From Weekend 1
THIS is a story which has preoccupied Jordan for well over a decade. I recall meeting him in the National Library back in 1983, when he was researching the film. Jordan's project was just one of a number on Collins which came close to getting into production over the years. There were attempts by John Huston, Robert Redford and Michael Cimino to bring Collins's story to the screen, and some years ago Kevin Costner came to Ireland to look at locations he might use for a film of the Collins screenplay by Eoghan Harris.
An ironic coincidence is that Liam Neeson's accent in Jordan's film sounds uncannily like Eoghan Harris at times.
David Puttnam had commissioned Jordan to write his Collins screenplay in 1982, after seeing Jordan's remarkable first feature film, Angel, which was inspired by the murder of the Miami Showband members. A violent but contemplative and stylised thriller, it featured Stephen Rea as a showband musician who witnesses sectarian murders and exchanges his saxophone for a gun when he seeks revenge.
Seven films and 10 years later, Jordan returned to the theme of Northern Ireland with his clever, incisive and mordantly humorous The Crying Game, which again featured Stephen Rea, this time as a disenchanted Provo who finds he can run but he can't hide from his past and, to his surprise, finds himself falling in love with a black English transvestite.
Winning the best original screenplay Oscar for The Crying Game copper fastened Jordan's new found Hollywood prominence, which led to Warner Bros offering him Interview With A Vampire and its global success led to Warners finally giving Jordan the green light to film his long ingestation - Michael Collins.
Jordan's third film set against 20th century Irish politics, Michael Collins once again reunites Jordan with Stephen Rea, this time cast as Ned Broy, the Dublin Castle detective who is depicted as passing valuable confidential data to Collins. Jordan admits that his treatment of Ned Broy in the film, as a composite of several characters, is one of the few liberties he has taken with the facts.
Similarly, he has fused the characters of Emmet Dalton and Joe O'Reilly into one, O'Reilly, with the result that it is O'Reilly and not Dalton who is shown on the drive down to Be a na mBlath with Collins.
These examples of dramatic compression are unlikely to arouse anything like the furore directed at the dramatic licence employed in, for example. In the Name of the Father. On the contrary, it is Jordan's diligent attempt to show the crimes committed on all sides during the conflicts at the centre of Michael Collins, and his explicit commentary on the evil of violence as used by all sides, which is much more likely to inflame passions. The whodunnit question is sure to be controversial, especially given that it is implicit that de Valera was complicit in Collins's assassination.
After all the many months of anticipation, speculation and rumours, Neil Jordan's Michael Collins will finally be publicly unveiled tonight when it has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, one of the three most important competitive film festivals in the world. It is the only Irish entry in the official competition.
GIVEN that Michael Collins has already come under attack in the British media before any of its detractors have even seen it, the film seems certain to be the subject of heated discussion at Venice. Winning the festival's major award would assist the film greatly through the encouragement such a win would give Warner Bros, which is distributing it around the world, at a time when several distributors are nervous about handling movies with Irish political subject matter.
Meanwhile, Michael Collins is set to open on October 11th in America, where Warner Bros regards it as a potent contender for Oscar nominations, but it may not be released in Ireland or Britain until 1997. Under such circumstances, pirated videotapes of the film can be expected to flood the Irish market within weeks of its US opening. This is not the format on which this remarkable film should be seen by audiences in Ireland or anywhere else.