彼得·莫兰（卫报）

Peter Mullan
Speaking at the National Film Theatre during the London film festival, Peter Mullan discussed the present and future of Scottish cinema, and explained why as an actor he would never second-guess his director. Here's a full transcript


o Simon Hattenston
o guardian.co.uk,
o Tuesday November 04 2003

Simon Hattenstone: It's a real pleasure for me and for the Guardian to introduce Peter Mullan. I just think that his achievements in the past few years have been fantastic. And I think he's a role model for all of us - he won the award for best newcomer to film at the age of 40 which gives hope to the rest of us. He really made his name with Ken Loach's My Name is Joe where his performance was just astonishing, and he's gone on to do brilliant work for Michael Winterbottom in The Claim, for Mike Figgis in Miss Julie and with Kevin Spacey in Ordinary Decent Criminal. But even more amazingly, he's managed to conduct a parallel career as a director - he started years ago with short films and it culminated in his debut film, Orphans, a fantastic mix of the kitchen sink drama and the surreal, the bleakest view with the funniest movie, which went on to win masses of awards. With his second film, he won best film at the Venice film festival, which was not only a great movie but also caused a huge stink. So I'd very much like to welcome Peter Mullan.

Peter's in a new film screening during the festival, directed by Emily Young, called Kiss of Life - it's an interesting film and quite an unusual piece for Peter to be involved in. It's quite spooky, isn't it? Peter plays a Unicef aid worker working in Croatia and Bosnia who's desperately trying to get home. He's got an intense relationship with his wife, but he's in Croatia trying to do good, but there's a feeling that he's also desperately trying to avoid his problems at home. What drew you to the project?

Peter Mullan: Precisely that. I met Emily and if a script's any good and if you're lucky enough to meet a director that you like, then I'll do the film. Generally I'll do a film if the director's inspiring, which Emily was. But essential to doing it was the fact that it was a brave, poetic kind of piece. I loved the idea that at the centre of it was a guy who's ostensibly doing a good thing but he's got an ulterior motive for being where he was. I remember meeting this bunch of guys who'd fought in the Spanish civil war and a lot of them, once you met them and got over the awe of their bravery for going over to fight fascism, you suddenly realised that all they were doing was fucking off to get away from the wife. That was a big shock for me, that they weren't just these noble creatures but that they just wanted to get away from the dullness of domesticity. So that shed a whole new light on what their wives had to go through and they came back as heroes but the wives only saw them as guys who fancied an adventure. That's what I loved about the story, and I told Emily that I loved that complex aspect to when people are perceived to be doing good things. What if there is a motive there that is not quite as noble? Does that cancel out the good that you're trying to do? Does it feed in to a more honest approach to one's self? And I loved the fact that Emily grasped that and that this was an integral part of the film. It was genuinely, movingly human. It wasn't trying to turn anybody into a hero, there was something much deeper there.

SH: In a way, I thought that the film was about not communicating. But the love between the two main characters is so intense, that there's so much that is left unspoken but in fact needs to be spoken but never gets spoken. This clip that we're going to show here is the only real bit of communication in the film - Peter's character has hitched a ride in a van and he gets into a conversation with an old woman in the van. Neither speaks the other's language and neither has a clue about the other's history, but when she takes out a picture, they realise that they can communicate perfectly well about what's happened in their lives. And he realises that she's lost her whole family.

[Runs clip]

SH: For me, that scene reminds me of what Ken Loach has said about your style, of being rather than acting. What does that sequence mean to you?

PM: For me, I find it really funny. This asshole says that he's there to help, but he's patently useless. He can't speak the language, he can't drive, and that's where I could relate to the guy, because I would be absolutely useless in a situation like that. And in trying to communicate with someone whose loss is so deep. For me, that scene is about a person with the best of intentions but he's completely ill-equipped. I phoned up after Ceaucescu, that particular despotic animal, was got rid of - there was a few of us who tried to get into Romania to do something to help. So I phoned up an aid agency - it started off really well but then they went into this list: Can you do first aid? Are you a doctor, a plumber, a joiner? By the time he finished, I was just this useless asshole who could do a bit of drama, which is what they really needed at the time. Like I could go over and do some drama classes, do some trust exercises and by the time I'd finished they'd be able to touch the floor with the palms of their hands. And I realised how ill-equipped to do something - perhaps it doesn't make someone a useless human being, but it does make you realise that if you're going to go on a quest you need to think about who you're doing it for. And for me, what that guy reveals in that particular scene is like that's not why you're there. He's there because he's an emotional coward, he's running away from things he can't face. And what that old woman's going through is infinitesimally worse than what he's going through. And yet, he can't face it - she's faced it, she has no choice, but he can't. That, to me, is what that scene is about.

SH: So did you think he was a bit of a plonker there?

PM: Oh, completely. He's an asshole, but a nice enough asshole.

SH: But watching it, I don't feel that he's completely useless.

PM: You don't set out to think that someone's an ass but if you were to see the world through their eyes, then you have to realise that they're by no stretch of the imagination perfect human beings. Part of the reason why so many actors lose the plot when they go over to America is that they become part of an industry, so that's why they don't want to play weak, bad or vulnerable guys - because that's not sellable, that diminishes their profit margin. It ceases to be an honest exploration of what a human being's about and instead becomes about what's an acceptable way to look and behave under the auspices of a film. So I would never consciously portray someone as an asshole but you do have to keep that always in the back of your mind. I was brought up on Brecht, and the whole Brechtian principle of at least being aware of a character's ulterior motive and where the character stands in relation to the wider context. Which is what the film is trying to achieve. That scene could have been played completely differently - you could really go for the heartstrings, that guy could have been bleeding for that old woman and possibly convince the audience that he is a good guy and is really there to help. But that would subvert everything that Emily was trying to do with the film.

SH: I'm going to change the subject totally here. I've always wondered how the hell did you get into acting and directing? You lived in a huge house in Glasgow's Moss Park Boulevard, but you were also a member of a knife-carrying street gang. And all the stories about you - it sounds like a pretty tough background, horrible family life, not the kind of life which would be the most obvious route to acting. And there was a story that the first time you tried to kill your dad was when you were 14.

PM: That's true. There's a big thing when people do profiles and stuff. Like when they give you a big gong at Cannes - my family taped the awards ceremony - and this guy jumped up in a kilt and got his prize from Scorsese. That was how I remembered it. When I got back home, BBC Scotland had done this unbelievable voiceover - this wee Highland guy saying [puts on camp Highland accent] Peter Mullan, a member of one of Glasgow's most notorious gangs and once arrested for attempted murder, here he is rubbing shoulders with the stars. This, I swear to God, I did not recognise. This voiceover had turned the man in the kilt into something else. I went to university when I was 17, but I spent one year in the gangs when I was 14. I worked with murderers for a long time after I left university - one thing you realise about the gangs and the criminals is that it's acting by another means. If you go into a bank or a shop and you want them to believe that you're going to shoot them, that's an acting exercise. If you want to turn to someone else who's as tooled up as you are and persuade them to put their knife down because you'll use your knife, that's an acting exercise. Nine out of 10 delinquents are frustrated actors. That's of no use when someone says to you when you're at a Cashline "Give me your money or I'll cut your throat" - you can't say "I know you're just a frustrated actor" and expect them to do their audition piece while you run away. But once you're in the movie business, that's where you meet the real criminals. You meet the guys who no law will ever prosecute - these are the studio bosses, the guys who swan around town with £80m yachts.

There was a guy who had his picture taken with me at Cannes, and he said "Come around to my yacht for lunch" and I said "Which one's yours?" and he pointed to this thing which the size of Wembley Stadium and then I said "So what is it you do?" and he said "Pornographer". There he was, him with his £80m yacht and he's got his arm around me, social realist, My Name is Joe. And part of the reason why movie bosses are so obsessed with crime movies is because they know that world and the criminals. And that's what they are - they would not hesitate to act illegally to achieve profit and gain. What I knew when I was 14 was just a preamble for what was to happen when I met various movie studio bosses. So in answer to the question of how my biography produced me, with anybody's biography, is that if you take selected parts of it, you can easily paint a picture. Well, sometimes it can be useful - some directors can be terrified of you because they think you're some crazed mass-murderer. It has its uses. The fact that you know you're not is neither here nor there.

SH: But you do tell those directors that you got chucked out of the gang because you used too posh language.

PM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm completely honest about stuff like that. And the funny thing is, directors think they're paying you a compliment when they things like "Peter's tough". But look at me, what is this tough thing? But because they're namby-pamby old Etonians, they think some working class guy with a Glaswegian accent has to be some kind of crazed, knife-wielding maniac. Which I only do once a month and only on a Sunday.

SH: So how did you get into acting?

PM: I did a pantomime at school and I was trying to get away from the gang, and there was an audition for Buttons. And there were these amazing looking majorettes - two birds, one stone - these girls and the gang thinking that I was a poof, so I auditioned and got a part and loved it. I worked on the stage and it was like home, and I felt I belonged. Most actors I know come from a screwed up background, so it makes sense that if you can walk on to a space and recreate your reality, then that's the place that will become very dear. And what I love about actors and the bohemian scene, for all that a lot of us are wankers, there's a genuine classlessness and there's no discrimination on the basis of sexuality, colour, religion. We're by no means the perfect species but on the whole we're a pretty nice bunch of people to be around - I mean there are some actors I could name you wouldn't want to be around for too long but for the most part, it's a nice atmosphere to be part of. I think nine out of 10 actors are in it for the social life - you feel that you can say just about anything and people will react to it.

SH: It's interesting what you're saying about how you were portrayed at that Cannes ceremony, because I've always thought that your background was a lot more complicated in that you lived in this huge, huge house, but there was no electricity, no phones. And there's always this presumption that because you were in a gang that you didn't care about school, but really you were a massive swot; you loved learning.

PM: Absolutely, I was in university when I was 17. In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don't know. One of the first auditions I did after leaving university, this guy at the Traverse Theatre asked me to audition and this guy said "I want you to frighten me". I was 22, 23 and this guy gave me a challenge, so I did as he asked and he called security. I was really upset, I said "You asked me to terrify you" and he went "You crossed the line, you really scared me" and they threw me out.

SH: What did you do?

PM: I swear to God, it was from a piece by Tom McGrath and it's from a piece, The Hard Man, about a famous Glasgow criminal who had been reformed in prison. So I basically just talked this guy until he was up against the wall and I was going to tear his face off with words - I didn't physically touch the guy. So he had me thrown out and this really angered me and I didn't seek acting work for a year. Mainly because I was teaching community theatre at the time but I was thinking "I don't want to go to your precious theatres because you can't handle being frightened". And theatre still is like that. It makes me laugh when you see some show and you read the reviews and you think "That's not the performance I watched". Half the time it's about where the critic is coming from, their particular class and culture, which may be a completely different idea from what it constitutes to you.

SH: Community theatre has been incredibly important to you. One of the things I like about your work is the fact you use characters, like in Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters, who would never be included in mainstream pictures. Like something as basic as a girl in a wheelchair, like you used in Orphans - not in the way like Tom Cruise in that Academy Award-winning way but in a completely natural way. And also in The Magdalene Sisters, you've got that girl who's a bit challenged. How important to you was working in community theatre?

PM: Community theatre's been the main influence in terms of directing, and in fact acting. Because there the main thing is the process, the product is unimportant. In the mid-80s, we introduced in Glasgow what we call the productive process - where you try to put something on but the process was paramount, so you appreciate that what's important is not whether someone gives a stunning performance but is so when a kid who's never spoken publicly has the guts to stand on stage and say a couple of lines. When we started we never planned to put anything on stage, but particularly in a working class environment, that was slightly insulting. They wanted to put on something that they could show their mums, dads, friends, audience. And that realisation meant that the workshops that we did, the dramatists became part-nurse, doctor, uncle, social workers.

I worked for a year in Gowan and I was working mostly with teenagers, and most of them had to babysit. So in the course of rehearsal, there'd be a line of prams in the back, so that in the middle of a scene, they'd have to go and feed big sister's newborn baby. So within that context, Brecht made total sense. This is what acting is - it's not about having the perfect environment, it's about having a duality of life. So with these kids - she has to go feed the baby and then she's got to come back and be charming and beautiful - and these teenagers would do that instantly, they were naturally gifted. And then when you move years later, and perhaps this is why Ken [Loach] likes to work so much in Scotland, because lots of Scots actors had to learn that, that you can be unemployed a lot of the time, that you can be treated like shit a lot of the time, and then suddenly you have to turn it on. And Ken's ideal... as an example, here's a scene where one character has to say "Will you marry me" and the other one has to express uncertainty. In a normal situation, both actors would rehearse the scene, look in the mirror and find out what's the best way to get that, so he would say "Will you marry me" and she would come back with "I don't know".

But you go on a Ken Loach set, and this is where his genius lies, there's a waiter and he's not even in the script. In a Hollywood situation, that waiter would have been told "After she says 'I don't know', that'll be your cue to come". On a Ken Loach set, just as the asshole is about to say "Will you marry me", that waiter will come in and say "Cappuccino, sir?" and he would go "Excuse me?" and straight there, would be a real scene, a real moment. In Hollywood, that waiter would be sacked for getting in the way, but Ken realises that to make the actors really perform is to have them not know from one take to the next what this waiter is going to do. And before you know it, the actors would really have to act for a change, instead of just exposing what was the emotional masturbation of the night before. They have to actually be in the moment, to discover what uncertainty is, that you can't rehearse moments in life so why rehearse them on the set. It's not about just achieving naturalism, it's a way of making actors remember what it's all about, which is about the interaction of two or more human beings and that anything can happen, and not about your scene or your close-up, or whether you look good, or your teeth look good.

SH: Can you tell us how that works in relation to the scene we're going to see here, which is from Orphans, which is about how four children react to their mother's death in the space of 24 hours and how they implode. This scene is where the oldest son wants to spend the night in the church with the coffin and his sister, who's in a wheelchair, just wants to go home.

[Runs clip]

SH: One of the reasons why I chose that scene is because I just think it's a classic Peter - absolutely desperate moment but so bloody funny at the same time. Another, slightly cruel reason, is that I read somewhere that Peter can't watch that scene? Is that true that you find that scene painful to watch?

PM: What, the smashing of the Virgin Mary?

SH: It's sacrilege. Tell us about it.

PM: It scares the life out of me. Come the day when we were shooting it I thought a bolt of lightning was going to head directly my way. The interesting thing about that was that Rosemarie Stevenson, who played Sheila, had never acted before. And she's got cerebral palsy. So through community theatre I'd auditioned her to do all the heavy duty, emotional stuff. What I hadn't planned on was she just laughed, all through the film. She cost us a fortune. I've never had to cut around someone the way we had to with her - she was loving it so much and that was my mistake. There's a lovely scene before that where Gary Lewis's character asked the priest if he could stay in the church all night, and we couldn't use it because she just giggled her silly head off. So I spoke to her mother; "She laughs at inappropriate moments" and she told me "You're too soft on her and she knows it. You've got to shout at her because that's how we got her to walk, shouting at her for every minute of everyday for 10 years". That put me in a real dilemma. One can argue about their methodology but the fact was that she was now transferring that experience into her acting, and there was no way that I was going to shout at any actor of mine, so she cost us a fortune.

SH: Could you have gotten that performance if you'd had Tom Cruise in that role, even though he's the wrong sex?

PM: Cruise, I liked him in the vampire thing. But with someone of that stature, they would bring an agenda, and that is "Love me". With virtually any American actor, with the exception right now of Johnny Depp or Sean Penn, I don't know any American actor could do what Gary Lewis does in that scene, ie play with someone with cerebral palsy and have you not like them. Like in that scene, he's really being cruel to her.

SH: Did you ask him to be that cruel?

PM: I asked him to be as cruel as he thought was appropriate. I didn't want him having an eye on the audience going "I'm only being cruel to be kind here".

SH: How planned was that scene - did they both know what they were going to go through?

PM: Towards the end, there's scene where he taunts her "Go on, speak. Yes or no. Speak", especially in the case of a person with cerebral palsy, where it takes time and every word induces a muscular spasm, that's really cruel and for Gary, that was rightly upsetting. But for the character, that was absolutely important because he's playing her brother and siblings are crueller to each other than to their friends, like offspring can be cruel to their parents. But with so many damn script editors, you write anything like this, they go "Oh, he's a bad brother, or bad mother, or bad father". But that's human relationships, that's what happens. And what's gone wrong with a lot of films is that they don't allow that to happen, they censor it at the script stage.

SH: Orphans is non-autobiographical, but in a way it is, isn't it? Can you tell us how it is? Your mum died around that time, didn't she, and also a character who is struggling between college and the gangs, isn't there.

PM: In a way, the four main characters in Orphans are the way I felt after my mother died divided into four. So each of those characters represent elements of how I felt, but what happens to them in the course of the film is completely fictional. The only thing in Orphans that really happened is the opening. My eldest brother, as we stood around our mother's coffin - we had no ceremony to fall back on even though we're working class Irish Catholic and we didn't know what to do. Well, he had a pair of scissors and he made each of us clip off a bit of hair - and I thought, "Wow, this must be some ancient, Celtic thing". And when it came to him, he took this big, fuck-off chunk from his head - it was like the opposite of De Niro in Taxi Driver - this big lump of alopecia and he threw it at her coffin. And it was so irreverent but we were all thinking "This must be something from Donegal". So I asked him about it later if it was some family tradition, and he said "Nope, I just made it up. I thought it sounded really good". We were thinking that we'd connected with death and life and the universe and this wanker had just made it up. God forbid that he had found a pair of garden shears - he might have told us to cut our ears off, and to be honest I'd probably have done it.

SH: Well it could have been, couldn't it, because it was all so barking...

PM: Oh yeah, all of it. The thing I wanted to do with Orphans was to counteract all those God-awful films where everybody sits around, very civilised and the revelations burst forth as they look at the photographs. For me the real grief that I felt would cover the whole gamut of real compassion, real anger, real self-pity and a real sense of duty - it covered the whole range and often times all those emotions clashed. And for me, and I'm not suggesting that this is everybody's idea of grief, it was a means to get through it and get by. Because I loathe that sentimental bollocks that by simply crying a great deal you'll somehow find that place of peace. For me it doesn't work that way and I've seen no evidence in other people that it works that way. Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding. And also, politically, Orphans was about the death of socialism in Scotland as we understood it. And it was trying to suggest, to those of us on the left, that we have to re-examine what we mean when we say socialism. That it's not a badge or about being a member of a trade union. We have to completely re-examine what it is that we actually believed in. It's like these children in Orphans - where all their beliefs were wrapped up in their mother and so had lost everything. And that's why the mother is deliberately never really explained in the film, she just is someone they believe in and they cease to believe in her.

SH: When Orphans was made - I was talking earlier about how you'd been named best newcomer in British cinema at age 40 - were you surprised to be given a reasonable budget to make a film.

PM: No, because we'd made three short films before we did Orphans. And two of them we'd made for no money at all. And then we got what they call a Tartan Short, and they gave us £42,000. And we shot it in my back close, we lived in a slum at the time. We could have shot it for £2,000 and I was going to raise the money myself and finance it. And at that time, this was 10 years ago, £2,000 was a lot of money. And the BBC kind of poached it. So because Fridge had won all these international awards, Channel 4 were quite anxious to put money in the next person that they thought was going to make them hip and cool and all that kind of stuff. So it was incredibly easy to get the money for Orphans. Getting the money for Magdalene was much more difficult.

SH: But Orphans didn't get very good distribution - I know that's a non-story in British film, but even by British standards, it got pretty bad distribution.

PM: Yeah, Channel 4 refused to distribute.

SH: But was that because they felt you'd broken some cinematic rules or why?

PM: No, no. They just felt it wasn't Trainspotting. They wanted a film that was going to make them rich, something hip and cool, and I was determined not to go down that road. Orphans was much bigger in Italy and France than it ever was in England - it was pretty big in Scotland and Ireland, I must confess. And in England, at that time, they had a real bee in their bonnet about the incomprehensible Glaswegian accent. By that time, I'd already been subtitled in America -they subtitled My Name is Joe and Orphans. But the films that they did distribute that year, we had bigger audiences than the three other films that they decide to support. But they didn't have a clue how to do Orphans, and when it picked up all these awards, they got embarrassed and wanted it back. They sent me this apologetic letter and asked to distribute it, and I wrote back saying I'd rather burn in hell.

Simon Hattenstone: I want to show a clip now from My Name is Joe, which is the film that really made your name. I was speaking to Ken Loach and got him to choose it, and he chose this section, where you confess that you'd done a drug run to save this boy's life. I asked Ken why he chose this bit and he in his diffident way said "It's got everything".

SH: Watching that clip, and I've seen the film a few times before - it still kicks me in the stomach. What's it like for you to watch that intensity of that performance? And what did you draw on for the character of Joe? For those of you who haven't seen the film, Joe is an alcoholic who's trying to put his life back together and has just fallen in love with a social worker.

Peter Mullan: Well when you're doing it, you're working with Loach, one of the genuine masters of cinema. And it's hard because you just want to burst out laughing all the time. It's the best fun you'll ever have on a set - he lets you out of the kennel and takes off the leash, there are no marks, no need to satisfy the demands of some stupid, out-there producer. It's a guy who just wants you to do your best, and that's an amazing feeling. And he's so skilful at it - it would literally take seven lectures like this to explain how unique Ken's working method is, and how complex they are, because everything he does is off-camera to make what happens on-camera feel very natural. So you can improvise one scene and then you can work with the script in the next scene. I don't watch myself - most actors don't watch themselves - because there's nothing to watch. I think Gabriel Byrne was asked "What do you see when you watch yourself on screen?" and he said "Big ears". And I thought that's dead honest - you see big ears, nasal hair, bad teeth. But when you're inside the situation, the situation is such good fun. I don't know any actor who has worked with Ken who doesn't want to work with him again. You feel you can try anything. Sometimes he'll pull you back - it's not like he just accommodates you. Like in the penultimate scene in My Name is Joe, he goes back to drinking again and Liam comes in and in the script he's just got two words "Fuck off". But when we came to do the scene - and with Ken, you don't rehearse until you start shooting - and I wanted to take him to another horrible, dark place. And Ken came over and - it's one of those moments where I thought "Is he going to tell me that's too much?" - but of course, he came over and said to go for it. So we improvised some more and rehearsed it about 20 times and made it go darker, funnier. But that's the great thing about Ken, he's allowed you to go further into that place and explore it.

SH: That's really interesting, the idea that a Ken Loach set is really good fun, because it's really counter to the image of it, isn't it? It just looks like the most intense place in the world, where you come out and have your breakdown.

PM: Absolutely. The first time I saw that film was at Cannes and I felt really bad afterwards because so many people came up and said how depressing it was but we'd had a ball. Honest to God. Working with people like Gary Lewis, David McKay, Louise Goodall and these are all great actors and we were all let out of the locker. That believe it or not, is not that common. In Scotland, we're a colony in more ways than one. So when directors come up to work, there's a very particular way they want Scotland to look like and to behave like. For me the two most important directors in Scotland in the past 15 years have both been English - Danny Boyle and Ken Loach. They were the ones who let us out of the dock.

SH: But they had Scottish writers though.

PM: That's true, but they were the ones, as directors, who cast the films and let actors have a go which we wouldn't have ordinarily been given the chance.

SH: Is it true you drew on your dad for the character?

PM: Just for the final dark scene.

SH: Could you explain that - I've read that before but I've never understood that.

PM: There are various types of alcoholic and he was the dark alcoholic, who after innumerable cans of Carlsberg, would reach that plane where he could hurt you badly just purely by language. Just because he's your dad and someone you want to love and respect. And he would call you in one by one and tell you how utterly useless you were, and to a 10-year-old that's quite severe and very scary.

SH: So he would do that, rather than physically hurt you?

PM: Ah, no. He was never physical with us - but we became right physical with him as soon as we were old enough, because he was physical with my mum. But prior to that, he was a master of the dark arts - now, I can see he was just a drunk. But as a child growing up with that, it was scary and depressing that this was a world that me and my seven brothers and sisters had found ourselves in, where the darkness was orchestrated by him. My only excuse for his behaviour is that he came out of the war in 1947 from India, he was from Argyle, a southern Highlander, from a particularly physical military unit. And they didn't get any counselling. So most guys of my generation - not only in Scotland, I'm sure they are all over the place - you didn't get to know your father. Because most of these guys were in the military and they were angry, and by the time the 60s arrived they'd lost their youth and they were breeding a bunch of spoilt brats. And I'm surprised there have not been more studies conducted into this - it's a generation that nobody looks at with insight - how could fathers behave so badly to their sons. I was by no means unique, everybody I knew was badly treated by their fathers. The only uncommon thing was that mine was not more physical.

SH: Can I tell the audience about your pathetic attempt to kill him?

PM: It was totally pathetic. I decided in a moment of melodrama that I would put rat poison in his tea and when I took it through and asked him to drink it, he just laughed. Because he knew that I never made him tea. If I'd been in his shoes, the idea of my child trying to kill me would hurt, but in his case, he found that amusing.

SH: And when he did die - you were at university - the first thing you did was kiss him?

PM: Yeah, and that moment shows up in Magdalene Sisters. He died on the couch, he had cancer, and literally the sun came in through the windows. I shouted up to my mother that he was dead, kissed him and then I left, that's it.

SH: Magdalene Sisters, now that's a nice, light story, isn't it. For those of you who don't know, it's about the Magdalene laundrettes in Ireland which was where they sent girls who'd either got themselves in trouble or, as in the case of one character in the film, just gave a look to a boy. They were thrown into these extensions of wash-houses and their basic penance was to clean people's washing for the rest of their lives. The clip I've chosen - I thought we should have a bit of nudity tonight, and I'm not going to talk about the sequence, but I just think this scene is typical of Peter, where the grotesque is made funny.

[Runs clip]

SH: The nun really couldn't understand why they didn't see it as a game, did she?

PM: No, they really didn't get it. The nuns, if you gave them lie-detector tests and asked them "Did you do anything that you feel was in any way cruel and inhumane to these young girls?", they would pass. They saw that kind of thing as entertainment, there really wasn't a problem.

SH: What drew you to the story of the Magdalene laundrettes?

PM: A lot of things. I saw a documentary about it and what angered me was that there was no conclusion - none of the girls ever received an apology, there was no compensation. And my mother used to work in a place called Nazareth House, similar to those places in Ireland. And when I was at school, these little guys would show me their scars and tell me that the nuns did it. I refused to believe them because the nuns I knew, they never did that. So we figured it must be their fathers who would do that to them. So when I watched the documentary, I couldn't believe it, how everyone had become complicit in that, that the sisterhood could do such things to young women. So it was the massive injustice of it. And also the fact that it was an incredibly peculiar kind of prison, because you were complicit in your own oppression, you colluded with your oppressors. I could relate to that, I remember that feeling, as a child, that even if you could physically overpower someone, you would never do it because they had control over your immortal soul.

When I showed the film in New York for the first time, everyone asked about litigation. And this idea that these girls could have gone to a lawyer, the idea that a secular institution in Ireland could have somehow been able to correct what was going on - the truth is that no one would have gone to a lawyer because the priests, the nuns, they have your immortal soul. And for a lot of New Yorkers, they couldn't grasp this. In the film, there were 57 girls - in some other places, there were hundreds of girls - against a handful of nuns, why didn't they just overpower the nuns and escape? But escape where? They have your soul - and they have it forever. And that's one of the most monstrous things the church ever did, that they abused that to such a degree that these days people quite rightly have reclaimed their souls and gone elsewhere, because the Church protected the abusers. And it's very, very difficult for deeply devout Catholics - most of my family's Catholic, I'm not, but I respect their beliefs - it's still very hard to cut that off, harder still even for a secular Catholic. I'm Marxist, spiritually agnostic, but it's still difficult to cut that link because it's so tied in with the romance, the sheer metaphysical joy of the iconography and all that was beautiful about the Church. When you realise what was happening in Ireland, it turns something that you held really high into something monstrous. And I felt compelled to try and expose it through fiction.

SH: Now the Church wasn't very happy with this award-winning film, were they?

PM: Not a postcard, no phone calls, nothing.

SH: But they actually called you a liar, didn't they? They took out big adverts at one point saying "Peter Mullan is a heretic and a liar".

PM: Yeah, yeah. But they've changed their tune. By the time we opened in Ireland after Italy - where they sent out priests with video cameras and they filmed the audience going in to see the film in Venice, and the priests literally said "We know who you are. Do you know that you're committing a sin by watching this film?" So you've got the Inquisition by DVD. And it was really stupid because it made all the papers and got us all this publicity. Then we got to Ireland, and we were waiting for the big backlash, and they said absolutely nothing. And the film was huge in Ireland, one in four of the people of Ireland has seen this film... I think it's one in three now. By the time we arrived in Scotland early this year, the Church took out full-page adverts recommending that every Catholic in the country go and see this film. So in the space of six months, they've completely turned around. And by the time I got to America, the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas sent me this huge apology to be handed on to the survivors of the Magdalenes. Now the Church has not survived 2,000 years without being clever, so they're probably thinking "We'll let him win this battle, but he won't win the war".

SH: Maybe they'll try to get you to be official film-maker to the Catholic church.

PM: Could be, could be. That would be a post. But donning my cynical hat, I think they're co-opting the film. When I don my more optimistic hat, they're realising that they at the very least own up to what happened and hopefully - and I got a phone call a few weeks ago where a lady just got compensation, after 37 years.

SH: How much compensation did she get?

PM: She's not allowed to tell me. And she was really adamant, and I was very surprised because she's a really bolshie lady. I tried the whole bit but she wouldn't tell me because she'd signed a contract. It was a lot of money, but the Church of Ireland made sure that she can never reveal how much.

SH: Do people get in touch with you saying "Thanks for making this film - a, you told my story, and b, you're helping me get some compensation"?

PM: Yeah, I get letters and stuff.

SH: And the last Magdalene was only closed in 1996?

PM: Yeah, that's right. And I get a lot of letters from Magdalene survivors who all tell me the same thing: "Thanks for making the film, it was useful, and the reality was 10 times worse". Which is fine by me, because the film was supposed to be a de-exaggeration of what happened. I was really anxious that the Church couldn't get off the hook by saying "This is an exaggeration and here are the people to say so". I wanted, if anything, to make sure that the opposite happened. And indeed is what happened - everybody says "I was there and if you think that was bleak, the reality was a thousand times worse". And for me, I'm happy with that, because it makes it politically more potent.

SH: Peter, I'm going to shut up now and we'll take questions from the audience.

[Silence]

SH: Have we asked them all?

PM: Ha ha. We did a retrospective in an art school in Glasgow of three short films that I'd made and the organiser stood up and introduced me "This is Peter Mullan, the man who made these three short films. Have we any questions?" And some guy in the front row put up his hand and asked "What was it like working with Mel Gibson on Braveheart?" So I just laughed and I told him all the anecdotes. And the organiser stood there, steam coming out of his fucking ears, then he stepped forward and said "Can I just remind everybody, we've just watched Peter's three short films, so please can I remind you for future questions, these were Peter's three short films. Are there any more questions about Peter's three short films?" This little hand in the back went up, "What was it like working with Danny Boyle in Trainspotting?"

Q1: Was the move from short films to feature films daunting? And what's the biggest difference?

PM: It's stamina. I was with Lynne Ramsay after Cannes, and she was about to embark on Ratcatcher, and I auditioned and didn't get the fucking job. I'd just got best actor at Cannes and I had to audition twice... Anyway, Lynne asked me "So what's the difference?" I replied, and it's not very profound, "It's the stamina that's the killer". That's the biggest difference. Nothing about the narrative structure, the wholeness of the piece. A short film is a couple of weeks' prep, a week's shoot, and then a couple of weeks cutting it and then getting it around the festivals. A feature film, it's six to seven weeks of prep, constant questions, everybody wants to know what you're planning while you don't want to nail everything down just yet because you want to have some flexibility on the day when you're shooting it. And then the toughest thing is six days a week, and for anyone who wants to make their first feature, the first thing you have to do is cut down on the smoking and the drinking. I swear, that won't guarantee the quality of the film, but you won't survive the course.

Six weeks, 24/7, six days a week - to try to relax on the Sunday is really hard, to just clear your brain and have a life. That was without doubt, for me, the biggest difference. And one worth remembering, because if you don't, and you try to go cavalier on it, as you would on a short film - no, actually, one's usually very focused with a short film, but even with a short film, by the fifth day of shooting, you're exhausted. So you have to pace yourself. On a feature, the crew, and often times the cast, come week four, they'll start to see the light at the end of the tunnel - so what used to be one night out a week is going to be four or five nights out a week, and you have to remove yourself from it and keep everyone going. The middle two weeks of a shoot are the toughest.

Every film I've ever worked on, and that includes Braveheart and Trainspotting, I've always witnessed a director having a breakdown. Every director will have a day, without exception, where they just can't do it anymore, they don't know what to say to their cameraman, their cast. It's the sign of real, physical exhaustion. And I swear, I've never been on a shoot where I've not seen a director have that day. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's two or three, depending on the level of exhaustion. Gibson went catatonic on Braveheart for a day - he sat there with 3,000 people in the baking sun, and he said nothing for a day. Now that's power. You were afraid to even cough. We were spear carriers with lines - there were eight of us - and we stood behind Mel as he sat watching these monitors, and for four to six hours he didn't say a word. And everybody was terrified and didn't say a word. He was looking, his eyes were open, but he was gone. He had a great job with Braveheart but he was just completely exhausted. And then he finally came out of it and said "Not enough blood". And these guys are tiptoeing around him - he's not spoken for six hours - and then the cry went, "Jonathan!" And this poor sod had to run 250 yards to Mel, and this discussion of "There's not blood" went on for half an hour, because Jonathan then called for Damian, and Damian became Margaret, and all these poor people, after six hours of silence, were suddenly exposed to 3,000 spear-carriers who were just so thankful that it wasn't their name being called out.

Q2: As a director, what part of the job are most uncomfortable with?

PM: The pre-production. All the stuff that you have to put in place for the six weeks you've got your shoot. I'm not impatient but I just find these meetings very boring. I'm not the kind of person who gets bored, I can usually wander off somewhere. But when someone asks you a thousand, billion, gazillion times about how you're going to shoot this, and you say "I don't really know. I'll just have the actors and a camera, and I'll kind of make it up as I go along". And they look at you like "You're not very good at meetings are you?" Some directors are great at pre-production and at meetings, but come the shoot, if anything goes wrong, they don't have a clue, they don't know how to think on their feet. And this is the bit that I like. And I like the editing process. So anything from the first day of shooting onwards. Oh, and casting's great - I love it. It's terrifying when you have to let someone know "No you haven't got the part" but the meeting and pre-production stuff, I'm crap at it. It's a necessary process, to be fair, you need to be there to let the design and costume people, camera people, to let the machine have a rough idea as to what you want to do. And meetings about money, I'm really bad at them. Like in The Simpsons, when the teacher says to Homer "Your son has a short attention span" and in Homer's eye, the guy is saying "Blah, blah, blah, blah". And for me, the minute they start talking about money, I just start hearing this "Blah, blah, blah, blah". And at the end, they say "You understand, Peter?" and I say "Yeah, yeah, yeah". That's why I still haven't been paid for Magdalene. It pays to listen.

Q3: If you're working with a first or second-time director, and if you see a scene where you think the director's missing something, would you speak up?

PM: Nah. I'm just an actor. I'd never do it. It would never even cross my mind to say "Are you really going to put the camera over there?"

Q3 add: But what if you put it in a positive way?

PM: There's no such thing as an actor giving positive criticism to a director. The minute you say "Don't you think it would look nicer...", that director's going to hate your guts. Particularly if it's a good idea. No, the only thing I would do is after work, I don't mind if it comes up. If a director were to ask me "How was the Magdalene shoot?" I don't mind talking about it in that sort of after-work kind of way. But on a set, no. But it would never even dawn on me because you're so busy enjoying the fact that you're not responsible for it - I don't give a monkey's. The great thing when you're actor, is that when it rains or something, it's the director who has the nervous breakdown while you get to go to pub early. I don't even give them sympathy - I've seen actors who fancy themselves as directors and say "Don't you think..." and you should see the look on the director's face. Because even if they're saying it in a very nice way, they're really overstepping the mark, big time.

Q4: What are you going to do next? And why have you chosen it?

PM: I've been doing this kids' series for the BBC, where I get to play a wizard. And it finishes next week, it's a big thing with Canadian television. As a director, I start writing in January and hopefully finish in March. I don't know, I've got about 16 ideas, so I'll choose the one that shouts loudest and take it from there.

Q4 add: So you're concentrating more on directing are you?

PM: Yeah, but I've had to work all year as an actor to buy myself three months off next year because the directing shit doesn't pay at all. I've only got 40% of my wages from Magdalene, so they still owe me 60% of my salary, and it looks like I ain't going to get it, and it's just made £10m, about $15m. It cost £2m to make, and they tell you you ain't going to see your salary.

SH: So who owes you the money and can you do anything about it?

PM: No, you can't, apparently. It's the way the system fucking works. It's between Scottish Screen, British Film Council, Lucky Red in Italy, and they claim "Blah, blah, blah". And all you do is go "Guys, it's made £10m, just pay me what you owe me" and they say "Nope, ain't gonna happen". I may see 30% of that 60% that they still owe me over the next three years. So with that in mind, you think "Well fuck that" but if I go back to acting, I can get a cheque at the end of the week and come back the next week to finish the job. Whereas with the directing job, I really don't know how you make money there. One brief anecdote, I was working in America and this guy, a very well known director whose last film had made $500m, and he goes down to Warner Bros to see these two execs to talk about another film, and they smiled, and wrote him a cheque for $1m. Now that's a lot of money, but you realise that they get $499m, and they were thinking themselves generous. So that's the way the film industry works - it's enough to make you think "Do I want to go down that road again?" I'll never take deferred payment again, it's basically a wage cut. You will not see your wages.

SH: $500m - that cuts it down to just a few directors. It must be James Cameron?

PM: No, no, no. Mr Cameron made a lot more than that.

Q5: Did you find making the transition from actor to director difficult?

PM: The transition from acting to directing is something I have to do, not something that I want to do. Like Howard Barker when he talks about his play writing. That's how I feel about directing - what worries me is when you handle a script that you've written, is that someone else will not change it. I wrote a short film many years ago, and I handed it over to someone else and they did it, and it was broadcast on Channel 4, and it broke my heart, it was so awful. But every single word of dialogue, I'd written it. So I couldn't blame the director or the actors for it. So the only reason I direct is that when I'm on set, once the actors have control of the piece, you realise which bits are the good dialogue and the bad dialogue, the bits that work. A script is utterly useless in and of itself, it's only of any worth the minute your actors, your designers, your directors come into being. That's when it may work, and a lot of times it doesn't work, so you have to try and make it work on the day.

So for me, that's where the directing stuff comes in. As for the acting thing, if you're going to explore someone and look at the world through their eyes, then you're obliged not to hide behind mannerisms and accents and funny hairdos and limps, all the stuff that's become the stock-in-trade in the last 10 years of a lot of Hollywood acting styles. There are a lot of great actors in Hollywood, but the minute they hide behind mannerisms - I've worked with a lot of actors who can't just sit down anymore, they have to [gets up, does exaggerated sit down and crosses legs] and there's nothing more absurd on this planet. It's really hard to act with someone who does that, and you're trying to do a scene about life and death and the universe and they've got all these terrible tics and mannerisms and looks and voices and the hair and movement. And before you know it, you're in a fucking opera, everything's become all flowery. It's like you're on the set of Springtime for Hitler - like any minute now everybody's going to burst out in song.

The more you see it, the more alien it becomes, especially within the context of the power structure of a film set. If it's your leading man or woman who does this, that starts to rub off, so suddenly everybody else does this sort of thing and it all becomes very silly. And for me, the great thing about ensemble working is that you're all there to explore how these people live, what they do, what they are, how they feel, and to realise that you're only a part of it, it's not about you. That's the killer. I can't abide actors who think that it's all about them, their personality, their career, how they look, what clubs they go to. I've seen actors who act with one eye to the audience, and he's thinking "Yes, that's Tom Cruise, and that's Nicole Kidman, and I'm acting with them. Look at my costume". You can feel it in the performance.

Q6: You mentioned the best directors working in Scotland are English. But you were in Young Adam and that's by David Mackenzie.

PM: David is one of the ones, thank God, on the way up. I said that Danny and Ken are the biggest influences - they raised the bar and gave a lot of Scots actors and writers and directors something to head towards and it gave us a confidence. David would be a perfect example of the new breed of actors and directors who are coming through who are trying things they may not have tried 10 years ago because the confidence wasn't there. Other directors, like Morag McKinnon, there's a whole host. And that's not even including the twentysomethings who will be coming through in the next couple of years. So, from a Scots perspective, it's looking quite good so long as the ambition stays there, and the confidence. I'm sure if there are five or six complete disasters the confidence will go the other way, but just now the Scots arts community is not particularly financially well off, but because of the financial clout of guys like Ewan McGregor and Bobby Carlyle who really kicked down all the doors 10 years ago ... they opened up so many doors for Scottish actors, only history will show how important those guys were, in conjunction with people like Danny and Ken. They had such a huge influence because they cover television, American cinema, they're good-looking and they're sexy, they can do the accents, that's a huge impact on a generation of Scots actors and directors, because they feel they can do it. David did an amazing job on Young Adam because it was a hugely ambitious piece for a second feature film and he got himself a cast that he felt confident with and it was mutual. So David's one of many, I hope.

SH: I think we should wrap up here. Thanks very much for coming everyone, and thanks to Peter.