A monk winning

All that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here", wrote Charles Dickens of the Five Points intersection in the 19th Century. It would have been difficult to argue. This squalid ghetto was a focal point for the 15,000 or so Irish who arrived in New York every week during the 1840s and 1850s. They may have escaped the famine, pestilence and political oppression, but what awaited them in the brave new world of America was hardly an improvement.

If the unfeasible degradation of life in early New York didn’t get you, then the self-styled ‘Natives’ would. These men, who represented the first generations to be born on American soil, were but one of many vicious tribal warring gangs in a city dominated by the scrabble for power and territory.

The venomous racial faultlines that defined the poverty-stricken classes, erupted all over the city during the 1863 Draft Riots into something more serious than the usual murderous knife fights. After all, persuading New York’s most deprived social groups that they should be drafted into Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War to fight on behalf of others was never going to fly, given the ruthlessly Darwinian code which governed their lives.

This explosive episode in American history forms the epic backdrop to Martin Scorsese’s new movie, Gangs Of New York. It has taken the director thirty years to bring Herbert Asbury’s 1928 chronicle of the city’s colourful and often demonic 19th Century criminal underworld to life, but the resulting gory and bombastic Western has been well worth the wait. Like Taxi Driver, Bringing Out The Dead or indeed much of Scorsese’s output, Gangs is a lush, disesased hymnal to the city that spawned him, and while many have criticised the film’s bloody vision of the metropolis as a wild frontier, Scorsese has always been a chronicler of the festering urban legends and dimestore myths that define New York.

The sprawling $100 million movie has also came under fire for its lack of adherence to the accepted romantic melting pot version of US history. But the film rightly illustrates the fledgling New York as a relentlessly capitalist cesspool, long before al-Qaida identified it as Great Satan’s HQ on earth, where, as one member of the ruling elite in the movie puts it: "You can always hire one half of the poor to kill the other half."

To match the gargantuan sweep of Gangs, there are grandiose performances from all concerned: Leonardo Di Caprio plays the young turk Amsterdam Vallon, who seeks vengence for the murder of his Irish father by native gang leader Bill The Butcher (a delightfully demented Daniel Day Lewis). Di Caprio has more than mere Oedipal revenge on his mind though. He seeks to consolidate Irish power in New York, by persuading the power hungry Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) to allow an Irish candidate to stand for election. The candidate he has in mind is Monk McGinn, played by Brendan Gleeson.

His Monk may be a handy man with a club, but there’s a statesman inside struggling to be heard. It’s another beautifully-judged turn from Gleeson, who relished the experience of working on Gangs, as he outlined during our recent encounter.

TB: Like all good Westerns, Gangs Of New York is not so much rooted in actual history, as it is in mythical history.

BG: Yeah, but I think it goes even a bit further than that though, in a way that a lot of Westerns do as well – there’s deeper truth behind it all, and I think it’s one of the things I liked about my character Monk, is that he gets to articulate some of those truths – that to form tribes, and seek out territory and expand – that’s what man was born to do – you either invade or you repel invaders, or otherwise you’re subjected to overlordship. That’s the pattern of human behaviour that the movie documents, and it’s a pattern that’s easily discernible. We’re still at it now after all.

TB: Another thing about Monk is that he embodies both the ‘man of action’ and the ‘man of words’ from the classic Western dichotomy.

BG: Yeah, that’s why I loved him from the beginning, he was a really interesting man, and he stands apart, but he’s really good at the violence thing when he has to do it, and so he guards himself by putting up this front of only doing violence for the money. And of course there’s the strong sense that he believed he had left all that behind him, and suddenly he’s trying to move into a different country and he finds the whole thing there waiting for him again.

TB: What is that thing that he uses to bludgeon people to death with?

BG: Ah yes, the club. It was kind of a half-made hurl thing. It had its uses.

TB: Then of course Monk has to put down his beloved club and make all these statesmanlike speeches.

BG: Yeah. You can see where he’s trying to move on, he’s one of the people who are more intelligent than all of that. But you can see where he’s coming from. Even reading about the poverty at that time, it strikes you that the squalor was just unbelievable.

TB: The New York of the film is certainly strikingly sub-Dickensian.

BG: Well, it’s funny you mention that, Dickens actually went out there at that time and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. So of course you have this place where everyone’s just trying to claw their way to having some kind of a life. And then when you get people trying to push that bit further and get involved in legitimate politics, then there’s hell to pay for them as well. So that’s why it was a great part, even though it was an economicaly written part. There were only a few scenes, even though I was waiting for ages to do them. ’Cause it was a long shoot.

TB: In terms of sheer scale, is this the biggest production you’ve been involved with, AI and Braveheart included?

BG: It’s hard to say: Braveheart was very big, or it seemed very big when we were sitting around with fifteen hundred extras. Also AI was a massive thing, just in terms of its ambition alone. So I’m not really sure how you’d gauge scale, but just in terms of being an actor walking around the set, Gangs was phenomenal. I mean, walking down to the harbour and seeing these two huge ships tied up in the dock, that was something else, that was amazing. And I remember Liam Neeson saying ‘you’ll never see a film on this scale again.’

But there were people saying that when we were making Braveheart as well. And even then, you had people already starting to use computers whenever they needed extras.

TB: But CGI still can’t replicate the epic effect of Gangs’ cast of thousands.

BG: Well, that’s it, I don’t know what exactly it is about movie-making, I think it’s an interesting mixture of carpet-baggers and visionaries who make up the movie industry, and they’re all struck by the romance of making a big movie like this one. I don’t know that that’s ever going to go away, and I hope, if for nothing else, that Gangs is a massive commercial success for that reason, because it’ll encourage producers to take risks and work on a bigger scale if it’s worth it. ’Cause it would be horrible to think that the big movie was lost for ever.

And of course, I hope the film does well so that Scorsese gets what he deserves. His films deserve to be seen by a larger audience, and he deserves the backing to do whatever he wants as a filmmaker.

TB: And how did you find working with the famously exact and exacting Mr. Scorsese?

BG: Oh, he’s painstaking all right, but he’s really funny and really brilliant, and he’s such a dude, he’s so cool. He’s very Italian, he’s a great storyteller but he’s really ferociously serious about what he does. He has an encyclopaedic mind when it comes to film – every film that’s ever been filmed, every shot that’s ever been shot, he knows about it. It’s a combination of his fantastic passion and all those loose things that you associate with being Italian, allied to a painstaking and exacting meticulous-ness – he really is the bee’s knees.

TB: And do you feel Gangs is his great masterpiece?

BG: It’s a great film alright but I’m absolutely convinced that when it comes down to it, people are going to do exactly the same as they’ve done with so many other Scorsese films. Everybody has expectations of a Scorsese film and when the film doesn’t conform to that, they won’t give it time. It’s like what you said about blank cheques – it took him 25 or 30 years to make this film, because nobody would give him any kind of a cheque. And you think to yourself, what kind of industry would allow that to happen?

But the truth is, the public are responsible as well. I can’t understand sometimes why they won’t give some films time, or at least stand back from them and think about them a bit, and that’s why Scorsese isn’t a massive commerical success, which is the oddest thing you’ve ever heard. I only wish he was our chronicler, like even what’s there of Irish history in Gangs is something that we need to look at.

TB: Gangs certainly does provide a timely reminder of Ireland’s own history of emigration.

BG: Yeah, it may have been set 150 years ago but the point is that the Irish were leaving in their droves and entering America illegally up until five or six years ago. I can’t understand how people can get their head around that and then respond so badly when they turn around and see immigrants in their own country. It’d be nice to think that this film could open a few eyes but I don’t think it will.

TB: The dialogue is written in 19th-century New York idiom: was that like learning a new language?

BG: Well, Daniel and those probably had to use a lot more of that language than I did. My character’s kind of separate, and on the set I was given carte blanche to muck around with my lines, probably because I was the only person on set that was speaking with their own accent. Even Liam Carney and these lads were playing native Americans, which was hilarious. But yeah, we did have this lexicon for the film and we’d muck around to see what was authentic and what wasn’t. And often, me and the rest of the Irish that were there would get consulted about what would be the right way to say something. So it was a real pleasure to work in that environment, you know, some place where your opinion is actually valued.

TB: You didn’t start acting as a full-time career until you were 34: what was it that made you take the leap?

BG: Well, I’d spent about 15 years thinking to myself that it was out of my league, or that acting wasn’t for me, it was for other people. Then I’d been working doing stage stuff with Passion Machine for a while, and when I’d watch stuff I’d think to myself ‘God, that wasn’t right’. And you get to the point then when you think ‘well, why don’t I try and do it and try and make a difference.?’ I’d also got to the stage in life where I didn’t want to look back in regret that I hadn’t done it, so to make the jump required – well, I just told meself, ‘I spent 15 years doubting whether I had any talent at all’, and then I decided that that wasn’t going to be a problem any more, even if I did have a lot to learn in terms of craft.

You just try to be a conduit as much as you can, when you’re an actor, and of course you also try to bring in your own things and hope that they’re universal. Sometimes, though, the things you imagine are most universal are the things that are very particular to you.

TB: Like those moments when a whole room goes quiet after you’ve opened your mouth...

BG: Yeah, exactly, I’ve had quite a few of those, but you never know exactly as an actor until it’s out there. But I just wasn’t going to apologise any more, I decided if I was going to go for it then I was really going to go for it. I don’t like exposure as a person but in terms of my craft I don’t mind.

TB: Are there any other great directors that you’d like to work with?

BG: No, not really. ’Cause truthfully, I’m not really a film buff. I listen to music and go to plays more than I go to films. I remember when I started going to plays I used to get the old sweaty-palm syndrome: I mean, my hands would actually sweat with embarrassment if something was bad in a play, I would find it really hard to deal with. The reverse is also true: I’d be completely exhilarated if something was brilliant. Movies don’t grab me as often – now when they do grab me, I’m completely transported. But I certainly don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of film, it was never for me the obsession that music or even plays are. Obviously though working with people like Scorsese or Spielberg or Boorman is just great, but in the end it’s like Peter Mullan says, ‘an actor’s reward is the job itself.’

TB: So you’ve no plans to go down the actor-turned-director route?

BG: Well actually, I do have a notion that I’d like to direct something someday. I did some writing and directing for Passion Machine, although I’m a bit sceptical about doing both again, because I found myself a little less than detached in my direction on those occasions. You know, you end up following the same preoccupations that you have in the writing of the piece and you don’t allow it to breathe.

TB: In the last year, the Irish film industry has come to a virtual standstill and the British film industry is in difficulty: has that impacted on you personally?

BG: Oh, it’s had a huge impact on the whole acting community here: there was a boomtime there, and I was lucky enough to be around at that point, but it’s getting tough and it’s going to continue to be tough. I’ve really only done two films in the last year. Once you decide you want a film industry, you have to keep it going, and it’s up to people to start writing proper scripts. Far too many people seem to write scripts for the sake of it, rather than writing because they have something interesting to say. I personally would love to work here more – I’d love to be able to go to work every day instead
of having to head off for six months at a time.

TB: Getting back to the gang: given Daniel Day-Lewis’ absolute mania throughout the movie, was everyone afraid to make sudden movements in his vicinity during the shoot?

BG: Well, just look what happened to my character when I turned my back on him!

TB: And how was working with Mr. Di Caprio? Has he really reformed his movie brat ways?

BG: Don’t believe a word of it. He was one of the gang. Honest!

Gangs Of New York speak
(From George Matsell’s The Rogue’s Lexicon, 1859)

ANGLERS – Thieves who place a hook on the end of a stick, with which they steal
BLUDGET – A female thief that lures her victims into dark alleys to rob them
CRUSHER – Policeman
DANCING – Sneaking upstairs to commit a larceny
GROANERS – Thieves who attend charity sermons and then rob the congregation
LACED MUTTON – A common woman
POLISHER – A man in prison
SAND – Nerve, guts
STAG – One who has turned State’s evidence
STAR-GAZER – Prostitute

Brendan Gleeson
select filmography

Dark Blue (2003)
Gangs of New York (2002)
Harrison’s Flowers (2002)
A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (2001)
The Tailor of Panama (2001)
MI2 – Mission Impossible II (2000)
Lake Placid (1999)
The General (1998)
I Went Down (1998)
Turbulence (1997)
Trojan Eddie (1997)
Braveheart (1995)