"I didn't think that you could make a film from the position of the hunger strikers or the British government," says the writer director of Some Mother's Son, Terry George. "There's nobody in those two groups that I think an ordinary audience could empathise with - they're too far out in their, extremity. The audience needs to be personified by a character that you walk through the film with."
Political criticisms of Some Mother's Son have centred on the representation of the British administration's handling of the hunger strikes, as personified in the fictional civil servant, Farnsworth, who orchestrates the British government's handling of the H Block protest.
According to the director, there were originally a couple of less strident scenes with Farnsworth, but they disrupted the narrative flow of the film. "You have two hours, and the number one thing for me was to tell the mother's story, and weave it through this complex narrative, which is still a hotly debated and contentious issue. I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as an unbiased film.
"Once you put the camera somewhere or make a decision about how long you're going to stay on a character, there's a bias to the exercise, but it was not my intention to demonise anyone. It would be amazing if you could produce a film about Northern Ireland that everyone would agree on. How the hell can a film maker come up with something that the actual society can't produce it sell?"
A former Republican prisoner himself, George is unapologetic about the fact that he has made a film which draws on his own experiences and memories of the effect of the hunger strike on the nationalist community. "It's about an event which singularly traumatised that community and changed it. It politicised Sinn Fein and ultimately sowed the seeds of the peace process.
"The British press is shocked that Britain is considered to be a partisan presence in the story that we're telling. Their reaction to In The Name Of The Father was one of horror that they were depicted as the bad guys and that was a situation where they clearly were the bad buys.
"In this film, it's a very grey area. The thing that fascinated me, and in some ways depressed me, is that everyone in Some Mother's Son is right from the perspective of their own position. I wanted to look at that situation, to take one woman who wasn't sure, who was actively apolitical, and take her through that process."
The criticism reflects a widely expressed fear in the British and Irish media that a film like Some Mother's Son forms part of an Irish nationalist propaganda offensive targeted at a naive American audience, and that it will encourage fund raising for the IRA, a charge which George rejects both as patronising and as a misreading of his film.
Everybody's worrying about each other's story getting out. It's like: "Jesus, don't tell them this in America because they won't understand. But, for all their ugly perceptions of the North, Americans are very sharp cinematically on a basic and intuitive level. I don't think, after seeing this film, that they'll be thinking about giving money to the IRA. They're going to think that Helen Mirren's character was right at the end of the day, and that Thatcher's government was stupid, and they were particularly stupid.
"I've been criticised for mythologising Bobby Sands, for having one of the characters say `you look like Jesus Christ', but that was the reality of the situation. We've all seen the photographs, and they looked like that. All right, so I have a character hit it on the nose and say it outright, but I wanted to get away from that Northern Ireland instinct of hiding everything in coded conversation, where you, don't really say what you mean.
GEORGE is reluctant to discuss his own involvement in the Troubles. The mini biography accompanying the publicity material for Same Mother's Son describes his career as a journalist and writer in the US since 1981, but doesn't refer to his experiences in Belfast before that. "I come from a section of society that is by its nature subversive because it feels it's repressed. Then you go to America and people are asking you things straight out. At first it's shocking, then it's liberating - but still, I never really wanted to talk about Ireland or my past, because nobody does that where I come from. To do interviews is anathema to me, but having lived in America I know it has to be done. You can't be running, around skulking in the background."
Interned in 1972 at the age of 19, he became involved with the IRSP on his release and was arrested in a car in which a gun was found. He was sentenced in 1975 and spent three years in the political status compound in Long Kesh, missing the British government's criminalisation policy by, nine months. In age, background and personal history, his story is very similar to that of the hunger strikers themselves.
"Ultimately I know, from my own experiences with the IRSP, and from ending up in jail, that there's an arrogance of youth that doesn't care about the spillage from its actions. There's a scene in the film where Aiden Gillen (who plays Mirren's hunger striking son) says that he's never seen things so clearly before. Now by that stage most of the hunger strikers were off in this self induced mystical state that the fast seemed to induce in them, but at the end of the day there's an element of selfishness about the whole thing, isn't there?"
EVEN if it weren't such recent history, the story of the hunger strikes has strong resonances for current events in Northern Ireland with entrenchment, suspicion and seeming stalemate on all sides. George believes that his film has something to say about the present situation. "It has to be recognised that the whole thing about decommissioning is just ridiculous. They've put themselves in these structural traps that happened with the hunger strikes as well - the five demands, rights and privileges and all that bullshit - and now we're back to that again, we've boxed ourselves into a corner.
"The whole community I come from in West Belfast was branded as subversive and second class, to be cordoned off and isolated. All you get out of that sort of society is people who lash out, usually violently. The more you demonise people, the harder you make it to find a solution, and the more about faces you have to do at the end of the day.
"It doesn't take a genius to see that, at the end of the film, when Helen Mirren is standing looking at these two groups of people screaming at each other while these men are dying, I'm ladling it on with a spoon. She takes a humanist decision and steps above the confusion and argument of that society; That's the statement of the film.
