Shawshank Redemption, In The Heat Of The Night, American Beauty, Road To Perdition, Sopranos, Godfather 1 & 2 (NOT 3!!), Dr Zhivago, Schindler's List, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Alien, Chinatown, Body Heat, Blade Runner, The Sixth Sense, Life of Brian, Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs, As Good As It Gets, Once Upon A Time In America, Gladiator, Trainspotting, The Usual Suspects, The Shining, The Bourne Trilogy, Pan's Labyrinth plus any of the Bond Films - just for the sheer fun of it, the girls and the fact I'd be filthy rich now if I had!!! I love Film Noir, Psychological Thrillers, Historical Epics, Social / Political Drama and Monty Python type humour.

My mother die (sadness); my little children (Fintan & Aoife) being born (happiness); my credit card bill (despair!); The Cars 'Drive' Video (of the children starving in Ethiopia) broadcast during the original Live Aid concert (humanity). I feel tears if a film brings to mind the horror and sadness of real events that happen to real people in this world - like Schindler's List and Holocaust; the wars in Vietnam, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq; the horror of child abuse and neglect or murders of children by their parents in family melt down situations. There are so many absolutely heart breaking real life stories in the World we live in. However I didn't cry watching ET die (he was a rubber puppet for God's sake!)

I never leave the cinema once I start watching no matter how bad it is. Working on film festival shorts selection committees and juries gets you used to watching the bad with the good. I stick it out because even in a bad film there are sometimes gems. As a writer it's worth seeing the bad to know what not to repeat!

Kubrick, Hitchcock, Coppolla, David Lean, Spielberg, Scorsese, A Minghella, Polanski, Tarantino, Sam Mendes, Tim Burton, Oliver Stone, Neil Jordan, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, James Cameron, Clint Eastwood, Peter Jackson, Zhang Yimou, Sergio Leone, Sydney Lumet, Carol Reed are the ones that jump to mind but there are many more.

Males - Newman, McQueen, Depp, Nicholson, Eastwood, Bogart, Pacino, De Niro, Spacey, Gabriel Byrne, Bob Hoskins, The Pythons, Morgan Freeman, James Gandolfini, Ralph Fiennes, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris, James Mason, John Mills, Connery, Kingsley, Tom Hanks, Alec Guinness, Daniel Day Lewis. The women would include Judy Dench, Helen Mirren, Helen Hunt, Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Nicole Kidman, Faye Dunaway, Audrey Hepburn, Julie Walters, Audrey Tattou, Kathleen Turner, Connie Nielson, Grace Kelly, Juliette Binoche, Ingrid Bergman, Charlize Theron, Vivienne Leigh, Claudia Cardinale and many more!

Robert Towne, Alan Ball, Tarantino, Neil Jordan, Steve Zallian, Joe Esterhaz, Wm Goldmann, Frank Darabont, Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), Simon Beaufoy, Jimmy McGovern, Kubrick, Mark Anders & James L Brooks (As Good As It Gets), Robert Bolt, Dalton Trumbo (for standing up to McCarthyism), Billy Wilder, Graham Greene, Scorsese, Christopher McQuarrie, Minghella, Coens, the Pythons, Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Val McDermid.

I love music. Some of my favourites would be Pink Floyd - Delicate Sound of Thunder; Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds; some Led Zeppelin; The Doors; Eric Clapton; Talking Heads and Fat Boy Slim and a wide range of Pop like Kate Bush, Tina Turner, Cher, Carpenters, ELO, 10 C.C. (you can tell my age!); not to forget Kylie, Lady GaGa, Shania Twain, The Sugababes and Girl's Aloud (and not just because Nadine comes from just around the corner from me - I really do like their music! Honest!). Also Riverdance; Secret Garden's Albums Dreamcatcher and Under The Red Moon; Blues Brothers, Dire Straits, Queen, Heart, Enigma, Fleetwood Mac, John Lennon, Horslips and many more. I love listening to classical music renditions for film scores by likes of Morricone, Vangelis, Mancini, John Williams, Tan Dun, Itzhak Perlman. I often listen to that while writing.

The Screenwriter's Bible by David Trottier, Filmmaking and Screenwriting For Dummies; How Not To Write A Screenplay by Denny Flinn (A must have); McKee's 'Story'; Film Directing Shot By Shot by Stephen D Katz; The Devil's Guide to Hollywood by Joe Esterhaz and novels - Larsson's Millenium Trilogy, the Lonely bones and Val McDermid's Tony Hill novels and recently copies of my own book: Short Films: Writing the Screenplay published by Kamera Books.

Well done steak with pepper sauce, mushrooms, tobacco onions and roast potatoes or maybe chips followed by Italian Ice Cream (Pistacchio, Fragolla, Vanilla) followed by half a dozen Southern Comforts & White Lemonade and a half dozen Budweissers and then there's not a hope of them shouting 'Dead Man Walking' because they'll have to carry me pissed out of my skull and singing my head off! That's if I don't find one of those James Bond wrist watches with the super laser thingy that can cut through concrete and get me to hell out of there into the arms of my sexy wife. As a last resort one of Captain Kirk's 'beam me up Scotty' communicators would be handy.

My life, my brain, my family, my imagination, my sense of humour, my determination to succeed and never lay down in the face of adversity, my sympathy for the poor, downtrodden and oppressed of the earth and a healthy hatred of injustice. The best thing that owns me: My beautiful wife, Vivienne, and my two little children. The worst thing that owns me: The taxman and the mortgage company!

A winner (Bronze Award) in Hollywood's Page Awards 2010 & Finalist 2011, Finalist in BBC's Tony Doyle Awards in 2010: British Short Screenplay Competition 2009; Waterford Film Festival Short Screenplay contest in 2009 & 2010; Final Ten 2008 Euroscript Screenplay Contest; Finalist 2010 LSF Shorts contest and 2011 BBC NI/NI Screen Primetime TV Drama competition; Semi-Finalist 2010 Scriptapalooza feature category (top 100 of 3,541), Semi-finalist 2011 Page Awards and 2009 Movie Script, Hollywood. Six Quarter Finalists in USA, Canada and UK contests 2009-2011. Honourable Mention Amsterdam Film Festival feature contest. I've written 15 shorts (six are half hour dramas), 3 features plus 2 others in progress plus a book on short screenplay writing for Kamera Books Creative Essentials series and a crime fiction novel adapted from my Tony Doyle Awards screenplay. I like an adrenalin fix now and then doing things like driving Ferrari 355, Porsche, Lotus super cars and single seat racers around Silverstone for the fun of it; two Bungee Jumps for charity including one at 330 ft in Ireland; I've even gone to the bottom of a local river with a scuba mask and snorkel looking for my wedding ring after losing it on a team building canoe event. I found it after an hour, only problem about that is I can't swim! Well it was only 6-7 foot deep at the time and I could walk the stoney bottom in places! I also survived Meningitis that left me on the critical list for weeks in 1990 (last rites stuff) and necessitated a major brain op to fix the lining of my brain. No lasting effects thank God but a scar that's positively erotic if you're into scars! Walking so close to the edge makes you look at the world and life in a totally different way. Didn't stop me from doing racing cars, bungee jumps and paragliding though - you need a thrill now and again to make you feel alive. So that's a bit of me - if you think you're beginning to get a feel for what I'm like from the above - that's only the tip of the iceberg - you should see what's down below then again maybe not. Isn't life fun and the World an interesting place!