’s vote.

Sean Gallagher: the man, the legend, the karate kid.

My interview with director Roland Emmerich about his new movie Anonymous from Day & Night in today’s Irish Independent.

In his 20-year directing career so far, Roland Emmerich has blown up the White House, buried Manhattan under floods and ice-glaciers, and sunk the entire city of Los Angeles into the ocean. Now the German-born buster of blocks is about to demolish a famous landmark of another kind: William Shakespeare.

Emmerich’s new movie, Anonymous, is set in Elizabethan England and posits a contentious theory that has raged for 400 years: namely, that Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays and was in fact an illiterate chancer, charlatan, and, possibly worst of all, a bad actor.

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