Truth & consequence

Based on the remarkable life and dramatic death of the courageous crime journalist, Veronica Guerin is a dark, powerful film and a very unlikely hollywood project – all the more so when one considers the involvement of producer and high-concept king Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Pearl Harbour, Black Hawk Down etc.) and director Joel Schumacher (Falling Down, Phone Booth). When Moviehouse caught up with the cast and crew at the world premiere in Dublin recently, though, Schumacher was keen to emphasise his eagerness to pursue this distinctly irish project.

MOVIEHOUSE: How did your involvement in the movie begin?

JOEL SCHUMACHER: “After Jerry Bruckheimer saw Tigerland, he called me and asked me if I knew who Veronica Guerin was, which I didn’t. And he sent me a 60 Minutes documentary on her, and a big book of research. ’Cause he’d had the rights for several years, I guess, since her murder, and I just knew I wanted to do it right away.

“I wish I’d known her, that’s the way I felt. I thought she had real balls, and I hate bullies, and I love the idea that she wouldn’t back off no matter what they said or did. And unfortunately it cost her her life, but I thought she was pretty amazing, and not a saint, which I liked too, she was a real human being. And her death – or her life – really did make a difference, it changed the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, which is pretty amazing.”

MH: To what extent did Veronica’s husband co-operate with the movie?

“We didn’t approach him, because the family approached us. Her mother had called me. And I didn’t want to invade his privacy. So it was really cool that he and his son came to see it. They’re very proud of her. But I had shown it to her mother, and some other members of the family, two months ago. And they’re really proud of the film.”

MH:Were you apprehensive, showing them the film?

“The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was show the film to Veronica’s mother. Because we had become very close friends by then, and she had opened up her whole life and family to me. They had had many dinners for me, we had spent a lot of time together, we had spoken almost daily on the phone for months – we really had, we still do have a very serious personal relationship. And if she hadn’t liked the film, I would have been devastated.”

MH:Although key underworld players depicted in the film – like John Traynor and John Gilligan – are in exile or behind bars, their associates could still be at large. Was there any concern about retribution?

“You mean that they would hurt us? No. That they’d be offended? That criminals would sue the movie? Fuck ’em. It was never a concern of mine. With every film, if you’re going to make mass media entertainment, you really have to put yourself out there. I think if you think of any film in terms of risk, you don’t do it. Film-making is like climbing Mount Everest, if you don’t think you can get up and back alive, you won’t do it.”

MH:Was there any pressure from the studio on anything related to the film?

“No, nothing like that. The movie didn’t cost a load of money to make, and the lower the cost, the less pressure you get from the studios. Also, when you make a film with Jerry Bruckheimer, he sort of gets betwen you and the studio. He protects you.”

MH:Is it surprising that someone like Bruckheimer does a movie like this?

“It’s very unlike anything he’s ever done before. It’s great, and I know how proud he is of this, and I’ve said to him that I think he should keep making his big blockbusters, but he should make a movie like this every year or so. Jerry is a very quiet, soft-spoken and shy person, basically, and he’s very warm and friendly, but he doesn’t let you into everything he’s thinking all the time, he’s more reserved than I am.

On the surface, it wouldn’t seem that Jerry would make this kind of film, but something in it really touched him or he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble, ’cause it’s never going to be a big blockbuster for him. And I don’t think he’s made that many movies with women at the centre.”

MH:Colin Farrell, who you’ve worked with a few times, appears very briefly: how did that come about?

“Well, we had done Tigerland and we had done Phone Booth, and we’re very close and his family live here, he was here and I wanted him to be part of the film, ’cause I’d made him do a Southern accent in Tigerland and a Bronx accent in Phone Booth, so I thought it’d be nice if he spoke a little Irish.”

MH:What was your impression of the crime underworld in Dublin?

“My job was to tell the story of Dublin at that time, and what was happening here, or what wasn’t happening here. The way it was explained to me very early on by the powers-that-be here is that because British law ruled for so long here, the Irish lived in a police state, so when Irish law was created, it then went so far in the other direction to be fair, and it was so liberal and so concerned with people’s rights, that it ended up favouring the bad people. We’d have some of that in the United States where it feels like the laws favour the criminals and not the victims.

“So it was a very serious situation because the drugs were building and they couldn’t get these guys, because they weren’t allowed to mention their names in the paper, they weren’t allowed to seize their assets. There’s a famous case where one of Gilligan’s thugs was caught with 200,000 grand and they arrested him, and they were holding him, and they were holding the money, and John Gilligan went there the next morning and said, ‘You have 200,000 of my money, I want it,’ and they had to give it back to him. That’s all changed now. But it took her murder to get anything done.”

MH:Do you think Gilligan and his gang made a strategic mistake in targeting Veronica Guerin personally?

“Yeah. The way I wanted the movie, as I told the actors, was that you had Veronica and Gilligan as equal forces, people who for complete opposites of the pole both actually had quite a lot in common. In the sense that they’re both self-made, they both don’t take any shit from anybody and they won’t back down from anyone. So when she gets closer to him, then he threatens her, then she rises to it and it becomes a vicious spiral, and eventually it was a dance of death, because one of the things that had made her famous and made her work so vital was the way she went about things. The way journalists had worked before her, they would phone people to ask for an interview, but she would just turn up on their doorsteps and knock.

“So in Gilligan’s case, she was just doing what she’d always done before. He did what he’d always done, which was, ‘You fuck with me, I beat the shit out of you’. So he beat her up. If she hadn’t knocked on the door, and he hadn’t beaten her up, she probably would be alive today – and he might not be in jail.”

The brilliant performance of Cate Blanchett in the central role ensures that Veronica Guerin will be given a fitting tribute. Despite an extraordinary CV (Elizabeth, The Gift, Lord Of The Rings) though, the Aussie born actress was extremely nervous approaching the role.

MOVIEHOUSE: Did you do a lot of research for this?

Cate Blanchett: “If I was making a documentary about myself, I don’t think that I would do any research, but any time I portray someone who’s not me, which is basically what I do for a living, I feel I have to research. That’s why I love doing this, ’cause you get to delve into the psyche of a person who you’ve never met, and invent and explore why another person would behave in a certain way. So yeah, I watched all of her interviews, I read all her articles and talked to her friends and family.”

MH: The striking thing about Guerin, as seen in the movie, is how normal she seemed...

“I think she was very down-to-earth. I don’t actually know what a normal person is, I think people are quite extraordinary. Anyone I met from her family was very down-to-earth, and she was apparently a fantastic listener and she could talk to anyone, which is a skill I so admire in people. She could just be put in any room with any group of people, and just charm the pants off them and really connect with them, and those people would walk away feeling that they’d really got to know her. It’s very hard for one film to replicate all of someone’s complexities, and we only had two hours to do it. But everyone said how regular she was.”

MH: Of the people in her life, who did you talk to?

“I spoke primarily to Jimmy Guerin and his family, I spoke to people who’d worked with her, I spoke to police officers and old colleagues of hers, even some people who had government positions at the time she was working, though I didn’t meet her sisters until we finished the film.”

MH: You’d given birth just a few weeks before filming?

“Nine or ten weeks. My first child, a son.”

MH: Did that make it easier to understand the dilemmas Guerin faced? Specifically, after she was shot in the leg as a ‘warning’, whether or not it was wise to continue her line of work?

“I think that’s occured to everyone. And I can only say as someone who is really engaged in my work, I can understand how someone can be completely engaged in something. And also, I completely understood her belief that she was trying to change something. She wanted, probably consciously, to help change the laws that were making it restrictive to write the facts, and to put pressure on government bodies to change the bail laws. But having a child - I think it affected me in a way that I didn’t even realise. I don’t think you do. You have a child, and it becomes part of your life. But I’m sure it affected the way I played certain scenes, though I wasn’t conscious of it.”

MH: What was the appeal of the project?

“I’d never sort of got inside the mind of a journalist. I found that a challenge, and how one elicits a story from someone. It’s very easy to make me talk, but I think it’d be a lot harder with some of those guys, and she had an incredible facility for getting people to open up. When I watched the 60 Minutes special that had been made on her, I just found her fascinating, I wondered what made her tick.

“What I love in life is looking out. I’m not doing it for some sort of personal development, I do it because I’m curious about what makes other people tick. I don’t think about transformation – obviously, in Veronica Guerin’s case, you think, ‘Well, I look nothing like her, my job is to try and approximate that as much as I can’. I think that kind of pressure makes you more aware of the need to transform yourself. But it’s not – I try to connect with the inner life of the character, and if that results in an external change, so be it.”

MH: The scenes involving Guerin and brothel-keeping scuzzball John Traynor (Ciaran Hinds) indicate some level of sexual flirtation between the pair. Dramatic licence?

“No – I definitely thought that she was a very gregarious person who was able to elicit stories from people, and when you’re a woman talking to a man with an enormous ego and you want to get him to say something, you butter him up. She was a very charismatic woman, and I think that they probably did, when necessary, have quite a flirtatious relationship. Quite a few people said that.”

MH: Do you think John Gilligan and associates sealed their own fate by targeting Guerin?

“I think she definitely exposed them to a degree that was unacceptably dangerous for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have shot her. When we were shooting, Gilligan had gone to the prison canteen and it was closed. He asked the prison guard to open it, the guard said no, it was closed – and he beat the absolute shit out of him, this guy almost died. Gilligan is, to be kind to him, a very fragile mind, and a deeply dangerous individual. To that extent, it was really important to Veronica and her family that she go through and prosecute him, because it was the only way he was going to be put behind bars. The Gardai weren’t going to get him on drugs charges.”

MH: Was the assault scene the most difficult you’ve ever filmed?

“Pretty close. With things like that, you see it once but you have to do it a hundred times. It was raining, and it was shot on gravel, and I was pleased when it was over.”

MH: Finally, you’re about to play Katharine Hepburn, who died in the last couple of weeks. Had you met her?

“I didn’t, no. I haven’t start filming yet: they’ve started, last week, but I don’t start until September. I got on the plane to go and rehearse, picked up the paper, and there was the obituary. I don’t know that she was a heroine of mine exactly, I suppose I never had any, but I definitely loved a lot of her films.”

Read part two of this interview