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October 10-16, 2002 movies Don Mullan
Don Mullan was there on Jan. 30, 1972, when British soldiers fired on unarmed civil rights demonstrators and forever changed Irish history. He did not follow other young men he knew into the ranks of the Irish Republican Army, but in time he would contribute as much or more to the republican cause as anyone who ever took up a gun: his book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday: The Truth not only proved that the first British-led inquiry into the massacre was a sham, but also was instrumental in launching a second investigation in 1998, which continues to this day. The book was also the inspiration for the new film Bloody Sunday, by British filmmakers Mark Redhead and Paul Greengrass. (Read Sam Adams' review.) City Paper: How well does the movie portray the events of that day? Don Mullan: I think it has a very uncanny feel about it. There were times in the shooting of scenes where I was feeling re-traumatized. ... What's powerful about this movie is that it was made by two Englishmen and an Irishman -- myself, [director] Paul Greengrass, [producer] Mark Redhead. And of course they were inspired to make it by my book, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday. The [style] that Paul had previously used to shoot a film called The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, which was a television drama-documentary, allowed itself to be transferred very powerfully to the big screen. And what we tried to achieve [with Bloody Sunday] was to in a sense allow the audience to almost feel as though they are eyewitnesses to the unfolding tragedy that is happening before their eyes. And I think we succeeded in doing that but it wouldn't have succeeded unless those who were the actors didn't believe in what they were doing. Our cast -- we were a low-budget movie -- our cast was about 12,000 people. And most of them were volunteers. The last time I remember a movie like this having that type of impact was I think the recreation of the funeral of Ghandi, in Richard Attenborough's movie. And in horrendous weather conditions, we managed to get over 7,000 people to come out in Derry, and they stayed with us through that whole day of shooting, despite the cold weather, despite the rain and the sleet, you know? We suffered making this movie, because it didn't come easy. And we had to repeat that process in Dublin, because we shot the highrise flats at the Ballymon flat complex in Dublin. But there was incredible good will, an amazing sense in Ireland that this is a story that needs to be told, and must be told right, and truthfully, and many people wanted to be part of that story. ... Bishop [Edward] Daly was there -- as the priest waving the handkerchief, one of the icon images of Bloody Sunday. He made the point that that the movie captures, with uncanny accuracy, what it was like to be there on the day. And watching some of the scenes unfold, I was re-traumatized watching them. I remember after the recreation of the shooting of Barney McGuigan, standing transfixed for about 10, 15 minutes, I couldn't move after it. Tears were running down my cheeks. And of course in the process of doing the book I became very close to the families. And I knew this was going to be hard for them as well to watch on the screen. CP: That accuracy, was that the most important thing to you going into this project? DM: Yeah, yeah. I have to be honest with you, when these two English filmmakers first approached me and asked me to be part of the process, I said we have to go talk to the families, and I brought them around. And I will always remember, there was one woman who simply said, ŒWe've had a bad experience, thank you very much.' Remember what Lord Widgery had done, in terms of the cover-up, the lord chief justice of England, and she just said, ŒLook, I don't trust you 'cause you're English. but if Don's involved, then I'll feel confident.' And there was that tension all the time, which was very good. Because on the other hand, what Paul and Mark brought to this was former British soldiers who'd actually served in the north of Ireland. And they're the people who play our paratroopers. And they're not caricatures of British soldiers -- they're people who knew what it was like to be there on the streets of Northern Ireland, people who knew how to handle a gun. CP: I wondered about that when I was watching the film -- are the scenes with the soldiers also based on eyewitness accounts? DM: The main character amongst the paratroopers is Soldier 027. Now, Solider 027 was a radio operator. I know his name, and the reason I know his name was that in 1975 he wrote a document, which is in my book, and the statement clearly establishes that not only was he a paratrooper, it gives his rank, his company, and he names the main killers. So we have the names of the main killers, and we verified the fact that these guys were in the regiment at the time. And he clearly establishes ... what he saw, including people being shot with their hands in the air, people shot as they lay wounded on the ground. So his character is based on an actual document written by a paratrooper. And indeed, the part where you see him shouting Œcease fire, cease fire,' again, that is written in the document -- clearly, Major [Ted] Loden had given a cease fire and the killings happened after the cease fire was actually made. That's all based in accuracy. In terms of the characters of General Ford, and Colonel [Derek] Wilford, again, the interviews that they give at the end [of the movie] -- in terms of, ŒWell, you know, we fired three shots' -- that is based verbatim on actual interviews that they gave after Bloody Sunday. So we aimed to be very accurate, particularly around the killings. One of the things I learned is that while filmmaking is a very powerful medium, it's also a very limited one. How do you tell a story of this magnitude, with such consequences, in 100 minutes? You can't do it, so you have to, in a sense, make choices, and we chose to tell the story around Ivan Cooper, a Protestant civil rights leader, a man who was well respected. We've invented some scenes with Ivan, obviously, to try and kaleidoscope what was going on and to give you a narrative to follow the whole story through. But when it comes to the area of the killings we were very faithful. U2, for example, gave us permission to use "Sunday Bloody Sunday" at the end, but they had questions about one of the scenes, and it was the scene of Jim Wray being shot on the ground. And they said, did that actually happen? And we were able to say not only do we have all the eyewitnesses, but even the independent forensic pathologists engaged by Lord Saville [for the current inquiry] have established that, number one, Jim Wray was already wounded, and number two, the shot that finished him off had to have been fired at closer range, while he lay facing downwards. So again, all of that is recreated faithfully. CP: You talked about making choices -- what sort of things did not make it into the film?
DM: Well, for example, in my research, I was the first person in 25 years to sit down with all of the eyewitness statements, most of which had been ignored Lord Widgery. ... And one of the things that struck me was that one in 10 of the eyewitnesses kept insisting that in addition to the army firing at ground level, so too were soldiers high up on the Derry walls. And I think I have established pretty definitively that there is a strong possibility that three of the Bloody Sunday dead were shot by a hidden marksman firing with a telescopic lens. And we just didn't have the budget to put that in. I tried to get some American money but it didn't come through. CP: Were you involved in working with the actors, in giving them a sense of what it was like? DM: Absolutely. I spent a lot of time with them. I talked to Jimmy Nesbitt [who plays Cooper], I took him for a walk around Derry, I did it for some of the other actors as well. And I'll always remember during the shootings of Glenfada Park, when we were recreating that, I got word on the radio that there was one actor who wanted me. And it was the actor who was playing that part of William McKinney, he's got the cine camera [in the film]. And when I got to him he was lying on the ground and he was bleeding. And he says, ŒDon, I've lost me accent. I need to talk to you, I've got to get me accent back.' And he says, ŒI don't know what to say, I don't know what to say!' And I says, ŒLook, all I can tell you is people who were there said that William kept calling for him mother.' And I said, ŒThat's the thought you should have as you die, think of William calling for his mother.' And of course that's a very natural thing, we know that soldiers on the battlefield do the same thing. This is the great thing about Paul Greengrass. He'd walk up to somebody's door and say, ŒCan we have your house to bring some of the wounded in?' So this house is totally unprepared, and that's the way it was, you know? And so these people would have been sitting at 3 o'clock when they get a knock, and by 5 o'clock their house is in major movie! But this was a small little house and I couldn't get in so I was listening [to the scene] on the radio, and I was listening to it with my daughter who was an extra. And it was riveting. I could hear this guy shouting, ŒTell me mommy I'm sorry, Tell me mommy I'm sorry.' And when we heard Paul shout cut, I went around to him, and I'll never forget, he stood up and he went outside and he wept sorrowfully, this actor. He got so involved in it. He was inconsolable for about 10 minutes. When you can elicit that kind of response from actors, it's quite extraordinary, really. I remember the day I arrived on the scene, and the guys were there dressed as paras. I remember cooked deep into my psyche was this fear and this resentment of the paratroopers. And suddenly I was amongst these guys with British accents, dressed as paratroopers, walking around with self-assurances and cockiness and such, and that psychic trauma was kind of brought back into focus. I remember having to make the effort to ... welcome them. ... I remember saying, ŒAre you real soldiers?' One guy, being cocky, I suppose, and trying to impress us, he says, ŒAs far as you're concerned, we could be SAS.' [Special Air Services, a British special forces unit.] This is in Dublin. And I remember standing, there, nonplussed, and I looked back and I says, ŒYeah, and as far as you're concerned I could be a civilian.' And he suddenly realized, when you're fighting a guerilla war, who's your enemy, you know? And at that moment, there was respect forged between me and those guys, particularly that guy, and I later realized he was a former paratrooper himself. ... I spent a lot of time with those soldiers. [The actors were former soldiers.] I gave them all copies of my book, we discussed it, we talked about their experiences, their prejudices, my prejudices, it was amazing, it was like a mini peace process. ... It was a very moving experience making this film. But you know, the people I most admire in all of this is the families [of the victims]. Because, yes, my book was a catalyst for forcing the reopening of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, yes, my book was the inspiration for the movie ... but there would have been no books, there would have been no movie, only those families never gave up on the innocence of their loved ones. And despite the fact that they were struggling against a very powerful monolith, look at what they've achieved. It's phenomenal. These are just ordinary people. And I would hope that one of the outcomes of both this film and the Bloody Sunday inquiry is that it would give courage to little people around the world who are struggling with human rights issues. If you never give up, it you remain constant, you can pull the walls of Jericho down. And that's exactly what these ordinary people have done. ... And they were the audience and the critics I was most anxious about. We promised that we would let them see it without anybody, without journalists, without other people involved. We booked this cinema and the families and their extended families and the wounded and all were there. And afterwards Paul Greengrass, Mark Redhead, Jimmy Nesbitt and myself, we went up for a Q&A, just for the families. And at the end of the Q&A the families stood up and applauded, and it was very moving to be given a standing ovation. Very, very moving. ... At the end of that process [of making the film], I have to say that Mark Redhead and Paul Greengrass are two of the most honorable human beings I've ever worked with in my career. If Prime Minister Edward Heath and Lord Chief Justice Widgery in 1972 had shown the same courage as these two British filmmakers, I don't think we'd have 3,000 people dead today. I think that we in Ireland have to be in awe of these two men. They remind us that despite our long and hard colonial history, there always have been caring and just British people who were prepared to defend the Irish and who were prepared to stand up for truth and justice. ... At the end of it, I can only think of them as brothers. CP: In watching the movie I wondered if any of the young men were based on you. DM: Paul Greengrass had actually thought about basing the film around me, but then he went, and I think it was the right choice, he went with Ivan Cooper. It was absolutely the right choice. I was just one of the crowd there. I just happened to find myself, as they say, in the vortex of history. But the four young lads [in the movie], they were based on actual group, four guys who did go on the march ... and indeed Dennis ended up joining the IRA and spent many, many years in prison, having been captured. That actually was interesting too -- with the Bloody Sunday inquiry I often did interviews with British radio stations and you would get the impression that my community was responsible for most of the trauma of the Troubles, and no doubt, over half the killings were committed by people in my community. But you'd get the impression we all got off scot free. I mean, I discovered that people from my community, in the last 30 years, have spent in total about 120,000 actual years behind bars [in the last 30 years]. ... In the [mostly Protestant] loyalist community it's about 70,000 years, and do you know how many years British soldiers [have spent in prison] -- and there's over 300 killings that were in controversial circumstances. Only four soldiers were ever convicted and sent to prison, in total they spent 17 years. And most of them were not only released early, but were actually accepted back into the British army and promoted. So what does that tell us in terms of the British establishment's value of human life in terms of the Irish? ... It's a point that I've tried to make as well: I came from a lovely community, I came from a very caring community. We were a poor community, [there was] a lot of unemployment in our community. We grew up in a big estate that was created in order to corall Catholic votes because of the gerrymandering system, so that even though we were the majority community in Derry, up until the late 1960s, local politics were controlled by [pro-British] Unionism. And the question that has to be asked by historians, by policymakers, by journalists, by educators, is how does a peace loving community suddenly produce young men and women who become dedicated and fearless urban guerillas? Was it because we were born with a genetic defect that made us prone to violence? Was it because we were violent by nature? Of course it wasn't. It was because of the political corruption and the violence that they themselves represent. Bloody Sunday played a crucial role in all of the because not only was Bloody Sunday terrible, but we saw then the highest judicial figure, Lord Widgery, murder the truth, with the collusion of the highest politician in the country, Ted Heath, because we've minutes of a meeting between Ted Heath and Lord Widgery the day after Bloody Sunday, when he talked to him about setting up an inquiry about the events in Londonderry the previous day, but he goes on to remind the Lord Chief Justice that in Ireland we are not only fighting a military war but a propaganda war. And [Heath's] clearly giving [Widgery] a steer in terms of the desired political outcome of the Bloody Sunday inquiry. And of course for young people watching this -- they see innocent, unarmed people shot dead, then they see the highest judicial figure publish a report in which he exonerates the military, in which he finds the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent. And so naturally they conclude the only way to fight this is by taking up arms. I never did, thank God, but I understand why many of my friends did that. And of course we had the situation throughout the period where the British tried to present themselves as though they were the honest brokers trying to keep two unreasonable, warring factions aside, whereas they contributed greatly to the culture of violence that eventually took root. And again, this is where Redhead and Greengrass and the British people who financed the making of this film must be complimented because as part of the healing process, as part of the peace process, there is a need for all sides to say yes, we did terrible things. And this is where Britain's people own Bloody Sunday, in a very truthful and very shocking way. Of course they were criticized by some predictable elements. There was even on journalist who, while not coming out directly and calling them traitors, he quoted George Orwell and what Orwell said about traitors to the nation, and that was her way of trying to put the knife into these two documentary makers. But I think that long-term, these men have contributed immensely to the healing process. And I don't think the film comes across as an anti-British or a bitter film. It's a shocking film, but I think it's an anti-war film, and I think it's a film also with a universal message. I think it's a message also to governments, in terms of, you should be very careful before committing your military to any civilian conflict. Diplomacy and dialogue are far more effective. And maybe it has resonance in terms of post-Sept. 11 as well. I mean, should the United States be thinking of sending ground troops to Iraq? ... We've got what, a billion people of the Islamic faith? Half of them are under 25, many of them are educated, radicalized and very angry and are alienated from the United States. Now, uneqivocal support for Israel in relation to Palestine, or going into Iraq, I'm not sure that's the way to try to create a new relationship. CP: What sort of reactions have you been getting from American audiences? DM: Up until now the only Americans who have seen it were at Sundance [film festival]. Now we went to Sundance just simply wanting to showcase the film -- we felt tremendously privileged just to get the film into Sundance. We had no expectations and to be honest with you, we never in our wildest dreams expected to leave Utah and suddenly get phone calls saying ŒYou've won the audience award in the world cinema section.' To come away with best picture at Sundance was unbelievable, unbelievable. And that was the moment when we thought, maybe this film will make an impact. CP: How did the events of that day change your life? You didn't become involved in the violence -- DM: No, but I thought about it long and hard. [Bloody Sunday] frightened me, and it politicized me, and it made me very angry. And if I'd been two years older, I think I probably would have joined the IRA. I was 15 at the time. And it made me very thoughtful and reflective. I mean I'd thrown stones and fought with British soldiers, but I had a neighbor who'd been shot by a young IRA sniper the previous Christmas and the bullet almost severed her spine, but not quite. I used to go and visit her, and I remember on one occasion her holding [my hand] as the pain went through her and I remember the ashen face and the sweat beads coming down her forehead, and I remember her turning to me and saying, ŒDon, I wish I was dead.' And I understood and I couldn't blame her for the death wish that she had. And I realized at that moment that the most precious gift we have is the gift of life, you know? And how easy it is to flex your index finger, but what you unleash, and the consequences for another human being can be absolutely horrendous. ... The following summer after Bloody Sunday, the army came in and took the no-go areas -- we'd no-go areas that were controlled by the IRA -- in Operation Motorman. And I remember shortly after that one day being with two friends and being stopped by grenadier guards in my street and asked for identification -- it was a bit like South Africa, you never went out without ID. I had a little football club card and I'd glued in a little passport photograph which I thought made me look suitably impressive and I showed this to the guy. And I remember the guy in charge, he looked at it and he laughed, and he passed my photograph around to the other soldiers, who all laughed. And I remember my sense of humiliation. And as the incident progressed I found myself becoming very frightening, but I realized I wasn't frightened of the soldiers -- I was frightened of what was happening inside of me. It was like a poisonous adrenaline had been injected into my system and this coldness was running through me. And what he had done was put me in contact with the killer instinct. If at that moment I'd had a gun I'd have killed him. And I remember going home, and for three days I never come out of the house. I couldn't. It was like an evil instinct inside me, and I had to exorcise it out of me. I didn't dare go out until I had somehow managed to get this feeling under control. I remember those soldiers walked away laughing, thinking they were being funny. They didn't realize that in a context like post-Bloody Sunday, they were playing a very dangerous game. But why did I not join? All I can say is but for the grace of God there go I. 
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