For years we have been waiting. Director John Ford, way back when, was interested. In the early ’80s Robert Redford talked about doing it. At different times Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise were said to be scouting locations in Ireland. Even Mickey Rourke was talked about. Well, at last, almost 75 years after his death, we have our movie Michael Collins made by an Irish director with an Irish actor starring in the title role.
Neil Jordan, with Liam Neeson as Collins, has made a breathtaking movie that instills life into the legendary revolutionary leader from West Cork who gave us the Ireland we have today. A story of epic proportions – larger-than-life figures, the making of a country, civil war, a little romance – it needed a great director to pull it all together, and fortunately, we have that in Neil Jordan who, finally, after all the talk and long delays, has made a movie that is worthy of Michael Collins.
Born in Sligo in 1950, Jordan (who now lives in Dublin) began his film career in 1981 as a creative consultant on John Boorman’s Excalibur (actor Liam Neesom also made his debut in the film). In 1982, he wrote and directed his first film, Angel (released as DannyBoy in the U.S.), which won him the London Evening Standard’s Most Promising Newcomer Award.
His next film, The Company of Wolves (a science-fiction thriller), was honored with Best Film and Best Director Awards by the London Critics’ Circle, and his third feature, Mona Lisa, (reminiscent of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver) received several honors including a Golden Globe Award, and earned Bob Hoskins an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
Jordan’s two Hollywood productions, High Spirits, starring Peter O’Toole and Daryl Hannah (ghosts in an Irish castle, worth a video-rental for cameo roles by Ray McNally and Liam Neeson), and We’re No Angels with Robert de Niro and Sean Penn, (escapees who dress up as priests) met with limited success. And Jordan would return to Ireland to make his next movie.
The Miracle, a film of a young boy’s coming of age, starring Beverly D’Angelo and Donal McCann, didn’t receive much attention but fans of Jordan the prose-writer are sure to love this film. Jordan was a writer first; at a young age his Night in Tunisia won the Guardian prize. The Miracle is from the world of those short stories.
In 1992, ten years after the making of Angel, Jordan would again make a movie that used the conflict in Northern Ireland as a backdrop. In Angel, a young Stephen Rea is featured as a dance hall saxophone player who goes astray when a young girl he has befriended is killed in an IRA attack. The Crying Game again featured Rea in a story of friendship between a British Soldier, his lover, and an IRA man. The movie received six Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actor nomination for Stephen Rea. Jordan won the Oscar for best original screenplay.
His reputation as a director and screenwriter soared, and he was given the coveted job of directing Interview with the Vampire, from the best-selling Anne Rice novel. To date Vampire has grossed over $220 million worldwide, but more importantly producer David Geffen proved to be instrumental in ensuring that Jordan’s latest movie finally made it to the silver screen.
Jordan wrote the first draft of his script for Michael Collins 13 years ago, and since then every time he finished a movie he tried again to make the story of the man who changed the course of Irish history. “Interview had been such a good experience for everyone involved that he (Geffen) wanted to keep the same team together for Michael Collins,” says producer Stephen Woolley, whose long-term partnership with Jordan began with The Company of Wolves.
Fortunately, Tom Cruise, whose casting as the vampire Lestat was so controversial, is not in this picture. Right from the start, Jordan knew whom he wanted in the title role. “Liam Neeson was always going to be part of this film, from the moment Neil started writing it,” explains Woolley. “It was Neil’s and Liam’s obsession right through the eighties and early nineties.”
During that period both Irishmen’s movie-making reputations were on the rise. Jordan had his Crying Game and Interview success, and Neeson’s Oscar-nominated performance in Schindler’s List put them in the top rank of international talent. Finally, it seemed, the time was right to make the movie.
Jordan lined up what must surely be one of the most talented group of actors to ever appear in an Irish film. Aside from Neesom, Alan Rickman, one of Britain’s most respected actors, is superb as Eamon de Valera, Collins’ colleague and final adversary. Harry Boland, Collins’ best friend, is played by Aidan Quinn (some of the most tender scenes in the movie are between these two), Stephen Rea continues his long-standing working relationship with Jordan as Ned Broy, the G-man who joins the cause, Julia Roberts plays Collins’ girlfriend Kitty Kiernan, and a score of Irish actors including Ian Hart and Gerry McSorley make up the rest.
The making of Michael Collins was a major news event in Ireland in the summer of 1995. Thousands of unpaid extras volunteered for crowd scenes, many turning up just to see production designer Anthony Pratt’s extraordinary set – the largest ever built in Ireland – which re-created Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, down to the tiniest detail. Movie-goers will be thrilled at the time-travel opportunity to see the Dublin of the early part of the century.
The film also showcases the lighting mastery of Chris Menges, who worked on Jordan’s Angel and since then won two Oscars for his cinematography on The Killing Fields and The Mission, and should definitely be nominated for his work on Collins. “I like to work on films that I learn from,” Menges said. “Neil’s a wonderful director to work with, because he brings a questioning mind to the process, so you have to come to work with fresh ideas.”
With such a talented cast and crew, the movie is fully expected to repeat the success of The Crying Game. Speaking of which, Jordan said, “I think there is a kind of communal amnesia, a desire to pretend that these facts of Irish life have nothing to do with the way we are now and I think they have everything to do with the way we are now.” Jordan’s statement on The Crying Game never rang more true than it does for Michael Collins.
Speaking in a New York hotel room prior to the opening of the film which had just earned the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion Award for Best Picture of 1996, as well as the Festival’s Best Actor Award for Liam Neeson, Jordan, sporting long hair and leather jacket, and looking younger than his 46 years, takes a pull on his cigarette as he says now that the film has finally been made, “I know I’ll never make a more important one.”
“There is certainly a very strong comparison to be made between Collins and Gerry Adams. The second half of the film shows a man trying to decommission his army and shows the difficulty of taking the gun out of the conflict after you have introduced it.”
Why did you want to make this movie?
I think it’s a very good story, for one thing – it’s a genuinely kind of tragic tale and it’s unique in that one person’s story can embody so many elements of the story of the country as a whole.
Why did it take so long to make?
One of the reasons is the timidity of people because of the current IRA. One of the worst by-products of that is that any examination of that period of history seems suspect. People are too embarrassed. They don’t want to seem anti-English. I don’t think that the film is anti-English. The events that happened are documented. Very few people internationally know about Bloody Sunday. (The Black and Tans killed 11 people and injured 57 at a game in Dublin’s Croke Park).
Did you grow up knowing about Collins?
To a certain extent. I would hear conversations between my mother and father about civil war politics. My grandmother worked with Collins in the post office in Kensington when he was very young – he must have been about 16 – but it’s not something that I grew up with.
The casting for the movie is excellent. Who was responsible?
Well, I suppose I must be. Because basically, Warner Brothers were very good when they finally came to do it. They said, you have 28 million dollars, do what you want with it – just don’t ask us for any more money. Which is the best possible way to make a movie because I had a totally free hand with the casting and then I had to make it so that it didn’t become one of those big gargantuan 100 million-dollar crippling things, because when films get to that stage all the lightness goes out of it, and they become corporate things – a lot of studio interference and all that. They knew Liam would play Collins because there was no question that I would do it with anyone but him, and so I cast Liam, Aidan Quinn and Stephen Rea.
I would have preferred to see and Irish actress as Kitty instead of Julia Roberts, although to be fair she did a good job.
Well, my perception at the time was – I might be wrong – was that there were a tremendous amount of very strong male actors between 18 and 26 but that the best of the Irish actresses, like Brid Brennan, were all just slightly too old for that role, so I started looking abroad and Julia called me up. It’s not a huge part and I couldn’t expand it – the place Kitty herself had in it wasn’t that large.
What did you think of Garret Fitzgerald’s review in the Irish Times, which was complimentary but said you were too hard on de Valera?
It was terribly generous. The stuff he said about de Valera was…I have to accept that but the things is, I’m not trying to imply that de Valera had anything to do with the assassination of Michael Collins. I’m just trying to show two protagonists who dominated the story and an attempted meeting between the two of them. I don’t claim that that last encounter actually happened. He (de Valera) through a series of actions of his own set events in motion that would lead to civil war, and once the war happened he was powerless to prevent an assassination.
Some have said that perhaps your perception of de Valera came from Tim Pat Coogan’s book.
Well, I had the script since 1983. I read all the biographies until that time. But certainly Tim Pat Coogan’s book was the most extensive. History hasn’t been kind to Dev. That quote (“It is my considered opinion that in the fullness of time, history will record the greatness of Michael Collins, and it will be recorded at my expense”), which I used in the movie is from Tim Pat’s book.
In school in Ireland we were given a very simplistic view of what happened.
They stopped at 1916, didn’t they? And then, of course, Dev was in power.
As a matter of fact we weren’t allowed to see the film Mise Eire.
Mise Eire – made in 1966 for the anniversary of 1916 Rising. On the first track of this film I used all of Sean O’Riada music, which is quite marvelous but very badly recorded.
Do you see Michael Collins as being educational?
It’s very educational for English people who for the last 30 years have wondered what on earth is going on there. And I think it is instructive for people to see the movie and see that so much of even the War of Independence itself was fought amongst Irish people. Almost everybody that Collins targeted in the initial period were Irish people working for the British administration.
What’s the difference between back then and the IRA today?
Well, the difference is that in the elections in 1918, which I didn’t put in the movie because I didn’t have (screen) time, there was a mandate for the independence movement which was given by 80 percent of the Irish people. I don’t support the IRA. I don’t see any justification for the use of violence. I try to understand it.
Collins was responsible for setting up the Six Counties, it may have been a disastrous decision – I think that most extreme republicans would regard Collins as a traitor now. My perception of it is that had he lived he would have ensured that the boundary commission (responsible for drawing up the border which separates the North from the 26 counties) would have been acted upon in a serious way. I think that he understood the British mentality far better than anyone else, and I also think that he wouldn’t have fought a war that he knew he couldn’t win.
Is there a comparison to be made between Collins and Gerry Adams?
There is certainly a very strong comparison to be made between Collins and Gerry Adams (President, Sinn Féin). The second half of the film shows a man trying to decommission his army and shows the difficulty of taking the gun out of the conflict after you have introduced it.
What about the rumors of conflict between Neeson and yourself about the movie’s ending?
That’s not true.
It was a brave movie to make given the media reaction to anything political. For instance, the Sunday Independent on Some Mother’s Son.
Ah, the Indo. There was a lot of adverse comment going on when I was making the movie. Roy Foster and Ruth Dudley Edwards – the revisionist historians – they all made comments, very stupidly, on something they hadn’t seen. And the English press waged a campaign against it.
Collins is a figure of such paradox. On the one hand he is the most effective Irish Republican there ever has been. On the other hand he is kind of the mentor of the Fine Gael Party which in some ways is representative of the old Irish Parliamentary Party. He is a figure of all these contradictions so I thought I would make a movie that would either annoy every possible point of view or intrigue people and make them examine the background even more.
I liked The Miracle, which kind of came and went. It was a quiet little movie.
It was such a quiet kind of film that no one went to see it. I put more of my fiction into that movie than any other.
The father figure is very strong in your fiction, yet the mother seems to be absent. Is this a reflection of your own childhood?
My father was a complicated man. He was a very fine mathematician. He was a Gaelgoer. He used to play the fiddle. You know the way Irish sons and fathers have in these strange inarticulate relationships, and at a certain stage … The Miracle was the world of those short stories. I suppose I had far less problems with my relationship with my mother. My mother is a painter and she wanted every one of us to be painter. My sister is a painter. I used to paint.
Is there a conflict between being a prose writer and a movie maker?
There was a terrible conflict when I first started making movies because at that time in Ireland people didn’t make films and the Irish regard their writers with tremendous affection – and a lot of people wanted me to continue as a writer.
I find the form of the novel very difficult – short stories are much easier to deal with in a way. I’m not sure I was very really a novelist, although I’ve written are rather private – solipsistic in a way.
What are you working on now?
I’ve just finished The Butcher Boy, from Patrick McCabe’s Novel. It’s nothing like this one at all. I shot the whole movie in Clones. It’s many of the same cast. Stephen Rea, Ian Hart, Brendan Gleeson, plays the priest. I found these two kids in Killeshandra. One, Eamon Owens, who had never acted before is a bit like Marlon Brando. And I have Sinead O’Connor as the Virgin Mary.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November/December 1996 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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