The message from a movie based on the 1983 Maze prison break-out is the potential of dialogue, according to its writer and director Stephen Burke.
Ahead of the Belfast Film Festival premiere on Thursday, Burke said as a filmmaker he believed any historical event was fair game as a subject matter but “it’s up to us to be responsible in the treatment of it”.
Based on the real-life story of the 1983 Maze prison break-out orchestrated by republican Larry Marley, the movie explores the story of 38 IRA prisoners’ H-Block escape, with varying degrees of success, from one of Europe’s most high-security prisons. However, it also looks at the episode from the perspective of prison staff.
It focuses in particular on the relationship between Marley, played by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and prison warden Gordon, played by Barry Ward. Burke said from a writer’s point of view he was attracted to the relationship between republicans and Maze prison service staff even though it was based on a deception.
“For me, for that brief period it showed the potential of dialogue, if there is message in the movie that is what it is trying to be,” he said.
The film has been shown to the Marley family. “They wanted to see how their father was portrayed and afterwards they said that he was portrayed as a republican and a family man which is what he was,” Burke added.
Burke intentionally did not liaise with “escapers or warders” as he wanted to remain objective but did as much research as he could, adding that he was blessed Belfast producer Brendan Byrne had done a BBC documentary “Breakout” on the escape.
“From the get-go we wanted to show a dual perspective, not a one-sided approach, we were very interested in the warders point of view,” he said.
Prison officer’s death
Two prison officers were shot and others assaulted and stabbed at the time of the escape, including James Ferris, who subsequently died from a heart attack.
“Some people are saying I shied away and tried to hide it (his death)but I made a decision not to linger on his suffering because I knew there was real family out there,” he said.
Vaughan-Lawlor said he spoke with escapees to help him understand Marley’s mindset. He found his research into the complexity of the conflict in the North and the violence of the time “eye-opening and sobering”.
Ward spoke to prison officers in Cork, where the film was shot, and read as much as he could about about the psychological impact of this sort of work.
“It’s a very tough job and not one I would fancy doing in real life,” he said. Ward also said his knowledge of the conflict had grown vastly and he didn’t believe the film was “glorifying terrorism” as had been suggested by some because the prison officers side of the story was “given a full airing”.
“This word glorifying keeps coming up... the very nature of putting something on a screen is glorification, by its very nature, magnifying it up there. Yes, it kind of does glorify everyone but you get both sides of the argument in the movie,” he said.
“You get to really explore and go on a journey with two men who are diametrically opposed and you get to understand and sympathise with both and I think it’s a very fair appraisal.”
Vaughan-Lawlor described being an actor as a privilege and said he had learned a lot about the dynamic of the conflict during the making of the film.
“You get different view points of life and that hopefully deepens you as a person in terms of understanding people’s motivations and why they make the choices they do and we are lucky to have those opportunities,” he said.
Maze opens at cinemas across Ireland on September 22nd.