Conroy worked closely with the Production Designer, Nicola Moroney. She had just wrapped up on the TV series, The Final Furlong, when she was approached by Adrian Devane about Speed Dating. “I thought that the screenplay was quite quirky and interesting in that it was set in a nondescript country so that it could be anywhere,” she says.

The screenplay with its non-specific locations – City Hospital, City University – emphasised this sense of the universal. Similarly Herbert and Conroy shot the movie so that it could not be readily identified in substance or style as being Irish. “A lot of the movie is interior so you don’t in that case see distinctive landmarks, “says Conroy. “When you do see landmarks, we tried to stylise them so that it is more about the structure of the building rather than a statement that this is a specific place. The biggest thing was that it was mainly interior.”

As the limited budget determined locations had to be pretty close to ideal fit, there was an extensive reconnaissance of Dublin and its environs. “I enjoy scouting for locations,” says Tony Herbert. “You have a picture in your head so it’s a matter of finding the location that most closely matches that picture. In a way it’s like casting, that moment when you find someone who hits the mark of what you want.”

But it took time to pin-point the best locations: in certain cases original discarded options were returned to. “It took a few weeks of scouting to get what we wanted,” says Moroney. “We would check some places and then go back to them later after rethinking the scenes. In this way then it was a process of elimination and it took a while to tie them down.”

The recce threw up the Martello Hotel in Bray, a couple of rooms in Ardmore studios, the disused John Player Factory on the south side of Dublin and Marlay House in Marlay Park in Rathfarnham. “There are no sets,” says Devane. “We are using actual locations so that the four walls and the electricity are there so that saves us a lot of money. Instead of building, plastering, painting and wiring up a room: it is already there. It is mainly dressing the location.”

The John Player Factory, a disused lot on Dublin’s south city, was tailor made for a low budget production as it was large and malleable enough to be used for a number of scenes and sequences. ”We shot street scenes there as well as the outside of apartment block, the inside of apartment block, a roof scene, an interrogation room in the police station as well as the front office of the police station,” says Moroney. “We also used it to shoot the waiting room of the City Hospital.”

The Van der Bexton home was Marlay House in Rathfarnham. “We chose that, not only for the imposing exterior but also it had a large circular room that was practical for the tracking shoots of the family as they ate. There was nothing in the room bar the table so we had to do a major dressing there for the dinner sequences. There is a whole drinking theme going through the Van der Bexton family so each place setting would have about ten glasses. There was a lot of red glasses in those scenes as well.”

The Martello Hotel in Bray was used for the speed dating sequences and Friendly’s Bar was a GAA club in Lucan. “Because of the clearance issue we had to hide a lot of drinks labels and cover up the pumps,” says Moroney. “We did up our own labels and posters. There were a lot of GAA posters in the bar so we kept in the shoot.”

One of the more complex set-ups was James Van der Bexton’s city apartment: a loft-style space that was created from virtually nothing. “James apartment was rather complicated to set up,” says Moroney. “We ended up using the prop store in Ardmore Studios. That was a vast empty space and we used big drapes and piles of books to show his apartment in disarray. Afterwards, when James cleans up his act, that apartment had to be similarly done up to reflect a tidier person. That was challenging as you had not only to create a loft apartment out of nothing, you also had to combine a number or elements to reflect his personality.”

“The psychiatrist’s office is the space that I’m most happy with,” says Moroney. “That was shot in an empty office in Ardmore but it had an interesting shape. We painted that a neutral grey and hung these huge abstract paintings – shades of black, grey and red – on the wall. There was also a lot of red glass in that room as well as lots of weird items including a big hookah pipe as the psychiatrist is slightly off his head. That room was very interesting.”

The street sequences were shot in the Guinness Hop store, in the John Player factory and on the streets of Dublin. “There were a lot of graphics – book covers, beer labels, posters etc – that we had to make up as we couldn’t afford the clearance costs,” says Moroney. “So there was a lot of work involved in that.”

“Speed dating is set a contemporary city somewhere,” says Moroney. “The cast have a variety of accents – Australian, American. West Brit, English – you can’t quite place it. Also you can’t place it as everything is prefixed by ‘City’ as in City hospital, City University, City Paper. There is no reference to any country. We also tried to do a lot with colours. Red was a dominant colour that runs through the picture – there is a lot of red in his apartment and touches of red in places that he would visit. It is quite stylised.”

“I worked very closely with Tony and John,” says Moroney. “I talked quite a lot with John in terms of the lighting and the look.” Certain thematic colours are used throughout the film to subtly establish mood and character. The palette for James’s place was predominantly red.”

Conroy was keen to shoot Speed Dating in a distinctive style. “For me Irish romantic comedies do not tend to do themselves justice in cinematography terms because they are so keen on getting the laughs,” he says. “I wanted James to feel that he was vulnerable and on a journey so there is a definite improvement in the quality and amount of light as the film develops. It is quite dark to begin with because he is in a dark place emotionally. So rather than just turn on the floodlights I wanted, as cinematographer, to give it a different edge: in the way that it could be a thriller except for the dialogue. The psychiatrist’s office is warmer looking than the rest of the interiors. It is a place of refuge. There is a lot of red and grey in that office as it were a sanctuary for James.”

For Conroy the most interesting sequence to shoot was the night-time dinner at the Van Der Bexton mansion. “That is where James is talking about surveillance techniques,” he says. Conroy, a son of veteran cinematographer Jack, reverted to some of his father’s box of light tricks to capture the action. “I used little front lights on the family’s faces because the light came from the canvas of the table. In a way the technique I used was a throwback to lighting in the 1960s and ‘70s: so that scene in particular was very different from the others.”

“Also because it was a curved room, on the wide shot we used curved track just to emphasise the shape of the table. We also used long lenses to shoot the mother and father at the far end of the table whereas the brother and sister were closer together I was able to get in and shoot them from the middle of the table.”

“For me Speed Dating is a romantic comedy,” says John Conroy. “It is quirky and is there to make you laugh: tuck into your popcorn and escape from reality. There’s no great meaning apart from whatever you want to take from it. I think ultimately this film is all about entertainment.”