Ex-Sheffield screenwriting tutor Mike Downey releases debut novel Istria Gold

The acclaimed film producer, who previously taught screenwriting in Sheffield, is speaking about his upcoming book Istria Gold, an historical thriller inspired by his love of the independent-spirited Adriatic peninsula he has called home for 25 years.

“Culturally it's very rich and history seems to live alongside you,” he says, and so it is ripe for fiction too.

His novel takes the reader through the centuries. In London 2019, undercover cop Marco Mihailić is drummed out of Metropolitan Police and seeks refuge with his family in Croatian Istria, finding a world completely changed from his childhood, and one in which his beloved grandfather Nino’s truffle-dealing ventures have got him into the kind of trouble that he can no longer handle.

In Roman Istria, AD 81, teenage Lucia desperately needs to escape the gladiatorial games, and her beloved English mastiffs are her way out - her loyal companions Brutus and Britannica have the ability to sniff out beds of truffles to make her fortune.

And in 1943, brothers Pino and Nino Mihailić have seen invaders beat, kill and imprison their innocent neighbours in war-torn Istria. Driven by fear and revenge, they join Tito’s Partisans, but once again, truffles could be their great escape.

Sprawling as it is, Downey says that Istria Gold, which is about greed, is just the first in a trilogy focusing in the next editions on hate and corruption.

“If you're going to start writing a novel as you approach your 60th birthday, you’d better go into it with some ambition and some scope and some scale,” he says.

“I had a number of different ideas for a novel set in Istria and I was spending more time in this area, and love the place, and I really wanted it to be discovered somehow.

“There's very little literature that comes from Istria, especially written in the English language.”

His background in theatre, publishing and filmmaking - in May he was handed an OBE medal for his services to world cinema from the man who has since become King Charles III - were ideal when starting to write a novel.

“I've been writing all my life in some way, shape, or form, whether it's when I had a publishing company, whether I was writing journalism, whether it was during the film period, rewriting scripts, et cetera,” he says over Zoom from his home in the village of Grimalda in Croatian Istria.

But he describes the “original excellent form” of the novel as the “best way of telling stories” - one he was always leading up to.

Furthermore, the solo pursuit of novel-writing started to appeal after a lengthy period running large operations in the film business.

“I’ve made over 100 movies now in my fairly late 20-year career in the film business, and I sort of have a sense that filmmaking is more of a younger man's game,” he says.

Downey’s parents – his father a farm labourer and mother a cleaner – were from Kildare in Ireland and migrated to Devon, but he grew up in Somerset and went to grammar school in Taunton.

Intent on going into theatre, he was educated at the Universities of Warwick, Paris III (Sorbonne-Nouvelle) and Paris X (Nanterre) where he did his master’s degree and began his doctorate, while concurrently teaching at the prestigious Lycée Charlemagne and the theatre school at the Théâtre des Amandiers – Nanterre – under Patrice Chereau.

He spent much of the 1980s as a theatre director and producer in France, Germany, the former Yugoslavia and the UK, and i the 1990s as the co-founder of the Moving Pictures International group of media publications.

Downey founded the UK-based independent production house Film and Music Entertainment (F&ME) in 2000 and has production credits on about 100 feature films, and over the years worked on projects with writers such as James Ellroy, Colm Tóibín, Thomas Keneally and David Grossman.

He is chairman of the European Film Academy, a member of the Bafta Council, co-founder of the International Coalition for Film Makers at Risk and recently started an emergency fund for filmmakers in the Ukraine.

Downey has written books about film and during the early 2000s he tutored on the University of Sheffield’s creative writing for film course, but he had spent time in South Yorkshire city during the late 1970s too.

“Sheffield is a little bit of a home away from home for me because my best friend, the director Stephen Daldry, who I went to school with, he studied at Sheffield.”

Daldry is known for directing films such as Billy Elliot and The Reader.

"I used to be every other weekend in Sheffield, we used to do theatre there,” says Downey.

“We always used to rehearse our Edinburgh Festival shows there and we did a bunch of shows at the Leadmill, I seem to remember.”

They put on plays such as Deathwatch by Jean Genet, who he met in Paris, and Downey’s own work, In Search of Artaud, in preparation for Edinburgh.

But it is Istria that he wants the world to see. So in comes the truffle - the valuable mushroom and prized regional cuisine, which in Downey’s story could be his characters’ best hope for sanctuary.

Ultimately, he leaves the explanation to 19th century French author Alexandre Dumas, whose quote he reads aloud: “To tell the story of the truffle is to tell the history of world civilisation.”

Istria Gold is out on Thursday.