TD 1
My introduction to Paul Duane’s work was a little
different. It was the early days of the pandemic, and like many, unburdened for too long by human contact, I opened up that hellscape that was Twitter dot com. Granted, it was often just to shout at bigots, or to beg for the reinstatement of gibbetting as a punishment, but soon enough I ended up following a bearded avatar who talked about film, actively disliked idiocy and had a lot of sensible viewpoints on things I cared about. I recognized him later at a Deadlians show and thought, “Oh, that’s that legend from the internet.” Now, it transpires that he has made the first film I have actively anticipated since Prometheus reminded me of the folly of optimism. All You Need Is Death is a lovingly crafted, fiercely original and singularly Irish folk horror tale, released through XYZ Films. Starring Olwen Fouéré, Simone Collins and Charlie Maher, and scored by the distinctive dark timbres of Ian Lynch, the visionary behind the Fire Draw Near podcast, One Leg One Eye and co-founder of doomed folk primogenitors Lankum. To borrow the film’s tagline: “A young couple who collect rare folk ballads discover the dark side of love when they surreptitiously record and translate an ancient, taboo folk song from the deep, forgotten past.” In a twenty year career as a documentary filmmaker, director, and creator in film and television, Paul Duane has earned some justifiable notoriety. As well as directing stints on Casualty and Ballykissangel, cocreating the harrowing Amber and being the mind behind Secret Diary of a Call Girl, I urge people to seek out his astounding 2018 documentary, While You Live, Shine, that follows Chris King, an American audiophile and musicologist who bravely contends that “anything recorded after 1941 is garbage.” All You Need Is Death is the auteur’s first foray into genre film, and I’ve been waiting with bated breath since a buddy told me it was a story about a haunted folk song. Ishmael Claxton, Duane’s friend, sometime collaborator, and photographer for this article, was kind enough to host us in his living room, late in February, in the midst of a packed schedule of jetsetting to worldwide screenings to speak to little old me, and because I lack tact, I immediately brought up the topic of the dying creative spaces in the city. 16 “And the Wee Stores used to open on a Sunday. Because they were Prods. They’d open and sell the newspapers, while all the Catholic stores were closed.”