Updated / Friday, 11 Sep 2026
07:00
Piers McGrail is an IFTA-winning Irish cinematographer whose work spans film and television, with credits including Calm With Horses, Ordinary Loveand It Is In Us All, for which he won the IFTA for Best Cinematography.
Most recently, he served as director of photography on Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Grant Gee’s jazz biopic written by Mark O’Halloran. The Irish-UK production premiered in Competition at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear for Best Director, one of the festival’s top prizes.
We asked Piers for his choice cultural picks…
I’ll recommend a couple of great old films as I’m really slow to see the most recent ones. Sorcerer (by William Freidkin) encompasses so much that I enjoy in film – it’s a gritty and extremely tense thriller/adventure but it’s also weird and offbeat and fully of gritty atmosphere.
And I’m a big Hitchcock fan so I’ll also recommend Foreign Correspondent, which is an early and lesser seen one (and clearly wartime propaganda) but very pacey and entertaining.
Also, there’s a re-release of Ken Russell’sThe Devilscoming up at the end of October, not to be missed. It features a manic Oliver Reed swinging around a taxidermied crocodile and an incredible performance from Vanessa Redgrave. And it’s visually stunning, with incredible production design at a scale that you rarely see in arthouse cinema.
I hadn’t listened to Bill Evans much before working on the film but I emerged a convert and I’ve bought a bunch of his records since then. I’ve particularly enjoyed the 1970 album Alone.
Otherwise my most recent acquisition is the soundtrack to 80s erotic thriller Body Heat (also an excellent film!) by my favourite film composer John Barry. It’s very romantic and dramatic.
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I’ve just started the audiobook of Jon Ronson’s The Castle. He’s so good at drawing something compelling and far-reaching out of a seemingly simple starting place. It’s great storytelling, and I highly recommend the audiobook [read by him] to properly appreciate his very funny intonation.
I need to get to the theatre more! I’m always wowed by THISISPOPBABY – they always put on a great show. The designer of Everybody Digs Bill Evans, (uber-talented Ellen Kirk!) has a also designed new play in the Fringe Festival, Crisis Actor, so I will definitely be checking that out.
I tend to watch films rather than shows. That said, I will always watch anything by Adam Curtis, and I’m still catching up on Shifty, which is about late 20th century politics in the UK. In other hands that could be an extremely boring subject matter, but Curtis is a wizard. Like Jon Ronson, he weaves seemingly unconnected stories into an overarching narrative. It’s confidently political and his opinions are clear, which I quite enjoy. His soundtracks are always super, and although his work is entirely made up of archive material (often forgotten bits of newsreel) it contains some of the most mesmerising images I’ve seen recently, all expertly cut together.
I’ve never been more soaked that I was following the David Byrne gig at St Anne’s Park a couple of months ago, which was the last gig I went to. It was pretty much a constant downpour but nobody budged as the set was so good. And the next gig I’ll be going to is a super talented friend of mine A.S Fanning, who I highly recommend – he’s playing Whelans in Dublin on 26th September.
The most recent exhibition I went to was William Blake at the National Gallery, which was great – an array of demons and weird devilly things and dark religious iconography. I also want to give a shout out to The Museum of Curiosities on Pembroke Street. Like the Blake exhibition it also is a great collection of weird and wonderful things, very much up my alley. In a Dublin that feels at constant risk of losing any culture that isn’t completely profit-driven, it’s nice to see a small independent museum succeeding.
I’ve been driving all over Ireland for work in recent months so I have listened to a lot of podcasts. One I frequently listen to is Search Engine, which tackles a different factual topic every week. They’re often unassuming subjects but presented with humour and curiosity.
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I also really enjoyed a series about a shipwrecked family, calledAdrift. It’s an incredible story, told with a mixture of re-enactments and interviews with some of the survivors. It’s very well produced with great sound design – even my six year old daughter was captivated.
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My friend Glenn just alerted me to a new app created by director Steven Soderbergh. A lifelong fan of Jaws, he intricately breaks down literally every frame of the film with ostensibly mundane information such as what day it was shot on, what lens was used etc.. But for anyone interested in the mechanics of filmmaking it’s fascinating to see how the film progressed in such intricate detail, where things went to plan (and often didn’t). It’s called Production 02074.
THE NEXT BIG THING…
One of the great benefits of my job is that I sometimes get to work with exciting new directors, and I’m happy to shout out a few who I’ve worked with this year – Alan Hopkins, Ellius Grace and Edwina Casey. Getting a film made is a bit challenging at the moment but there is certainly no shortage of talent out there, especially in Ireland.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans is now screening in selected screens nationwide
