Автор: Baz McAlister

Most movie stars go home for a bit of rest, relaxation, and solitude, or to have some time off from the rigours of filmmaking and spend some time with family. But for rising Irish star Cillian Murphy, Ken Loach's new film The Wind That Shakes the Barley—a study of the life of an IRA flying column in the Irish War of Independence—presented a unique chance to combine the two.

"It was special because it was being shot in my home town, and it was a particularly specific Cork story," Murphy says. "I don't just take a film because I want to go back home to Ireland—I take it on the strength of script and director and what-have-you. That said, it was lovely to be at home working with people that I knew. And it's great to be able to do a film in your own accent, as well."

And about that accent—the impenetrable Cork brogue may be a little difficult to decipher for the first ten minutes of the film. This writer, perhaps unfairly equipped with an Irish accent of his own, certainly noticed some amusing scratching of heads at the Brisbane preview screening.

"We weren't laying it on thick," Murphy says—his pronunciation of 'thick' as 'tick' giving somewhat of a lie to that statement—"but you have to just tune your ear in. I have to do different accents when I'm performing, obviously, but when you go home [your native accent] does come back a lot. But, Jeez, I'd get a good clip round the ear if I went back home sounding different, at all!" he sniggers.

The shooting experience was unique in other ways, too, Murphy says. Loach shoots scenes in chronological order, often without supplying his actors with a script (or even an overview of the plot) until the day of shooting.

"That's the way [Ken] works, and it's one that he's used very successfully in the past," Murphy says. "I enjoy working like that—it whips any manner of safety net from underneath you. It's logical as well, because you shoot chronologically and you experience the events at the same time as the characters experience the events. It's a much more instinctual and honest way of working. There's no premeditation, you're not sitting around for three or four hours talking about motivation, it just happens. It mightn't be that cool-looking but I think it's very… true, you know?"

In one scene, Murphy learned minutes before shooting that his character was going to have to execute a teenage traitor to the flying column. He's rarely had to film a scene that was so hard to play, he says painfully—and one of the hardest parts was having to say goodbye to the actor who played the young lad afterwards. In a chronological shoot, there are no call-backs for the dead!

The subject matter of The Wind That Shakes the Barley is pretty sensitive and potentially inflammatory stuff—in typical Loach fashion. It adopts a republican view of the Anglo-Irish War, 1919-21, holding a mirror up to the British Government and inviting it to face up to the brutality and injustice of the past. Naturally, that's resulted in the film being universally labelled "controversial."

"I'm fine with that," Murphy affirms. "There were certain knee-jerk reactions to it in Britain, but as long as people are talking, it gives a forum for both sides to get up and engage with each other. And it brought a lot of people into the cinemas, which was good."

And as for further allegations by some of the film's critics that it paints the IRA in a very positive light, almost to the point of being propaganda, Murphy isn't convinced that's the case.

"I don't think the scene where I have to shoot a 16-year-old boy in the heart is a glorification of the IRA, really," he muses. "And anyone who's said that it's anti-British… it's not. It's anti- the government of that time and their policies. No-one who's levelled those charges has ever contested that these atrocities weren't carried out. Everyone accepts that as fact."

It was inevitable that the story of Murphy's character Damien O'Donovan's evolution from medical student to hardened IRA man and patriot would strike a chord with Murphy personally. As he says, The Wind… is a specific Cork story, and Murphy's family have lived there for generations. Some of them even lived through the events depicted in the film. Others were less lucky.

"I had a cousin who was killed by the [Black-and-] Tans… a distant cousin, from Cork," he says. "And my grandfather was also shot at. You know, it's not that long ago that all this happened."

Indeed, the Irish Troubles haven't, on the grand scheme of things, been happening that long at all. Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that both the British and Irish education systems choose to gloss over that period of history, to sweep it under the rug. Until he got the part, Murphy had only a basic knowledge of the inception of the IRA. Like most, he was only familiar with the IRA of the "modern" Troubles.

"When I was growing up," Murphy says, "I only knew of the IRA as the IRA of the North in the 70s, do you know what I mean? I didn't really know their origins or how they came about. In school, we weren't taught about the Civil War [1922–23] in depth—the War of Independence [1919–21] more so, perhaps. It wasn't a very glorious time. When I got the part I went back and studied up about the situation a bit more, and there were a lot of surprising things that were new to me," he says.