Producer and researcher Sheila Ahern writes for Culture about Citizen Lane, her acclaimed docudrama about Cork-born art dealer and philanthropist Hugh Lane, starring Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.
Watch Citizen Lane here, via RTÉ Player.
It is almost three years ago since Producer James Mitchell called to ask if we could meet and talk about an idea he had for a drama-documentary about Hugh Lane.
Like many other people I knew very little about Lane - he was an art connoisseur and died on the Lusitania and that was about it. But then I remembered spending many afternoons in the Hugh Lane Gallery as a teenager. I went to school nearby and really didn’t like the nuns, so would spend long afternoons mitching in the Gallery. The memory of those paintings was haunting. James was fascinated by collectors and their motivation - why would someone like Lane amass so many beautiful paintings and then just give them away? So we began the journey into Hugh Lane’s world.
There is a lot of really good research material available about Lane. Robert O’Byrne’s biography was invaluable and the letters and photographs in the National Library and the Hugh Lane Gallery were a fantastic resource. But what was lacking was a sense of the man himself. Lane never went to school, was not interested in writing about his thoughts or feelings. All his letters are very functional and deal with day to day matters, so it was hard to get inside his head.
This changed when scriptwriter Mark O’Halloran came on board, and produced a subtle yet profound portrait of Lane. Mark could take the tiniest details we had about Lane and weave them together to build a complex and empathetic character. I would give Mark letters, photographs or small details about Lane and the other characters and Mark would bring them alive. One of my favourite examples is a small black and white photograph that fell out of a letter the Italian painter Antonio Mancini wrote to Lane, now lodged in the National Library archives. It was of Mancini painting a portrait of Lane’s sister, Ruth. Mancini is standing proudly beside the finished portrait, while Ruth is sitting stiff, looking terrified. From this tiny photograph, Mark wrote the wonderfully warm opening scene with Tom Vaughan Lawlor as Lane and Gemma-Leah Devereux as Ruth.
Citizen Lane has many of the traditional elements of documentary making in the film; interviews with experts, archive film footage, photographs, documents and ephemera. But it was when the drama sequences were put together with the documentary, in the skilful hands of Director Thaddeus O’Sullivan and Editor Mick Mahon, that’s when the magic happened. Enjoy!
