'It's a very hard picture to talk about," says Fionnula Flanagan. "Because you don't want to give away the ending. You want the audience to experience that denouement. It's very satisfying to see that happen with an audience."
The film is The Others, Alejandro Amenβbar's Gothic supernatural chiller, already a surprise hit in the US, and likely to repeat the feat here with its tale of a young mother (Nicole Kidman) and her two children, stranded in a fog-shrouded Channel Islands mansion after the second World War. More reminiscent of 1940s melodramas like Rebecca than of more recent haunted house efforts (there's not a special effect in sight), the film features a fine, restrained performance from Flanagan as a mysterious housekeeper.
"When I first read it I thought 'he can make this work'," says Flanagan in her Cork hotel the day after introducing The Others to an enthusiastic audience at the Cork Film Festival. "I had seen his two earlier films, which were superb for such a young director."
Now only 29, Amenβbar made his first film when he was 23. "It's called Thesis," says Flanagan, "and it's basically saying that, no matter what anybody says, we're all addicted to violence against women as an entertainment, and he proves that point. It's a very simple story, wonderfully done. I thought that for someone so young to be able to carry that kind of political statement, and almost prove it by the end of the movie, is wonderful, and if he can make that work, then he can do this."
Shot on the Atlantic coast of Spain, The Others is Amenβbar's first English-language production (his previous film, Open Your Eyes, has just been re-made in the US by director Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz). "Because of the nature of this film, with such a small cast, and the fact it all takes place in or around the house, if you can find the landscape you could shoot it anywhere," says Flanagan. "He comes from Chile originally and moved to Spain as a child. He considers himself a Spanish director, but I could see contained within it that South American surrealism, addressing the whole spirit world, and the whole idea of spirituality being different from religion. I think it's wonderful that there's no evil person in the story, no monster or alien or whatever. He really does address the evil within us, the dark side, which is not the norm for Hollywood or anywhere else. Usually the evil has to be located outside somewhere, to leave the hero or heroine squeaky clean."
Born in 1941 in Drumcondra, Fionnula Flanagan has been living in the US for 30 years, since arriving in the country with a production of Brian Friel's Lovers. Her career in the US has won her an Emmy (for Rich Man, Poor Man), while her one-woman show, James Joyce's Women, was highly successful. "It's very beautiful," she says of her California home. "I live in the hills, with a lot of wild animals in my garden, which is lovely. I know a lot of very talented people who work in the film community there, but other than that, I don't have a relationship to California. In a city like LA, you relate to the community you live or work in. But it's a very hard city to identify with. It's a very beautiful place, but I think what makes it possible to live there is that I leave it so much.
"I see sea-changes here in Ireland. I see people isolated in their new communities of wealth and well-being, and then other people isolated by not having that. I see a huge increase in the people living on the streets, and I read in the newspapers about the gap between haves and have-nots widening. It's happening everywhere. At this point in my life, I could live anywhere, but I do like to come back to Ireland, because it's the well."
Amenβbar cast her in The Others after seeing her play the hardline Republican mother in the hunger-strike film, Some Mother's Son.
"That film was very close to my heart, because I saw the hunger strike as a watershed event in our history," she says. "The reverberations from it are still being felt and seen today. It's never been really dealt with in a way that put it to rest, in a way that removed that sense that it's something we should be ashamed of."
She has been prominent at Sinn FΘin fundraising events in the US in the past few years, and makes no bones about her sympathies. "I wasn't here during the hunger strike," she says. "And I probably wasn't aware of the enormity of it and the effect it would have. But during the making of the film, and given the family I come from, and the schools I went to and the version of Irish history that I got, I was certainly sympathetic to the plight of the hunger strikers and what they represented. And to the idea of nationhood as sketched out by Irish nationalists in the North.
"The Republic turned its back on them. My experience of coming here in the years after the hunger strikes was that if you wanted to talk about Northern Ireland, people said 'Oh please, give it a rest. You live far away, but we have to live with it all the time.'"
Surely that reaction was understandable, I suggest, given what, at that time, appeared to be endless violence, and the atrocities committed in the name of nationalism? "Yes, but I think that predates the Provo campaign," she says. "I grew up believing that it was a part and parcel of nationhood that you would have your own native language and that you should be able to speak it. I'm very grateful to my parents for giving me that, and for giving me access to a vast and wonderful literature that otherwise I would have had to read in translation. But I was sneered at. I was a source of ridicule, as somebody slightly dimwitted or hazy or something. I think that kind of slur didn't need the Provo campaign to justify it. So I don't think it was only that. Anything that spoke of nationhood was automatically linked with the Troubles, but that wasn't because of the Provos. We did it ourselves."
Flanagan insists her opinions are rooted in her own experiences, that she's no Beverly Hills Provo, but she agrees that some see her as a blow-in Yank with misguided beliefs. "There's a great divide, and God knows I used to make it myself before I moved to the United States, between the Irish and the Irish-Americans," she says. "There's a great contempt here for Irish-Americans. But if you go there to live for any length of time, you become Irish-American and are embraced by that.
"One of the most irritating things that happens when I come here is that people, some of whom I've known for a long time, start sentences with: 'I'll tell you what we're like here in Ireland.' What am I, a tourist? They never forgive you if you go away."
The Others is on general release