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 "I think you would genuinely have a case to suggest that this wee film [On a Clear Day] is actually subversive, because it actually suggests that people can help one another as a group. There’s not a serial killer or paedophile or rapist or nymphomaniac amongst them; they’re just people trying to help one another. I’ll be honest, that’s what I really like about the film. Because from where we’re standing now, where we have a barrage of Hollywood movies telling us don’t trust anybody, don’t even trust your own kids because they’re all possessed, you know, it’s like Jesus Mother of God. The darker the film now, for me, that’s like the most pro-establishment type of film, that’s the ones that are banging the fascist drum, which is like, ‘Do not trust other human beings, they’re not to be trusted. They’re all out to get you.’ And that’s exactly what the establishment want you to believe. They’re desperate for us to believe that because then they can take away any fucking civil liberties that we happen to have left. They can justify shooting an unarmed man eight times in the back of the head.”
You recently finished shooting the thriller Cargo in Spain. How did that go?
“The most drastic outcome was when I came home I had contracted pneumonia from the fucking thing. Yeah, I got it from a sick African bird. It’s called cystatosis or something. So I was in hospital for about a week and septicaemia kind of came into the equation also. It was pretty brutal, actually. I’m absolutely fine now. I suppose when I find myself saying ‘pretty polly’ and stuff, I’ll know I’ve been badly, badly, badly affected. But no, I’m fine. The antibiotics kicked in and it was fine. But aye, the fist week it was absolutely brutal. I lost just under a stone in a week because you sweat. You just lie there and you hallucinate a bit. I discovered that I got it from the rare African bird that I’d been working with on Cargo. I was none too happy about that.”
You do seem to put yourself through stuff for your films.
“It does seem to be that case, doesn’t it? I always seem to think I get quite easy jobs but I always seem to end up freezing to death, getting hypothermia, pneumonia, or some other fucking such thing.”
But do you like the challenge of swimming in open water, as you did in On a Clear Day, or working in freezing conditions on a film like The Claim? Do these extreme conditions present a challenge that you find attractive?
“Yeah, I learned how to swim, really, for On a Clear Day. It’s nice if you learn something. I learned how to swim, really, for On a Clear Day. I knew before hand but I had never been taught. It’s nice if you do something like that or learn how to ride a horse, drive a car kind of thing. I nice if you walk away from a film and you’ve learned something. You’re always learning, obviously, but it’s nice when you pick something up doing a job. The physical stuff is fine if you’re channelling it, excuse the pun, into the performance. It’s much more difficult if, say, you’re in freezing cold water and you have to make out that you’re really happy and jolly and it’s lovely and warm. It’s much harder than if you’re in freezing cold water and you have to act like you’re dying because it’s freezing cold. It’s not by any means impossible, obviously. But it’s much more difficult to act against a climate.”
In that respect was this more difficult than The Claim?
“Aye, The Claim was different type of cold. On the whole you were protected until that silly day they had me in the snow for eight hours and all that. That was just stupid. On this one, I had much more training, which was five and a half months just on the swimming alone. So I guess the headspace for the character was, for me, a relatively place to go, because I’d had many panic attacks before, so I knew how all that felt. And you only have to think about your own kids to feel what someone’s loss might be. If something is in an emotional range that you know even just a little bit about, then that makes life a lot easier. So for a job like On a Clear Day, from my point of view, I had a really nice time. Emotionally it wasn’t any place I wasn’t familiar with.”
I watched Blinded and On a Clear Day back to back last night and they’re two very different films. What attracted you to each of them?
“Well, Blinded, you’re playing someone who’s lost his sight so I had a beautiful advisor, Jill Davie, and Jill lost her sight when she was 19, she’s now 27, and Jill taught me so much about what it is to lose your vision and basically have to examine your soul. The guy in Blinded, obviously, had not come out the other end. Jill, thankfully, did come out the other end. She is a remarkable young woman. Also Blinded was in the Gothic genre, and Gothic’s always a good place for any actor to go to, because emotions are pretty extreme. For a guy like him, his darkness is very attractive, literally and metaphorically his darkness, because you’re thinking, ‘What is going through this guy’s mind that he should feel so belligerent to both himself and those around him?’ In On a Clear Day he is the opposite of that because he’s like an open wound. He’s desperately just trying to hold on to his sanity, you know? He finds that place to go to exorcise his demons, even though he’s completely unaware that that’s what he’s doing it for.”
For me the moment when he’s in the water and face to face with his demons is like King Lear raging against the elements on the heath.
“Yeah, I discovered talking to people who had done extreme things that the extremity is based upon how large, if you like, the demons are, or how many of them there are. I think we all do that to some extent. When something is eating away inside you, we all find means to run away from it as he did with his work, or a means to confront it. Even though, as I say, we’re not always completely conscious of that fact. It was a year after we completed The Magdalene Sisters before I really understood why I had made the film, and it was very personal, it was all to do with my relationship with my father and all this kind of stuff. Even though that was my exorcising my demons about him, the subject made it in no way apparent that that was what I was doing. About a year after I’d finished making it, I suddenly sat down and thought, ‘I now know why I made that film. Why it affected me so deeply, that whole subject.’ It’s the same thing with Frank in On a Clear Day and the guy in Blinded. Acting’s a great place to go to dark places with impunity. You can go there and leave. You’re just play acting. It’s just a game. It’s the same in My Name is Joe or Miss Julie: you’re a tourist, an emotional tourist, which is very fortunate, because not everyone gets to do that.”
When I interviewed you for My Name is Joe you said that memories of your father inspired the chilling moments where Joe falls of the wagon and it’s angry and dark. Did your relationship with your father also inform your work in On a Clear Day because this is a film about fathers and sons, and a father who is not emotionally available to his son?
“Not the relationship with my father. On a Clear Day was more influenced, I guess, by a projected relationship with my own kids. In the sense that you thought imagine you lost one and you couldn’t look at the other one. You know, you obviously just use your imagination. But emotionally, you think, ‘How would I react to my own kids not relating to me or to my not relating to them?’ And also, I understand how some men basically just close things off, they can’t deal with certain things, so everything just implodes, it doesn’t always explode. Again that was in the writing Alex had written. You know, you really did get a good insight into someone who’s suppressing things that are going to have to come out sooner or later.”
Did you also see a bit of yourself in the character of Rob, Frank’s son in the film, played by Jamie Sives, who’s sort of compensating for his own lack of a connection with his own father by making sure his kids get everything? Because you have talked to me before about not wanting to be away from your family for long periods, and have turned down work accordingly. That seems to be a desire on your part to give your own kids what you didn’t have growing up.
“Yeah, yeah, particularly the way the brilliant Jamie Sives played him. The scenes between him and I were really easy for us to do because we both kind of understood where each of those guys was coming from. It wasn’t as if one was necessarily wrong and the other right. They were at that kind of impasse in their lives and they had to work that out.”
But do you see yourself in the situation with regard to wanting to give your own kids more than you got from your own father?
“Aye, yeah, yeah, that’s really important to me because I didn’t have a role model for fatherhood, or rather the one I did have was pretty aberrant. So yeah, it’s always been vital to me to be around my kids so they can realise a father is someone who doesn’t have to be dictatorial or monstrous and that they can have a male presence in their lives that is a force for good and not a force for not so good.”
I was talking to Lexi Alexander, the director of Green Street, a film about football hooligans, and she said that when she was in a gang a lot of the young men in it were fatherless or didn’t have much of a bond with the fathers. You were in a gang in Glasgow -- albeit not a football firm -- and I wonder whether that’s something you recognise.
“Aye. It does get a little bit more complex than that but that’s definitely a place that you come from. There’s no doubt about it. I think once you’re in amongst that grouping it becomes more than about your relationship with your father or any male role model. Most gangs are based on fascistic kind if principles and you become this little fascist unit. You operate, you think, in an anti-authoritarian kind of way, and all you’re doing is fighting with other gangs and it becomes territorial and tribal, whereas in fact all you’re doing is you’re circling the wagons around young men. Most of the guys in the little gang that I was in, most of them came from good homes. They had really good relationships with their father. I was the only one that had a bad one. Most of the gangs in Glasgow in the early 70s were what you would call upper-working class, Labour aristocracy. It’s a complete myth that it was the lower working class, the socially deprived. Most of the gangs were very well dressed, and had the money to get well dressed, they weren’t having to steal to get it, they just were. That was always a tradition within Glasgow gangs: uniform, costume, call it what you will, fashion if you like. Basically, you rallied round one another, and emotionally where the damage really sets in is every form of aberrant behaviour on your part -- knives and guns and whatever it is, weapons of choice – it only serves to feed a growing lust for power. And that’s where the gangs at that time, and they remain so now, if in the right context, they can be a frighteningly dangerous grouping, because you’ve not got much to lose. And yet, technically, you’ve got everything to lose, but you don’t feel that way.”
How did you get out of the gang culture?
“I was in it for one year and they kicked me out. They said I was a bit too crazy and boring, That one hurt much more than the crazy. The crazy I quite liked. The boring bit hurt me to the fucking core. And I used too many big words. They kept saying, ‘You use too many big words. We don’t like you.’ I’d lost he plot completely and I was wanting to start a mini revolution and stuff. I was wanting to firebomb police stations and all kinds of crazy things. So the best thing that ever happened was they said, ‘Nah, you’re just a nutcase. Fuck off.’ And I did. I’d been off school for about a year and I went back, and I was in university at 17. I put my head down and started studying, which is what I should have done anyway. I was just a tourist, I wasn’t a proper gangster. Proper gangsters go to jail. I just got kicked out and went back to my studies. [laughs]”
On a Clear Day, as well as the things we have talked about is also about unemployment, and I believe you have strong memories of its effects on your generation in Scotland.
“Oh shit, yeah. It was devastating. The reason why there will be parties in this country when Thatcher pops her clogs is the rape of our country was apocalyptic. Everywhere you went it was just places shutting down, and guys on the brew. Guys I met when I was shooting Orphans, we did a graveyard in the scene where I used hang around in, and I met some lads that were in the gangs and I met them in the pub, at that time I was 37, so they were obviously the same age, and half of them had never worked. Never. And two of them, I know for a fact, have now died; one through suicide, one through a drugs overdose. So it was apocalyptic. You can’t stress enough how much that devastated us. We’re still recovering from it in Scotland. We still have a chronic underclass in our country, which is scandalous considering how well the upper-middle classes are doing under this present regime. And you see the devastation in the streets now which wasn’t there in the early 80s because the drugs weren’t so readily available. You walk around the streets of Glasgow now and we’ve got junkies everywhere. We’ve young men and women who, through no fault of their, took a fucking substance, decided they liked to be out of their skulls with it, and now their lives are just fucking in ruins. That’s the worst legacy of the Thatcher years is that we’ve got a whole generation of kids that are now fucked.”
In the film as well there is the added humiliation of this shipyard where Navy ships are being built being taken over by a foreign firm. It’s timely given that MG was taken over recently by Nanjing.
“Absolutely. And as we all know with MG Rover there is going to be, as they put it, streamlining, which means they’re going to put guys out of work. The fact that we have a so-called Labour government that’s willing to accept . . . you should never accept less than full employment, you know? Both economically and morally their obligation is to try and keep everybody in work so that people can have some dignity to their lives. Something that’s touched upon in the film, and it’s very prevalent in society now, is they still expect the working class to just accept their lot. You know, ‘You’re unemployed, now just disappear. Fuck off.’ And obviously people don’t.”
Another theme that I thought made it timely was the one of communication, because it’s not just within families in the film but between communities, too. There the idea of bringing someone into the community, in this case a Chinese immigrant, rather than pushing them onto the margins and making them feel alienated and unwelcome.
“Yeah, sure. Exactly. It’s so ironic that now I think you would genuinely have a case to suggest that this wee film is actually subversive, because it actually suggests that people can help one another as a group. There’s not a serial killer or paedophile or rapist or nymphomaniac amongst them; they’re just people trying to help one another. I’ll be honest, that’s what I really like about the film. Because from where we’re standing now, where we have a barrage of Hollywood movies telling us don’t trust anybody, don’t even trust your own kids because they’re all possessed, you know, it’s like Jesus Mother of God. The darker the film now, for me, that’s like the most pro-establishment type of film, that’s the ones that are banging the fascist drum, which is like, ‘Do not trust other human beings, they’re not to be trusted. They’re all out to get you.’ And that’s exactly what the establishment want you to believe. They’re desperate for us to believe that because then they can take away any fucking civil liberties that we happen to have left. They can justify shooting an unarmed men eight times in the back of the head.”
You only need to read the headlines of a particular London tabloid to see how they deliberately play on people's fears.
“Exactly. Then you get headlines like the one we had the other day in the Daily Express saying they were all asylum seekers and they were all scroungers. So they managed to put asylum seeker and scrounger in the one sentence, you know? The neo-con philosophy can only succeed if people believe that theyt cannot trust anyone, not even their own family. Nobody is to be trusted. It’s all about looking after number one. It’s all about keep your head down, do what the government tells you, make your money and heaven awaits. It’s a disgusting philosophy, it’s absolutely obscene, and it’s nice that a little film like this can be a little reminder. This isn’t a far away galaxy a long time ago. This is the here and now and we don’t all behave like barbarians. Because none of us would be walking the fucking streets if we really believed what the Hollywood films and some of the TV is telling us at night.”
I assume your politics help to inform your choices as an actor. But would you, and I think I know the answer, do anything that you didn’t entirely feel comfortable with? I ask because I spoke to an actor recently who told me he appeared in Land of the Dead even though he disagreed with its politics.
“Why’d he do it, aye. No, I wouldn’t if I could avoid it. If my kids were starving, to be honest, I would try and work in a bar. I wouldn’t, if I could avoid it, do any film that I found offensive to me or what I believed in. That isn’t to say that every film has to be leftier than left and holier than thou. But if I did find something that I found dodgy, I would say no; because I’ve always said no to films like that. Sometimes people have disagreed and said there’s nothing dodgy there. But if it makes me feel uncomfortable then I don’t do it. That’s why I’m poor. [laughs] You don’t make money that way. I don’t give a fuck.”
With On a Clear Day were you drawn by the idea of a woman director and two women producers making a movie about male relationships?
“I swear to God, I never thought about that. Gaby’s now the fifth woman director I’ve worked with. Most of the people I’ve worked with in the last three years as an actor have been women directors. So no, it never even crossed my mind that these were women looking at what is basically a bloke’s film. And then in Galway Gaby talked about it to the audience, because some one people had said to her why was a woman making what is ostensibly a bloke’s film as they call it. I never think of films as blokes’ films and girls’ films, and chick flicks and all that. I never look at it that way. So when [Gaby] said it I was surprised because it never crossed my mind. Because it’s always good if someone, as Loach did and as Boyle did, guys who are not from Scotland or Glasgow, come in and put their take on things. That’s brilliant. Obviously you want more of that, because then you get to see your city and your country in a different way, which is how you want to see it or it gets boring. To me it was just a nice woman, good director.”
Do you think that women directors sometimes have a different drive because it is still such a male-dominated industry?
“No, I’ve never felt that. I’ve heard one or two directors grate about that. To be honest, I’ve never witnessed. There was only one occasion when a woman director had a bit of trouble with a First AD and she sorted him out, you know? He was being a wee bit lippy, a wee bit fucking chauvenistic, and I was going to sort him out but she stepped in and it was literally sorted on the spot. No, the biggest difference I’ve noticed when it’s a woman director is it’s a calmer set, on the whole. Male directors are a bit more masculine, a bit more macho. The women directors I’ve worked with anyway, the set feels a bit calmer. Except maybe for once a month. [Laughs]”
Have you worked on Scorsese’s new film, The Departed, yet?
“No, I had to pull out. I said I was going to do it and then I realised that I’d been away from my kids and I was to have three weeks off before going over to work with Marty, and that three weeks became two days. So I wrote him a long letter saying I wasn’t emotionally equipped to be hoping back and forth to my wee ones for the next six months, because I went over to do Cargo for that seven weeks, and then when I realised that I was going to be miserable, I just wrote him and apologised and pulled out. He wrote me a sweet letter, saying, ‘I understand. We’ll work together soon. Blah, blah, blah.’ I had to. I couldn’t just go home for two days and then say, ‘Bye, kids, I’m off.’ I just couldn’t live that way.”
Do they sometimes travel with you?
“Yeah, they’d always travelled with me the last couple of years. But they’re now at an age where it’s difficult with schools and all the rest of it. That’s another reason because I did ask them if they wanted to come over and they didn’t fancy it, so I said no.”
It’s the second time you haven’t been able to work with Scorsese, isn’t it?
“I know. I know. Whether that third time ever happens I very much doubt it. But never mind. [Laughs] He’ll just have to learn to work without me.”
What are you directing next?
“Don’t know yet. I’m writing September/October and there’s another couple of scripts that I’m looking at quite seriously. But next year some time I will definitely direct.”
And your next acting job?
“I’m going to do a cameo in a kids film called The Last Legion. I’m doing a week as the King of the Barbarians. It’s a nice wee film. It’s a David Leland script, and I like his stuff, and hopefully that will give me enough money that I can start writing.”
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