Scott Essman,
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focus john boorman

Article by Scott Essman
cahill in camera
"I have one thing in common with Martin Cahill in that I hate anybody who has authority over me," said John Boorman of the title character in his current motion picture, The General. An infamous Irish criminal throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Cahill managed to elude both criminal convictions and direct contact with the media prior to his assassination in 1994. Having lived in Ireland for the last 30 years, Boorman felt a unique connection to Cahill as a public figure. "I was very much aware of this character because he was a legend in his lifetime," Boorman said. "In fact, I first came into contact with him in 1981 when he robbed my house. Amongst the few very valuable items he took were a gold record I had for the music of Deliverance, ‘Dueling Banjos.’ After I was burgled by him, I followed his career quite closely."

Shortly after Cahill was assassinated, crime reporter Paul Williams compiled a paperback book about Cahill's exploits; Boorman soon acquired the rights to the book and planned his film, drawn to Cahill as a representative of Irish sensibilities. "He seemed to be an important figure in Irish life," Boorman observed. "From time to time, these rebel characters erupt from the national unconscious. They are fundamentally against everything, and especially against authority of any kind."

Since Cahill refused to have anything to do with the straight world, Boorman had very little documented information about him. "In the film, when Cahill is accosted on the street by a television unit trying to interview him — a word-for-word reproduction of something that actually happened — it was the only real piece of evidence we had of Cahill," the director said.

After completing his own extensive research, Boorman wrote a screenplay that only strayed from the truth to avoid legal entanglements from several of Cahill's actual victims. "All of the events in the film occurred," Boorman noted of his first screenplay based on the life of an actual person. "The invention was in how characters related to each other. I tried to be as true to Cahill as I could be; otherwise, why do it? I think that when you've got a lot of facts about someone
cahill & wife & sister
like that, eventually you have to rely on the truth of the imagination. It's extraordinary how reliable the imagination can be once it's been fed with so much information."

Cast in the title role, Irish actor Brendan Gleeson [see PERSPECTIVES] had come to prominence as a character actor in many films, including Braveheart, The Butcher Boy, and the TV movie, The Treaty, in which he convincingly metamorphosized into famed IRA leader Michael Collins. A month before shooting began, Gleeson worked diligently to find a characterization of Cahill that satisfied both Boorman and himself. "When we were rehearsing and had shot a couple of tests," Boorman recalled, "I said to Brendan, 'what you're doing is an imitation of this man. It's brilliant, but it has no real depth to it - it's an impersonation.'"
cahill & friends
Gleeson affirmed the evolutionary process of arriving at his interpretation of Cahill. "I had heard all the anecdotes and done all the research during rehearsals," he said. "I could talk like him and look like him — all the various things were there, but it was all external. It was a hard two weeks of rehearsal, but we were both kind of disappointed because there was something missing. John said there was nothing really coming from inside. I realized at that stage that I had to basically go a bit deeper — it was just a question of making sure that we were right in the zone when it happened."

Jon Voight, a close friend of Boorman's since Deliverance in 1972, was cast in the part of fictitious Inspector Ned Kenney when a local actor dropped out due to a scheduling conflict. Kenney represented an amalgam of three police inspectors who pursued Cahill over the years, including Gerry O'Carroll, who advised Boorman on the film. When Voight arrived in Ireland, he based his character completely on O'Carroll. "The rest of the cast was Irish," Boorman noted, "but nobody in Ireland could point a finger at the slightest error in the way that Jon played it. That character and the relationship between him and Brendan Gleeson's Cahill really developed in rehearsals."

Gleeson, in particular, benefited from those early collaborations with Voight. According to Boorman, "Something clicked then for Brendan. Instead of imitating Martin Cahill, Gleeson was suddenly playing a character based on Martin Cahill. From that moment on, all of his instincts were right."
cahill & voight
Chief among Boorman's artistic choices for The General was his decision to film the movie in black-and-white, despite the resulting obstacles. "Black-and-white is much more complex than color," he said. "There's also this resistance to black-and-white. Distributors don't like it because the prints are more expensive and exhibitors think that it puts people off. It's a shame because I love watching black-and-white movies."

Boorman made the film entirely with an Irish crew. He selected cinematographer Seamus Deasy, who had an extensive resumé in black-and-white. Deasy's skeletal camera crew included his son as focus puller, a clapper-loader, camera trainee and grip, in addition to several electricians — termed "sparks" in Ireland. "What I look for in my collaborators are kindred spirits," Boorman explained, "people who have sensitivity and a sense of humor."

For Deasy and his crew, the shoot was made easier due to Boorman's meticulous organization. "John Boorman's preparation was incredible," Deasy said. "I think it is important to have shot lists even if you don't always stick to them. He came in every week with a shot list for that week, yet on some days we would start out with a shot list for the day, do some rehearsals, and change it completely."
dunbar & gleesonBW
After a brief discussion about the shots, Boorman—who chooses all his own lenses and creates his own compositions—would typically walk through the scene with the cast members. "Then we would work out that maybe two of the shots that he had on his shot list could be done as a single shot with a track or with some movement of the camera," Deasy described. "The only thing we talked about quite a lot beforehand was John's decision to do the film in black-and-white. John jokingly said that there were only two people old enough in Ireland to have worked in black-and-white originally, and that was John Boorman and myself."

Though Deasy was a veteran of black-and-white television documentaries [see sidebar], a month before principal photography commenced, he and Boorman experimented with various stocks and lighting concepts before settling on their final look for the film. "We used a laboratory in France and spent time trying to get that fairly contrasty look," the D.P. related. "We didn't use an awful lot of light in terms of kilowatts, but we used quite a lot of direct light, shafts of light, and back light, probably more than people would use today — it was almost like an old black-and-white film."
cahill & wife
Boorman concurred on the difficulty of the process. "You've got to separate the objects by light rather than relying on color to separate them," he noted. "Also, the black-and-white stocks that are available are much more limited than color stocks. They have not as fine grain, and are not as fast. We found that by shooting color and then going on to black-and-white internegative, we got much richer blacks."

The General shockingly opens with Cahill's assassination by the IRA. "To some extent, as Cahill was an unsympathetic character, I wanted to show that he was killed at the beginning of the film to lend him a little more sympathy," Boorman stated. "Cahill's assassination gave The General a tragic mythic dimension. It was like a shadow across the length of the film — you knew, after all the things he was doing, that he was going to die."

Having achieved that, Boorman follows with a striking reverse shot. Proceeding backwards, the action tracks from the point just after Cahill's death inside his car, to the car window’s glass shattering, to the assassin approaching the car. In addition to revealing the killing in amazingly visceral slow-motion, the effect transports the film back into Cahill's childhood where the remaining narrative progresses chronologically. "That sequence was done in the camera — it is not a special effect," declared Deasy. "The actor ran up for the shot, then we reset the camera in reverse and we got him to run up again. The simpler way would have been to have had the film reprinted and run in reverse, but we did it the old-fashioned way."

After morphing the adult Cahill's face onto the face of young Cahill, actor Eamon Owens from The Butcher Boy, a continuing sequence follows young Cahill being chased through his Hollyfield neighborhood, running through familiar alleyways as he escapes the authorities. "It has the exuberance of the character, his defiance, and the relish that he takes in eluding the police," remarked Boorman. "It was all in that one sequence, setting up his character for later. You also see that he's stealing food for his family."
gleeson in van
One of the most dynamic sequences in the film, the chase was achieved with noticeable lack of flashy techniques. "We shot it with available light and did it very simply," said Deasy. "We did it with steadicam and I shot some of it myself, hand-held sitting on a glorified wheel chair where we ran after him." The crew waited for the sun to position itself for the memorable sequence, shot at 50 frames-per-second. "You couldn't light it," continued Deasy, "since it was such a narrow alley."
voight & police

Except for the adult Cahill's flat and a few other interior sets, The General was shot entirely on location in and around Dublin, including interiors of actual houses. "We built our sets in a shed at the back of the production office," Deasy described. "It was right in the center of town and had a corrugated iron roof that wasn't sound-proofed. We kind of were lucky that we didn't have storms during shooting. Derek Wallace designed ceilings for most of the sets, so we were able to dampen the sound."

Among Cahill's numerous heists, none of which resulted in a criminal conviction, Boorman chose to portray the famous 1983 robbery of O'Connor's, a prominent jewelry establishment in Dublin. Before stealing £2 million in valuables, Cahill and his gang staked out O'Connor's for over six months — earning Cahill the nickname, "the General." Another outstanding re-creation involved Cahill's 1986 theft of eleven paintings from the Alfred Beit collection, at the time, the second biggest art robbery in history. Boorman's staging of the nighttime event arguably provides the film with its major set piece, both thematically and stylistically. "We actually shot it at night," Deasy conveyed, "so we could have some source light coming through windows and the alarm lights that came on after he broke the window. The film was extraordinary in that we didn't ever have to re-shoot anything."

Undertaking the life story of as notorious a person as Cahill was not without its share of bizarre situations. During location filming, one of Cahill's sisters appeared on set, very curious to see what Brendan Gleeson looked like in the role. "She spent an hour talking to Brendan," Boorman recollected. He came out and was absolutely astonished. He said, 'John, many of the things that you thought you invented in the script turned out to be true.'"
cahii in basement
Trying to remain truthful to Cahill's life provided Boorman with unique dramatic circumstances. For example, Boorman reveals Cahill’s intimate relationship with his wife's sister, a situation consentual to his wife. "A film about a real person has certain limitations because you're stuck with the facts," he commented. "On the other hand, it's also liberating because, for instance, the fact that his relationship with these two women happened gave me the confidence to do it. If I had been making a fiction film, I think I would have probably felt the need to build up to it more, to add more scenes between them where they gradually get to that point. Because I had the confirmation that it actually occurred, I felt confident about just presenting it."

As with most of his projects, Boorman chose to shoot very little film on The General, keeping up to date by watching dailies on a Steenbeck each evening after filming wrapped. "I hate shooting more than five days," he revealed, "and I spend one day a week in the cutting room. [Editor] Ron Davis and I sit down and we cut everything from the week. We assemble it, and that way I can see if there's anything else needed. A week or ten days after I finish shooting, I have the picture assembled. Then Ron and I sit down, go through it, and fine cut it."
In the course of making the film, Boorman claimed that he discovered a great compassion for Cahill once he learned to understand him. "You're appalled by Cahill but attracted to him in a certain way," Boorman noted. "At the end of the day, you've seen a tragedy. You feel that he was brilliant, clever, funny and took the wrong course because of the circumstances of his childhood."
cahill in court
Ultimately, Boorman's presentation of Cahill in the climactic scenes likely rests in the director's self-proclaimed interest in how his characters respond to extreme pressure. "Here was a man who was under enormous pressure from the police and was totally isolated towards the end," he said. "It's to do with extremities. That I found fascinating."



Extra Special Thanks to Hiromi Kawanishi and Sara Finmann at Magic Lantern, New York.
Photos Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics © 1998

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