Representing Ireland competition at the 51st Cannes Film Festival, where it will have its world premiere next Tuesday night, The General is John Boorman first film in black-and-white since he made his cinema debut in 1965 with Catch Us If You Can, which featured the pop group, the Dave Clark Five. And The General is his first feature to deal specifically with Ireland since he moved to live in Co Wicklow more than 25 years ago.
"I felt I had been living in Ireland long enough to make a film about contemporary Ireland," Boorman said when we talked in the boardroom of his Dublin-based production company, Merlin Films. The subject he has chosen for that film is the life and death of Martin Cahill, the notorious Dublin criminal known as The General, who was killed in Ranelagh on the afternoon of August 18th, 1994. It is widely believed the killing was carried out on the orders of the Provisional IRA.
"Clearly, I was aware of Cahill," Boorman says. "I couldn't not be aware of him. When Paul Williams's book on him came out, I was fascinated by his exploits. The book is very well researched. For me, Cahill is an archetype of a certain kind of Irishman. Like a reincarnation of a Celtic chieftain - the sense of celebration, cunning and wit, the violence and the hatred of authority. He's iconoclastic, he's rebellious against a society which was rigid and is now much less certain of itself - the Church, the police, the bureaucrats, all those things. It enabled me to say a few things about Ireland that I wanted to say - by putting them in his mouth."
Certain things said in the film are certain to cause controversy when the movie goes on Irish release at the end of the month. Opening with the murder of Cahill, the film suggests that the heavy, round-the-clock Garda surveillance outside Cahill's home had been lifted on the day he was killed, and when the composite garda character, Insp Ned Kenny, is asked if there was collusion between the Garda and the IRA in setting up the murder, Kenny does not reply.
The inclusion of that scene was deliberate, Boorman says: "The fact is that there was never any arrest nor was there much of an attempt to find the assassin. They would argue that the removal of the Tango squad, the 90 men on surveillance duty, did not happen overnight, that it was thinned down over a gradual period. But that is what happened and clearly the IRA knew when they removed the surveillance."
Some commentators have already described the film's depiction of the Garda as incompetents like the Keystone Cops, but Boorman rejects these claims as simplistic. "The film is made from the point of view of Cahill, and he took his pleasure from making fools of the police, running rings around them. What you see in the film is Cahill's point of view of the police. There were these obvious incidents where he did make fools of them. However, the Insp Kenny character is a very serious officer, so is Sgt Higgins.
"Then there is the scene where the Van Morrison music is playing when Cahill is robbing this house. You hear the lines, `It's so quiet in here/This must be what Paradise is like', and someone said to me, `Aren't you romanticising burglary?' But this is the way Cahill saw it. There are no scenes in the film which are not seen from his perspective. So how do you balance that without making him a sympathetic character?
"From the outset I was determined to make it as honest a portrait of Cahill as I could, to try to strike a balance. It was true of him in life that he was a very sympathetic and charismatic character. He inspired great affection from the people around him. All the people we talked to who knew him, they all talked about his wit, his humour and - oddly enough - his good nature. We tried to intersperse that with these brutal incidents in the film - when he intimidates this woman by going into her bedroom and terrifying her, or when he shoots one of his own men in the leg, or the crucifixion scene.
"So there's quite a lot in it that's brutal. I think when people see the film they will have mixed emotions - they will feel drawn to him and repelled by him. A lot of people who have seen the film say they feel guilty about feeling sympathetic towards him and that's probably the right sort of response."
Boorman's film is both a gritty thriller which appears authentic in its depiction of Dublin's criminal milieu, and a vividly-etched character study which is charged by the quite remarkable central performance by Brendan Gleeson. For all the character's flamboyance and off-the-wall humour, this is an altogether more dangerous and sinister gangster than the awkward and amiable minor Dublin crook played with such style by Gleeson last year in the Irish road movie, I Went Down.
"I wanted Brendan from the beginning," Boorman says. "There was enormous pressure to get an internationally known name such as Gary Oldman or Gabriel Byrne to play Cahill. But I wanted Brendan, which made it more difficult to get the money, but for me there was no question about it from the very beginning.
"Brendan is very intelligent and very intuitive at the same time. I can't quite put my finger on what he does, but it's like he transcends acting. Often, when something goes wrong in a scene like another actor forgetting their lines, Brendan is always so alert to the moment, like a Method actor, that he can improvise and turn it around. But at the same time, he's completely unlike a Method actor because at the end of the scene he's back to himself again. He's extraordinary."
Boorman also cites Sean McGinley, who plays a hapless criminal associate of Cahill as a "very inventive actor who came up with several lines which were just perfect". The fine Irish cast also includes Adrian Dunbar, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball, Eanna McLiam, Tom Murphy, Pat Leavy, Jim Sheridan (in a cameo) and, as the young Martin Cahill, Eamonn Owens from The Butcher Boy.
The only non-Irish actor in the movie is Jon Voight, the American actor who first made his mark in Midnight Cowboy, won his Oscar for Coming Home and starred in one of John Boorman's finest films, Deliverance. Voight plays Insp Ned Kenny, a composite character based on several detectives. In casting the role, Boorman says he needed an actor of strength and power to match up to Brendan Gleeson.
"There were one or two Irish actors I wanted for the part," he says. "Ciaran Hinds was one and at one point he was going to do it, but then he just wasn't available. He just couldn't fit into our schedule. So I thought about Voight. I just called him up and he said yes right away."
It's the meatiest role in some time for Voight, who has been suddenly prolific - though ultimately underused - of late in movies such as The Rainmaker, U-Turn and Anaconda. Boorman laughs at the mention of the latter, a deliriously over-the-top snake-on-the-rampage yarn. "Did you see that?" he smiles. "It's a great hammy performance by Jon, but he is a marvellous actor, one of the best of his generation, I think, and he has this facility with accents." In The General, Voight plays Kenny with a soft Kerry accent.
Maria Doyle Kennedy and Angeline Ball, who first acted together in The Commitments, are cast as the sisters, Frances and Tina - respectively Cahill's wife and his lover - in the film's picture of Cahill's highly unorthodox marital arrangements which involved having children with both sisters. According to the film, Frances suggested this herself. "Keep it in the family," she advises Cahill at one point.
"I just made that line up," Boorman says, "but she certainly tolerated the relationship. Whether she actively encouraged it, I don't know. But, finally, if you are making a film about living people, at the end of the day you have to rely on the truth of the imagination."
Has he had any reaction from the Cahill family? "I sent the script to his widow and didn't get a response," he says. "I also invited her to see the film before anyone else saw it - in a completely discreet situation - but she didn't respond."
Evoking resonances of classic gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s, The General was shot in gleaming, richly textured black-and-white by Seamus Deasy and accompanied by an atmospheric jazz score by Richie Buckley. "I wanted to remove it from contemporary reality so it wasn't simply a contemporary gangster movie with all those plasticky colours you get on the streets," Boorman says.
"Black-and-white suggests a kind of parallel world. It's our world, but it's not quite that. It's something separate from it. Also, I do think black-and-white is much more intense - if you look at the faces in black-and-white photography, for example, it tells you more about the person than a colour portrait. If you strip the colour away, it's like stripping a skin away. It's more revealing.
"The other reason I wanted to avoid colour is that colour film tends to prettify things, especially poverty. When I was making Deliverance I had this problem with the river - how to make it look forbidding and sinister rather than just bucolic. So I went through this long process of desaturating the colour in order to achieve that. It was the same with The General. There is something too familiar about Dublin on film today, and I wanted to separate it from that."
As a commercial decision, shooting the movie in black-and-white was "extremely unpopular with everybody", Boorman says. "There has been a great resistance to it from distributors, but I'm not convinced audiences will feel the same way. Warner Bros take the view that it's very much a mainstream movie. They're going out with 250 prints, 50 here and 200 in the UK, and a big TV advertising campaign."
The General will be released nationwide on May 29th