Автор: Stephen Schaefer

Stephen Schaefer: Hello, you are listing to WPS1 Art Radio. I'm your host Stephen Schaefer. The show is Beyond the Subtitles where we take a close-up look at independent and foreign film. Today we couldn't be happier to have with us Cillian Murphy who has actually been on this show before. His new film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is from the famous filmmaker Ken Loach, who is known for his unique style of blending drama with social concerns. Welcome, Cillian, to the show.

Cillian Murphy: Thanks. Good to be here again.

SS: So I guess the first thing is, how personal is The Wind That Shakes the Barley, because you're Irish and it's really a story about the rebellion of the Irish against the brutal British occupation.

CM: It means a lot to me because I'm from Cork, where the film is set, and you know the film takes place I guess just over two generations ago, which isn't that long—it's like 90 years really. And this struggle touched my family. I had a cousin who was killed by the Black and Tans and as a kid I'd drive through the town where my mom was from and she'd point out this plaque that was erected in his memory. And I'd never really had any context for what it meant. And also my dad told me just as I was doing the movie that his grandfather was shot at when he was playing music because traditional music was also banned along with everything else. So it felt like I needed to be in the movie and it felt like I had a debt of responsibility to the memory of these people and to my ancestors, really, to do this. It's who I am.

SS: Your face is the dominant image in the poster of the movie—people would think you're the star of this film even though it's an ensemble film. But I understand when you said yes to this movie that you didn't really know what the story was—you didn't know what the script was, Ken Loach doesn't do that with his actors. You sort of film day by day, in sequence, and discover what is going to happen to your character. This is like nowhere else in the film world.

CM: Yeah, well, people that know film know Ken and know his methods, which he's always reluctant to talk about because he doesn't want to make a big deal of it, and he's right. But it is quite unique, his way of working. I've always said when people ask me "what is your criteria for choosing jobs," I will always say it starts with the script, and then it's the director and the creative team, and so on. Whereas in this case you don't have a script. Now, people have to realize that there is a very strong script that is completed and written by Paul Laverty who's worked with Ken for his last ten films or something like that. So it's just that Ken doesn't give it to his actors. And so you do take a leap of faith, but if you're going to take a leap of faith with anybody, it might as well be Ken Loach.

SS: What does your management team or your agent say to you when you say, "I want to do this Irish film with Ken Loach, it feels very personal to me, but I really don't know how much I'm going to be in it, I know I'll be there the whole time…"

CM: I mean, again, once you mention Ken Loach, people are like "you've got to do it, you have to do it." And it was a fluke of coincidence that I am from Cork and Ken decided to do a film about Cork. If I wasn't from Cork, he wouldn't have put me in the film. When he makes a film about Glasgow or London or wherever the hell it may be, Nicaragua or wherever, it's people from that area because they have that language that's where they're from, and it's in their blood—they have it in the way they move and walk. That's why I got the gig. Well, I did go through a big audition process. But you've got to … if it's Ken Loach, I think any actor worth their salt is going to jump at the opportunity.

SS: Was there a basic sort of training thing that the actors went through to sort of join up to the Irish revolutionaries who were opposing this, learning how to work with rifles and do that kind of thing?

CM: Yeah, we did a "boot camp," is what people call it, but it was interesting because we had a week of this, we had just a rudimentary weapons training, and learning songs, and hanging out. But what was interesting about it was when these young recruits joined the Flying Column historically, they only ever had like a week's training before they were thrown into the field. And so that again was—when you thought about that, it was quite revealing.

SS: And when an actor looks at a script and says "I'm going to be playing Damien, he's a doctor, or aspiring to be a doctor here in Ireland in 1918 or 1922, how do you prepare for your character then, when you don't really know whether he's going to be alive or dead at the end of the movie?

CM: You don't have the script, but you have a back story that Paul and Ken give you, and you talk about it a lot. And I spent a lot of time talking to Donal O'Driscoll who was the historical advisor on this movie, who's a professor of history at University College Cork. So I spent a lot of time talking with them, I talked to doctors to try and get into the mindset of what it's like to be a doctor with the Hippocratic oath and all that stuff. And then I did a lot of reading and talked a lot with Ken. But it's more about the instinct that you have as an actor than sort of an intellectualization of the role, which can happen a lot when you are given the document, which is the script, months and months before shooting, and you tend to pour over it and try and figure out motivation and everything else. While that is the normal way of approaching a role, to do it like this you just have to rely on your instincts. And I think that's why Ken is so particular about his casting and why he takes so long to cast his movies, because he relies on the instincts of his actors. And he I think also he casts actors who have something of the character in them.

SS: Obviously Batman Begins and Red Eye were big Hollywood commercial movies that put you on the map internationally. Does this kind of movie, being in a Ken Loach movie, a movie that own the Gold Palm at Cannes last year, mean anything internationally career-wise to you or is this personal—you know how they say I'll do one for them and one for me?

CM: I don't look at anything strategically or career-wise. For me it's about the stories and filmmakers and roles, and this had all of those in one. To win at Cannes was just such an amazing achievement for Ken and for the film. It was one of the first movies shown in competition, and then we had the two weeks of competition, and then it won right at the end and it was a unanimous decision. You know, people talk about the politics of film, but this film would not have won if it was not a wonderfully, entertaining, moving story, politics aside. And that's what Ken manages to achieve. His films obviously have a message and we all know what Ken's politics are and where he comes from, but they're always stories about humanity and normal people and people that you can invest in. That's what makes them so compelling.

SS: What have you been doing then since The Wind That Shakes the Barley? I understand that you've done a very strange sort of science fiction movie where you play an astronaut and you've reunited with Danny Boyle called Sunshine?

CM: Yeah, weirdly I had a weekend off and then I was in space with Danny, it was great. So I did that, and that was a long, tough shoot. And then I took a lot of time off, and then I went into this little movie called Watching the Detectives which was shot in New York in the summer with Lucy Liu, a little comedy directed by Paul Soter. And then I just finished a play in the West End in London directed by John Crowley. So that's kind of what I've been up to.

SS: And the play's called?

CM: Love Song.

SS: And was this the idea, that you're just not thinking about what I have to do next, I'm just going to go with my instincts and find what pleases me?

CM: Yeah—what challenges me rather than what pleases me. That's always how I've operated, and tried to insist on diversity and again stories that are worth telling.

SS: For the Danny Boyle movie, how did you prepare to be an astronaut? We've just heard about in the United States this woman astronaut who turned out to be a stalker with a diaper.

CM: [chuckles] That's funny. We spent like a month doing lots of different things. We had a lot lectures from people from that field, we—I went to Geneva to the CERN centre where they're building a particle accelerator under the ground and they're about to switch it on where they're smashing particles together and trying to recreate the conditions of the big bang effectively and find out why the hell we're here or how the hell we got here. And Danny made us all live together in like these little student apartments to kind of—you know the whole premise of science fiction is a group of people thrown together in this confined space for an extended period of time and how the hell that affects them and then, you know, they disappear one by one. It's very hard to act that thing—there's a certain essence or a certain familiarity or a certain irritation that's very hard to contrive. So to actually live together as a crew and as a cast is one way of getting that real feeling. Most of these movies, the classic sci fi movies like Alien, they open with a group meal and these people have eaten together for the last—I don't know how many hundreds of meals they've had, so you want to try and get that, and you want to invest in these characters and go on that journey with them. And we did that, and we went scuba diving, and we went in light aircraft and did flight simulators. Danny is very intensive.

SS: So you had two intense filmmakers that wanted you to—I wouldn't say become obsessed, but become fully committed to that part. Does that transfer when you go home? Does your wife look at you and say "Cillian, who are you today?"

CM: No, she knows who I am. But I do think that it takes something from you. There's an absence when you're making a movie. You're absent physically because you're working every god-given hour, but emotionally I think it does takes something from you when you come home.

SS: Especially when you only have a weekend off.

CM: Or a day, that's generally how much you have off. And even then you're preparing for the next day. It's quite exhausting. But I'm loathe to complain about it because this is what I've wanted to do all my life—not all my life, but I've acquired this passion for this job, and it's wonderful to get to play, but it can get exhausting.

SS: So when people say you're a star or a rising star, what does that mean to you exactly? Just that you're doing well in your profession or it's something to be avoided?

CM: I try not to think about all that stuff. I try to just do my work, be judged on my work.

SS: When you were in the West Song in this play Love Song was your name above the title?

CM: Yeah, but so were all the other cast members.

SS: And how different is it to do a play from a movie? A play, everything's contained you do it eight times a week.

CM: When I started acting that's what I did exclusively for four years, I just did theatre. For me it's all about learning, really. Well, whenever you do a job it's learning, but I think in theatre there's a much more accelerated rate of learning because you're doing an entire narrative, an entire character arc, an entire journey live on stage. And there's this communion with the audience which you don't get in movies—it's about acting in moments and it takes a long, long time. So theatre's been very, very important to me. And to be acting every night, and twice a day on Thursdays and Saturdays for three months, you can only be a better actor out of that, regardless of how good or bad the show is, I think.

SS: Do you think movies or theatre have an opportunity to change people's lives? Do you think that's one of the best things that can happen, as well as to tell interesting stories?

CM: I think our job is to entertain, first and foremost. And if you entertain and you engage, then you have a chance to put across a message. I think as I spoke about earlier, Ken's films only work because you engage and you're entertained and you're emotionally connected with these characters and you invest in them. And so that's the ideal, that you say something intelligent with your film, but also in an engaging way.

SS: A lot of people that I've talked about over the years, when you say, "Do you remember a movie that you saw early on that seemed to change your life or really left a strong message?" So many people have come up with Kes, Ken Loach's movie about a boy and his falcon from 1968. Do you have a film in your childhood that you remember as having some kind of real, lasting effect on the way you looked at the world, or the way you looked at movies, or the way you thought about yourself?

CM: Did I tell you about this before? Kes is a seminal movie for a lot of people. It's crazy to think that's 1968 and he's still making fantastic films since then. Who else has had a career like that?

I watched this movie by accident with my brother when I was about 15, 16, this movie called Scarecrow, ironically. It's directed by Jerry Schatzberg with Al Pacino and Gene Hackman. We rented it by accident. It was Halloween, we wanted to rent a scary movie, and the idiot behind the counter gave us this movie. And I remember watching it and I suppose how it affected me was I didn't realize that film acting could have that kind of visceral, emotional effect on the viewer. And I'll never forget the two of them together. I think it's a film that's been forgotten, really, in that whole … when people talk about the movies of the '70s, I think it's kind of been forgotten in that canon, and I think people should revisit because I think Pacino is just extraordinary.

There's this scene in the end where he's in the fountain, where he has this kind of breakdown. And I remember watching it and just going, "My god! Watching a film can have that kind of effect on me?" I didn't act for five or six years, but it had a lasting effect on me. It's the only film that I watch over and over again.

SS: The idea of just going along and making movies then like when Pacino did Scarecrow, you never know what the effect is. You don't know if you're going to walk away with an Oscar or a Palme d'Or, you just do it for the experience.

CM: You never, ever make money for prizes. That was just such a beuatfiul film. I remember reading Gene Hackman's biography and he said they shot that movie chronologically, which is what Ken does, because it's logical for the actor to experience the events as the character does. So they just went across America and just shot that movie, and it's so beautiful.

SS: Batman Begins is going to have another episode. Were you alive at the end of the first one? Could you be in this next one? Do you know?

CM: I believe I was alive. I don't know what's happening with the next one. All I know is they've got a great cast. I'd work with Chris again in a heartbeat.

SS: Thank you, Cillian Murphy. This is Steve Schaefer from Beyond the Subtitles on WPS1 Art Radio, saying so long, farewell.

CM: Bye bye.