When acclaimed actor and director Peter Mullan overcame his fear of flying his career took off, he tells Donald Clarke - but why did he try to poison his father?
In Gaby Dellal's forthcoming On a Clear Day, Peter Mullan (the overpoweringly Glaswegian actor- director whose previous film, The Magdalene Sisters, made such an impact two years ago) stars as a recently laid-off shipworker who, for the same reason former steelworkers so often turn to stripping, chooses to swim the English Channel. The film has much to do with fathers and their children. Mullan's character, emotionally cut off following an earlier tragedy, has enormous difficulty communicating with his eldest son. This offers me an excuse to ask about Mullan's own father and, more specifically, about a particular incident which leaps out of any profile of his you read. It has been said that Mullan, while still a lad, tried to murder his sadistically abusive dad with rat poison. Is this really true? Did he really mean to kill him or was it just a gesture?
"I meant it in as much as you would mean it if you had seen your mother getting f***ing raped," he says in a surprisingly even tone. "He would hold a knife to her throat. A few times I took the knife off him and I was tempted to plunge it right into the son-of-a-bitch. But with the poison, I think I liked the drama of it. I took him this cup of tea with the poison in it, and if he had drunk it I would have taken the consequences. But I had never made him a cup of tea in my life, so he got suspicious and just looked at me and laughed."
Mullan is a natural storyteller. Cradling a pint of lager in the bar of Edinburgh's Sheraton Hotel - the last time I met him he sucked one down in about five minutes - he enthusiastically expands his answers into structured dramas. It's the writer in him I suppose.
"You'd think that the knowledge that your wee one was trying to kill you would wake you up," he continues. "And the older I get, the more nutty his behaviour then seems to me. It was a lot of things I suppose - the drink, the war, his own background. And it was just the way he was."
Mullan, now 45, grew up in Cardonald, to the south-west of Glasgow city centre. His father, now long dead, was a toolmaker and lab technician and was involved with the development of the first laser. That distinction aside, Mullan still regards his family as part of the "respectable working class". As a teenager, he went through a period hanging out with street gangs, but, a fervent reader, he still managed to secure five As in his Highers. A place in Glasgow University studying economic history and drama followed. Was he - to use a well-worn phrase - the first person in his family to go to university?
"Oh aye, all that stuff," he says. "When I was at Glasgow University, they reckoned that about 14 per cent of the students were working class. It's not much better now."
The heroes of On a Clear Day are, as the film begins, being made redundant from the shipyards near Mullan's childhood home. If things had gone differently, he might have ended up there himself.
"My school was one of the principal suppliers for the shipyards," he says. "Army, police, factory, shipyards, crime: those were the five main options. And of those the shipyards was the most respectable. I honestly couldn't have lived that life. I can act it, but I couldn't live that. My brother lost a mate in the shipyard when he was only 17. Watching a guy grieving at that age is terrible. The accident rate was terrible. Some guys might talk romantically about the shipyards, but most do not."
DESPITE VARIOUS GLAMOROUS but unsuitable offers from Hollywood, he and his wife refuse to leave Glasgow's southside.
"Oh I could never move," he says. "Never. We have bought this house and our wee ones will always have that. We couldn't leave Glasgow. That's who we are. I lived there for a long time before this acting thing happened. I was 27 before I was really a career actor."
After leaving college Mullan devoted himself to that school of politically charged theatre that blossomed during the Thatcher years.
Troubled by constant panic attacks and the occasional nervous breakdown, he slowly garnered a reputation among insiders as a powerful writer and commanding dramatic presence. He appeared in Braveheart and Shallow Grave. He popped up in Rab C Nesbitt and Taggart. But it was Ken Loach's My Name is Joe in 1998 that really announced Peter Mullan, by then in his late 30s, to the world at large. His performance as a reformed alcoholic won him the best actor award at Cannes. In the same year, Orphans, his extraordinary first feature as director, picked up a bucket of awards at the Venice Film Festival. I assume life changed significantly.
"It didn't really change at all," he laughs. " 'Oh your life will never be the same again,' everyone said. Well it was the same. I was still skint. I was still in the same house. You know what really changed things for me financially was when, later, I decided I could fly again. I had a panic attack on a plane and demanded they let me off it. For seven years after that I couldn't get on a plane. When I got over that I suddenly was able to take better jobs and get to more festivals."
Observing the confident way Mullan possesses a room, you wouldn't guess that he was the sort of person to suffer from panic attacks or a nervous disposition. But nobody escapes from such a ghastly childhood totally unscathed. At any rate, he claims, in a characteristically uncomplicated manner, that one day in 1986, while sitting on a bus, he suddenly realised the nervous breakdowns were behind him. He credits getting over his fear of flying to "homeopathy and all that shit". There must be something in it, because he travelled the world to promote The Magdalene Sisters. He is still puzzled by the differing responses the film, which revealed the way nuns mistreated the young female inmates of Ireland's Magdalene laundries, was received in different countries.
"There was very little fuss in Ireland - the film's home, as it were," he muses (the picture did, however, do extraordinarily good business here). "But there was a real stink in Italy and America. In Scotland the leader of the Catholic Church took out a half-page advertisement in the Herald urging people to go and see it. It was all very strange."
Mullan admits that all kinds of odd writing offers have come his way since the success of The Magdalene Sisters, but he is reluctant to take commissions for projects over which he doesn't have full control.
"Then they own you," he says. "I would rather do the occasional acting part to finance my own stuff."
To that end he has recently returned from playing some class of hairy barbarian in a Dino De Laurentiis epic, The Last Legion, in Tunisia.
"I said, you will have to bribe me with a lot of money to do this," he says. "And they did. So that allows me to start writing my own stuff in October or so."
Before The Last Legion hits our screens, we have On a Clear Day. It's a decent, humane thing, featuring a little broad comedy and a lot of making amends. Mullan's greatest challenge was to look convincing in the swimming sequences. A double was used for many of the scenes in open water, but there were still close-ups and dialogue that required Mullan to immerse himself in the icy Irish Sea.
"We shot it in the Isle of Man," he explains. "It was far colder there than it is in the Channel. This must be one of the few examples of a film shooting scenes in a less hospitable environment than where the film is actually set. I originally thought they will never put me in that water; they will fly me to Hawaii or somewhere. It was brutal. You can't think. You can't breathe it's so cold. One good thing is when they say 'turn over', Doctor Theatre kicks in and you start to use all those sensations. You don't have to think: 'Now, how do I play cold?' "
DESPITE ADMITTING THAT feeling wretched helps you act wretched, Mullan exhibits a healthy disrespect for more pretentious approaches to his art.
"We never talked about character on this film," he laughs. "We don't do that in Scotland. That is a total waste of time. American actors do it all the time and I would never criticise anything any actor might do that works. But when you come down to it, why bother thinking about it? Things will happen on set and the whole performance will change. A total waste of time."
Mullan is full of such strong opinions.
"I am more political than ever. The trouble with capitalism is there are just too many victims," he says at the beginning of a Marxist ramble. But, despite that rasping Glasgow accent, he never comes across as aggressive or intimidating. He seems to have emerged from his difficult adolescence as an amiable human being. Surveying his career and his considerable reputation, he must be happy his dad didn't drink the tea and force him to - as he put it earlier - take the consequences.
On a Clear Day opens on Sept 2