Peter Mullan tells DONALD CLARKEabout Neds, the Glasgow gang movie showing one boy's descent from intelligent youngster to violent psychopath. Decent lad, led astray? No, says the film-maker: he's a bit of a bastard
ONE OF THE great pleasures of interviewing film-makers is the opportunity to ask what the hell their latest movie is really about. Why was that sledge so important to Charlie Kane? What’s so great about going home to Kansas? That sort of thing.
Any sensitive viewer will leave Peter Mullan's Nedswith questions spinning around his or her brain. For much of its duration, the director's excellent follow-up to The MagdaleneSisters plays like a Glaswegian version of Shane Meadows's This Is England. John McGill (Conor McCarron), an intelligent young fellow, gets sucked into the city's gangland culture (the title stands for "non-educated delinquents") and gradually constructs a bonfire of his own potential. As events progress, however, it becomes clear that the protagonist has more screws loose than we hitherto suspected. He was, perhaps, always a psychopath in the making.
Seriously, Peter, who is this guy? “I looked at him as someone who, once he dismantled himself, is capable of becoming anything – from a psychopath to a perfectly well- adjusted young man. It’s a fucking hair that separates the two. He ends up taking it far too far, and I am intrigued as to why.”
He doesn’t know why his own character behaves as he does? “No. I don’t have a Scooby. I really don’t know. That’s why it’s interesting.”
That is a very different approach from Meadows's. In This Is England, we are clearly meant to identify with the young chap led astray by racist skinheads.
“I couldn’t do that. I love Shane’s films, but that would strike me as a betrayal. I want you to try and understand the character. But I don’t want you to say: ‘Ach, he’s a decent wee boy.’ He’s not. He’s a bit of a bastard.”
Mullan must, surely, have a better understanding of John than he lets on. After all, he does seem to have lived through quite a few of the character’s experiences. Now an enthusiastically acclaimed actor, writer and director, Mullan was raised in the Mosspark district of Glasgow. His mother was a nurse. His father, a lab technician, was a terminal alcoholic who regularly abused his wife and eight children. As a young fellow, Mullan did, indeed, become involved with a street gang, but somehow managed to disentangle himself and make his way to Glasgow University. A life in the theatre followed.
In the film, John's mum is a nurse. His dad (a chilling performance by the writer and director) is a near comatose, permanently boozed-up tyrant. A voluble, energetic storyteller, Mullan has, in earlier interviews, admitted to making half-hearted attempts to poison his dad. In Neds, the tormented pater familias actually asks his son to "finish him off". Mullan cannot expect to avoid being asked about these apparent autobiographical strokes.
“No, no, no,” he says with a smoker’s cackle. “I guess part of the reason why I don’t read interviews I’ve done is that I might read myself say something like ‘It’s not autobiographical, it’s personal’, and think how wanky that sounds. But the truth was so much more prosaic. I wanted to take the truth as a basis and then turn into something more operatic.”
Surely by taking on the role of the father, he is making an unmistakable gesture towards his own ill-remembered dad.
“He’s still a character,” he rationalises. “But as played by ‘Mullan’ – I think in the third person here – I was surprised to discover there is not a word he says in the film he didn’t say in real life. When writing it, I did think I was basing it on him, but it was only later I thought: ‘Shit! He said every one of these words.’ I never realised how mentally ill he was until I played him.”
Mullan then goes on to confirm that, well, the film appears soaked in autobiography. Like John, the young Peter made friends with a middle-class boy, but was subsequently sent packing by his pal’s snobbish mother. On the rebound from that rebuff, he fell in with a gang who, aware his brother was a hard nut, showed him a degree of respect. The film does, however, diverge from Mullan’s personal arc in its chilling final third. Whereas John gets drawn deeper into violence, Mullan shook himself free before too much blood was spilled.
“They eventually threw me out for using too many big words,” he says. “And that was the best thing that ever happened. I was getting out of control and coming up with hare-brained schemes. I had discovered Marx when I was in the gang and was reading books. I wouldn’t let the gang know that, of course. Then I came across Jung and that really changed things for me. I remember the day I killed off God. I had been a good Catholic, so that was a shock.”
Yikes! There were clearly a great many warring forces at work in Mullan’s developing psyche. Still fired with Marxist anger, a serious smoker with a granite- fronted Glaswegian accent, he now spins off an invigorating blend of unreconstructed political idealism and back-slapping saloon-bar rhetoric. A hard worker, he has had a formidable career on stage and in film. Part of that fecund wave of political theatre- makers who fought against Thatcher in the 1980s, he toured the UK as part of such well-remembered companies as Wildcat and 7:84.
His glory days came, however, in middle age. In 1998, then nearly 40, he won the best actor prize at Cannes for his performance in Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe. That same year, Orphans, his first film as director, another tough study of Glasgow life, won a cluster of awards at the Venice Film Festival.
He must occasionally wonder what would have become of him if he hadn’t escaped the gangs.
“I did go from being a blue-eyed boy, the good one, to being just another hood – the usual adolescent troubles taken to extremes. But, when you are in a gang, nothing quite so dramatic really happens. There is not a lot of fighting, but there is a lot of running. We chase you. You chase us. Quite funny. Look at the weapons they have in the film. If those were actually used there would be as much bloodshed as in Helmand Province. It’s all about: ‘My knife is bigger than yours’.”
You don’t have to read Freud to interpret that, surely? “Yeah, exactly. Ha ha ha! It’s about something else.”
In recent years, like the late Pete Postlethwaite, Mullan has secured a career playing earthy character roles in mainstream films. He appeared in the last Harry Potter movie and has recently finished shooting Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's War Horse.
“Spielberg gave me an iPad,” he says. “My daughter immediately said: ‘I’ll have that. You’d never be able to use it.’ I said: ‘I’ll fucking try!’”
For many Mullan observers, his greatest achievement remains The Magdalene Sisters. Released back in 2002, that study of abuse in Irish laundries – winner of the Golden Lion at Venice – confirmed that he is a director with a singularly unflinching eye. Why did he take almost a decade to follow it up?
"I never really thought about it until we started shooting Neds," he says. "For starters, what with publicity, I didn't really stop working on that until late 2003. That was one reason. Then there were acting jobs. The primary reason was I didn't want to go away from my family for too long. Some people have suggested we had trouble raising money for Neds. But that really wasn't too much of a problem."
Mullan explains that, while travelling with The Magdalene Sisters, he heard a great many disturbing stories from survivors of abuse. It seems inevitable that such a powerful film would trigger support groups and campaigns for compensation, but the director claims to have been taken aback by the galvanising effect the work had on survivors.
"I read a thing yesterday that the Germans had given out €150 million compensation to victims of clerical abuse. That came about because elderly people saw The Magdalene Sistersand set up a campaign. What was moving was being reminded that a film could do that. It never crossed my mind that it would wake up survivors. I thought of it as a public- information film: something for those who didn't know the story. To have that effect was really something. I was really fucking chuffed."
Quite right. Tell your daughter to get her own iPad. You deserve the odd little treat.
Nedsopens January 21
