سيرة
In 1977, at eight years old, Declan went to the cinema for the first time. He waited in line for hours. Once inside, he began running up and down the aisles playing airplanes with a stranger, thinking that was expected. When the film started and the Star Destroyer pursued the Rebel blockade-runner across the screen, he was captivated by the spectacle. Star Wars marked his introduction to cinema.
Poor Declan! Intellectually, he was unremarkable. He never uttered anything brilliant or spiteful. Ultimately, he became a charming but ineffective young man with a perfect profile and no career. Recognizing his limitations, he naturally transitioned into directing.
After a well-earned divorce and lacking qualifications, Declan returned to education at 26 by attending drama school. This only convinced him that the world wasn’t ready for his unique anti-acting style. Still under-educated and overdressed, he then attended Bournemouth Film School.
Winning the prestigious Fuji Film Scholarship allowed Declan to create his first narrative film, A Frozen Chicken Saves the Soaps Day, which was invited to many major European film festivals. He is also rumored to have directed the satirical homage Potemkin: The Runner’s Cut, starring Charles Dance, which gained significant international festival recognition.
A commission to co-write two historical drama epics kept Declan busy: Brittania, about Boadicea, and Conqueror, unsurprisingly about William the Conqueror.
With his trademark dirty baseball cap tilted jauntily, Declan took a directing stint on the UK cop show The Bill, earning a shortlist spot in the New Director (Fiction) category at the BAFTA Television Craft Awards. This helped him become a regular director on several prime-time continuing dramas across all UK terrestrial networks.
He then moved into single dramas with the feature-length psychological thriller Wire in the Blood and an adaptation of Andy McNab’s novella The Grey Man. BBC’s flagship Robin Hood satisfied his schoolboy fantasy before he swapped his now very dirty baseball cap for a stetson to hunt serial killers in Texas with Prayer of the Bone. Returning from distant lands, he began cohabiting with vampires, werewolves, and ghosts in the pilot of the hit show Being Human, and battled dragons and Greek mythological creatures in Merlin and Atlantis.
The invention of the spell-checker eventually lured Declan back into writing, resulting in the whiskey-soaked revenge thriller Broken Cove (Black List 2014). Despite typos, the script was a Nicholl Scholarship quarter-finalist. His follow-up script, Numb, reached the quarter-finals of the Final Draft Big Break and was a Page Award finalist (2015). In 2018, he was nominated for an Emmy for directing Free Rein – which, naturally, is better than not being nominated.
