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A LIFE’S WORK Pat Ingoldsby brought Seamus Murphy
and Tom Burke together. Here the director and producer explain how he entered their orbit and impacted on their lives. “I had known Pat already through occasionally seeing him on television but then also seeing him out when I was making this film for the New Yorker in 2013,” explains Murphy, a photography and director whose most recent work includes A Dog Called Money, a documentary he shot with PJ Harvey. “I had this odd tuition. I needed this extra voice, this extra layer as a voiceover and thought ‘maybe that guy Pat Ingoldsby’ because he was always weird and outside everything and that’s how I got to know him.” Around the same time Burke was directing Losing Alaska, a documentary on a small community battling with the disappearance of their homes owing to permafrost erosion. “I wanted to do something closer to home and I had a street relationship with 26 Pat and proposed something lightly to him and he mentioned Seamus. And said that, ‘maybe you two lads should talk to each other’. That precipitated us getting in touch. I knew of Seamus from the PJ Harvey videos Let England Shake, which I loved, so we met and had a big old chat. I thought we were coming at Pat in a similar way, not in a hagiographic ‘isn’t he amazing’ way but in understanding the link between Pat’s poetry and the streets of Dublin. And I think what Seamus achieved with the New Yorker film is this really particular way to shoot Dublin so if his point of view could be matched with Pat’s poetry, I thought we could have something special as a collaboration.” “And then what’s funny is the way Pat engineered this cause,” interjects Murphy. “I was talking to Pat and he was, ‘oh listen by the way, there’s this young lad who came in here, he’s a very nice guy and I knew his father and he said, ‘I’d like to make a film’ and I said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, Seamus is doing that. Seamus is doing that.’ I said, ‘should I go and meet Tom then?’ and he was like, ‘that’s a great idea.’” Unpeeling the layers of Pat proved tricky at first but ultimately rewarding once trust had been established. “The initial challenge was one of a central character who has given you their blessing but put up barriers,” says Burke. “Pat was reluctant to talk about his life or be filmed but “the central relationship between Seamus and Pat kept growing and ultimately, he’s a good judge of character. Anyone who makes documentaries knows access is an on-going process. The perception is Pat had some sort of heyday on Pat’s Chat and then there was this fall from grace and he ends up on the street selling books. I think the film is very keen to right the record on that by saying actually selling his books on the street and dealing directly with the people of Dublin was the high point, giving Pat a creative freedom he wanted.” “I knew he was intelligent and well educated,” says Murphy, “but I didn’t know his father was a school headmaster and that would have had an influence. And then I knew about his mental health but not all the details and the way he sees how religion screwed him up,” he adds when reflecting on what he learned about Pat in the process. What remained essential to their creative approach was placing Pat’s