Extraordinary joe

The acclaimed Scottish actor and director Peter Mullan is hugely relieved. He’s at the Cork Film Festival for the Irish premiere of his harrowing and magnificent new film The Magdalene Sisters, and he’s just learned that the BBC has secured live rights to the season’s first Old Firm game, which is just as well, because as a rabid Celtic fan (he once got Martin Scorcese to sign his beloved strip) one gets the distinct impression that Mr. Mullan would otherwise have been on the first plane back to Glasgow.

“It’s absolutely mad. If someone had told me that there was a chance that the match wouldn’t be shown in Ireland then I wouldn’t have come, premiere or not,” he explains.

This is a perfectly admirable sentiment coming from the native Glaswegian, his priorities clearly unaltered by the increasing acclaim heaped upon his head in the last five years. Though a veteran of stage and screen for decades, touring borstals, prisons and community centres with overtly political plays and clocking up minor appearances in such films as Riff Raff and Trainspotting, it wasn’t until his spellbinding portrayal of a recovering drunk in 1998’s My Name Is Joe that Mullan sprang to public prominence (as well as winning Best Actor at Cannes). Its release coincided with that of Mullan’s directorial debut Orphans, based on his feelings when his mother died, which took the Best Film award at the Venice Film Festival.

If it’s all arrived a bit late in the day (Mullan is 42), it’s still not bad going for a man who’s lucky to be alive after an upbringing of crushing poverty and violence, with many of his peers now six feet under.

“So many guys I was at school with have killed themselves. Off the top of my head, I can think of four in the past five years. That’s my generation: what happened, I don’t know. Poverty, alcoholism.”

The young Peter was one of eight children born to Charles Mullan, a sadistic, violent alcoholic whose kids recall their childhood as a reign of terror.

“I’ll give you an idea where the old bastard was coming from: my eldest brother’s name was originally Winston Spencer Churchill Mullan, which my mother changed to Anthony on the birth cert.”

Having survived his father, the notorious ‘razor gangs’ of his shipyard upbringing and three nervous breakdowns (the last one a long time ago), it’s small wonder that he feels such a strong affinity with the down-trodden ‘fallen’ women of the Magdalene Launderies, one of many such Taliban-style innovations introduced by the Catholic Church to keep the population in line during the last century.

Effective concentration camps where women would sacrifice their entire lives to menial slavery as a result of arbitrary and often non-existent offences, the last of the Laundries closed less than ten years ago. Despite a consistent pattern of continuing Church callousness to those who survived them, the film’s brilliance should do much to ensure that the scandal doesn’t fade in a hurry. At least, that’s Mullan’ s hope, as he explains over the course of our meeting.

TB: There have been some powerful documentaries made on the subject but after seeing Love In A Cold Climate what made you think that the industrial schools or the laundries would also make for good feature film material?

PM: Well, it happened very fast in a way and I guess it was only about two months after I’d finished making the thing that I sat down and thought – what the fuck was it about this documentary that got to me so much more than anything else that I had seen, and the only answer I could come up with – and I don’t know if it’s the right one – is that it was to do with my childhood and living in our household and with my father.

TB: From what I’ve read, your dad sounds like a bit of a regime in his own right... :

PM: Yeah. That’s for sure. And I think what I saw in the documentary that I related to was that sense of living in a regime where the door is open for you to leave at anytime. Except that it’s not really. And my dad, the old bastard, was very fond of telling that to me and my brothers and sisters – ‘The door is always open’. I remember hearing that repeatedly from the age of seven – and I remember thinking – Go where? Because there was no place to go, but that was the point. I wanted to go, but obviously I couldn’t.

TB: You’ve described your home growing up as being the equilivent of ‘a coat and no knickers’?

PM: Yeah. We were always thought to be well off because we were all told to say that the house was bought, which in those days was unheard of and because it wasn’t a council house and had these two big Grecian pillars outside, people believed it was ours. Of course we really had fuck all. And again that relates to my interest in the Magdalenes. On the surface things look OK, but go beneath and things are absolutely terrible. And it was one of the things that was important to me when I was shooting the film. I never wanted the mise en scene to be dark and brooding because that would have contradicted how they actually looked. Just like our with our house – it looked like an upper-middle-class home but inside there was nothing. No carpets, no telephone – just nothing.

TB: And your mother as well as your siblings had to go along with this farce I presume...

PM: Oh yeah, and again I think that the other thing that I related to, and again I could be talking in bad amateur psychology here, but my father used to put my mother in an awful dilemma. He’d tell her to put all the housekeeping money on the mantlepiece so he could look after the house finances – pay the bills and the like – because the finances were fucked. The electricity was cut off and we had balliffs threatening all the time, but if she complied things would be worse because he’d drink the money and we’d be left with no food in the house as well as no electricity. She was really in a no-win situation. That aspect of the industrial schools really got to me – tyrants who leave you with no way out.

TB: As someone raised Catholic have you any direct memories of the more tyrannical elements within the Catholic Church?

PM: Well, it’s funny and it goes back to what I was saying about appearances being deceptive. There was a big house down the road from us – a Nazareth House and I’m not sure which order ran it but it always looked really nice. Actually, it was probably the Nazareth order, now I think of it! But, me and my brothers and sisters all wanted to actually go there. We all heard as kids that they got great Christmas presents so we all used to wish we were orphans so we could get in. Anyway we used to pass this place on the way to school and there was a little boy from there and a bunch of us were showing off our scars. And this little lad took his shirt off and showed us these unbelievable scars across his back and he told us that the nuns had given them and none of us believed him.

TB: Were you fully prepared for the extent of the abuse uncovered in Magdalene Laundries or did it still come as a shock?

PM: Naw, it didn’t shock me. And I researched a lot after the thing as well, because I wrote the script after I saw the documentary. I just figured that if I did too much research before I wrote the film then it would end up being too much like a docu-drama and I didn’t want that, I wanted a film that would stand and fall on its own merits. So only after I had written it did I show it to women who had been in the Magdalene laundries, and basically if they had said it was bollocks then I wouldn’t have been able to proceed.

TB: As far as veracity goes, there’s also the problem that many of the women never got to share their stories – they lived and died in these places and were thrown in unconsecrated ground for their trouble...

PM: That’s right and it touches on what for me is probably the most sorry and disturbing aspect of the whole bloody affair – the degree to which the Church and the Vatican will not appreciate what these people went through and what it is that they want. The people I’ve met who have suffered through institutional abuse – not necessarily at the Magdalenes – all they want is an apology from the Church. They’re not interested in compensation or money. They just fucking want to go back to chapel. They want to go to mass and it breaks my heart that these people who have retained their faith, and they want to meet their maker via a priest and the last rites and they can’t.

TB: That’s definitely a generational thing. For people born in the 1970s or later, religion is a life-style choice. For older atheists even, they seem to be still involved in some ideological struggle, don’t they?

PM: Oh Jesus, are they ever. Naw, the Church really got my generation. I mean, my mother was Catholic, so I was educated that way until I was 18 or whatever, and it stays with you always. And it was funny because when I was over in Italy at the Venice Film Festival there, everyone there was coming up to me and saying – well, you must be a Protestant, are you? Basically, all these journalists were convinced that anyone who would dare to criticise the church couldn’t be of Catholic origin. So I’d tell them I was lapsed Catholic, or as a friend of mine puts it, a recovering Catholic and they couldn’t believe it.

TB: Of course, your true faith is socialism. How is it that you once managed to get expelled from Militant Labour, without actually joining in the first place?

PM: Well, it was around the time of the whole Roy Hattersley thing. I’ve certainly been involved with socialism, and Militant but I never actually signed up because of their policies on Northern Ireland which were virtually non-existent. Basically, anything linked to Northern Ireland would be solved according to the party by workers uniting. That’s not a policy. That’s a wish list and I never joined because of that. It seemed really short-sighted, and the only thing that I’ve been completely committed to politically is the idea of an independent socialist Scotland so I never joined but most of my mates are still Militant and we shared a common Trotsky based idea of socialism. But yeah, after the miners strike I got a letter kicking me out, and by that time Labour as the left was an absolute joke. But they were so pleased with themselves kicking me out, even though they technically couldn’t.

TB: You still live in Glasgow: are the proletariat there in awe of Comrade Blair’s heroic role in the vanguard of the struggle of the working class?

PM: Jesus fuckin’ Christ – I honestly think sometimes that he’s worse than Thatcher, and I can’t bear to think about what that evil bitch did to Scotland. Put it to you this way, Elvis Costello is still a superhero figure in Scotland thanks to his song ‘Tramp The Dirt Down’, which is the greatest song ever written about her, but at least with Thatcher you knew where you were and you knew where she was coming from. Blair’s government is more like the Vichy government, he turns around to the people and says, ‘This is just the way things are, and there’s no getting around it.’ He’s just a fuckin’ scumbag.

TB: Are you confident that The Magdalene Sisters won’t suffer from the same botched release that befell Orphans?

PM: FilmFour botched the release completely, and now they’ve closed down, which is as good a case of fucking karma as I’ve ever come across. To this day, they still haven’t given me a written explanation as to what happened. But it won’t happen with this film – for one thing, the people behind it know what the film is and know what it can achieve. And top of their agenda is that the film makes money. I mean, Miramax have picked it up in the States and they ain’t a fuckin’ charity. And in a really simplistic sense I find it easier to handle capitalism when it’s so up-front that way.

TB: Finally, in a thousand words or less: whither Scottish football?

PM: I can give it to you in three: God help us. That’s all I can say.