‘Collins’ Controversy Neil Jordan’s Story Of The Famous Irish Freedom Fighter Becomes A Touchy Subject For Many

Running his fingers through his lank black hair, wondering how he’s going to pack in 15 minutes to catch a plane to Cincinnati, Neil Jordan strides through a Boston hotel suite like a man hardly able to make sense of his own whirlwind itinerary, much less the tangled skeins of blood and passion that have made up the history of Ireland for decades. But Jordan has done just that in “Michael Collins.”

His new film, starring Liam Neeson as the often ruthless Irish freedom fighter, opened Friday. It clarifies, in a style that’s a throwback to Hollywood’s great historical epics, the story of the man who fought the British to a standstill, only to be assassinated in 1922 at the age of 31 by outraged compatriots who branded him a traitor for going to London and compromising on a peace treaty.

Although the film about anticolonial revolt veering into civil war - hailed at the Venice Film Festival - has yet to open in England or Ireland, Jordan has been fielding attacks on it, mostly, he wryly points out, from people who have not yet seen it.

“The controversy arises,” Jordan says, “from the tremendous fear that (the film) will be used for propaganda purposes to push one version of Collins’ life, especially as propaganda for the IRA. But the IRA regard him as a traitor who betrayed the republican ideal. I don’t think the film will upset the peace process. It’s an account of a tragic struggle that should have ended a long, long time ago. Collins’ tragedy was that he couldn’t lead the struggle as he did and then go back and say, ‘Look, forget what I told you four years ago.’

“But you’ve got to realize that Collins was never for civil war. He would never have involved himself in this warfare in the present day because it’s obvious that no one can win. He had the support of 80 percent of the Irish people,” including, Jordan adds, one of his own aunts who at the time was a post office clerk and used to copy letters and slip them to Collins’ volunteers.

If the film is to succeed, Jordan realizes, it will be because the heroic figure of Collins moves from man of action to man of peace. And, he pointedly adds, because the film bears out the prediction of Ireland’s venerable head of state, Eamon De Valera, who died at age 93 in 1975, believing that his own place in history would be eclipsed by Collins.

“It’s very interesting the way people’s perceptions of (Collins) have changed,” Jordan says. “He has become the figure people most strongly want to identify with from that period, you know?

“I believe it’s because Ireland is trying to redefine itself as something other than just green, Catholic and nationalistic. It’s trying to throw off that one-dimensional definition because there are many ways of being Irish, and I suppose that Protestant Unionist is one of them. People in Ireland do want to see the Northern Ireland situation solved. They know it’s always going to be a special accommodation.

“The extraordinary thing was that Collins, who was such a terribly effective military student, went on to actively embrace a political compromise. He hoped he incited change. Today people see Collins as the most effective representative of the republican tradition in a way, but yet somebody who is prepared to embrace its opposite, prepared to broaden what the definition is of what it means to be Irish.”

The film’s subtext is the Oedipal relationship between Collins and his mentor, Eamon De Valera, who, after breaking away from the Irish Free State put in place by Collins, became Ireland’s prime minister in 1937. In the film the mathematician and political tactician De Valera is played by Alan Rickman in a stiff, clenched, icy style antithetical to Neeson’s impassioned boldness.

“De Valera was the father who couldn’t quite prevent the death of his symbolic son,” Jordan says. “De Valera was earlier that day only 300 yards from where Collins was shot, but I don’t mean to imply that he had him assassinated. He had a nervous breakdown after Collins was killed. He may have won the political war, but in the end he lost the moral battle.”

The film doesn’t follow every twist of Collins’ life, but, Jordan says, he fashioned it as accurately as he could from Collins’ own letters as well as from documents, histories and biographies. Jordan says he especially relied on Collins’ letters to his fiancee, Kitty Kiernan, to whom he was supposed to be married on the day he died. If the relationship between Neeson and Julia Roberts’ Kitty is chaste on screen, Jordan says, it’s because it was that way in real life.

“If you read those letters, there was a kind of naive rivalry between Collins and Harry Boland (played in the film by Aidan Quinn) over Kitty. Collins would exchange letters with her about going to Mass. I didn’t get into a romance Collins was supposed to have had with Lady Laverty in London. I’m convinced that the romance was mostly her admiring him, and that it was unconsummated.”

Jordan admits he did take liberties but mostly, he says, in the interest of telescoping and concision, such as an incident in which British troops on a nearby bridge fired on an Irish crowd at a football match to retaliate for a lethal attack by Collins’ citizen army. In the film, a primitive tank rolls onto the field and opens fire.

“If I had done it the way it actually happened,” Jordan says, “it would have occupied 20 minutes of screen time. You don’t want to see attrition on that scale for 20 minutes. It would have been incredibly brutal because you would actually see the faces of those soldiers that were shooting up this innocent crowd. You would actually come to hate them because they did go in and shoot 13 people. I wanted it to start as a silly-looking thing, people in the audience laughing for a moment. Then they open fire. Basically, I wanted it to be over in two minutes.”

Jordan wrote the script in 1983, he says, for David Puttnam, while working on his own Freudian Red Riding Hood film, “The Company of Wolves.” He wrote with Neeson in mind, he says, and never considered anyone else. Over the years, figures ranging from John Huston to Kevin Costner have wanted to make a Michael Collins film.

“John Ford would have done a great job,” Jordan says. “But obviously there was no real eagerness to embrace the character, certainly not with me. I wasn’t a very successful director.”

But after maintaining a certain obscurity level with films ranging from “The Miracle” to “We’re No Angels,” Jordan attracted Hollywood attention with “The Crying Game” and “Interview with the Vampire.” Jordan got the green light because he promised to keep the budget down by filming in his native Ireland, where the architecture and the faces were right, and ads in the paper drew thousands of unpaid extras.

“We filmed where the action happened,” Jordan said. “The jail, the executions in the square where they actually took place. That scene where they argue about the treaty, that was in the actual room of the Mansion House where it happened. You do feel a certain authenticity creep in. At least you know the afternoon light was the same.

“It had to be made at such speed to get it made on budget. We did these massive scenes in the center of Dublin - tanks, vehicles, soldiers, crowds, then an assassination between 11 and 1, and in the afternoon two very broad interior scenes.

“For the scene where Harry Boland dies, I managed to find a remarkable set of tunnels near Dublin Abbey, beneath an old bonded warehouse. They saved my bacon, really, because they served for two separate scenes.

“In Dublin, directors aren’t stars, thank goodness. They’re back-room boys. People in Dublin never get on me for directing or going Hollywood.

“They did get on me for making movies in the first place, because writing is a sacred vocation, or at least it was when I started,” says Jordan, who neglects to add that in his native Ireland he’s at least as well known for his fiction as for his films.

“I was born in Sligo, but I’m basically a Dubliner,” says Jordan, 46. “My father fished from the bridge you see in the film. It’s the third time I’ve used that bridge. …

“But the truth is I’m not nervous about ‘Michael Collins’ opening in Dublin next month. After all, half of Dublin is in the movie.”