Martin and John

Boorman takes charge

NEW YORK -- British-born writer/director John Boorman had a personal connection to Irish crimelord Martin Cahill, the subject of The General: Cahill allegedly stole from Boorman's home in Ireland a souvenir from the filmmaker's classic Deliverance, his gold record for "Duelling Banjos," a burglary re-created in the movie. More than that, what fascinated Boorman about Cahill was "this complexity he had, the fact that someone who did this military-style planning was also a clown. He could be tender and brutal and witty and crude. And I've been living there for 30 years, and there were a few things I wanted to say about it. Because he was so opposed to society, he eliminated it, really."

The General portrays Cahill as a sort of Robin Hood who targeted the Irish establishment, though Boorman says the film does not romanticize the criminal. "It was enormously controversial before it opened in May, shortly after Cannes [where Boorman was named Best Director]. A lot of people, for instance, this forensic scientist he blew up in the car, he was giving interviews saying he was still in pain, and that it was wrong to make a film about him. And these accusations about glorifying crime were hurled at us. I showed this man being blown up, I showed him courageously testifying in court, I showed what actually happened. I wasn't glorifying it in any way. Once people saw the film, they recognized that. I was a little bit nervous because there's something in this film to offend almost everybody in Ireland, the police, the IRA, the church, the government, the civil servants. Fortunately, there were no repercussions."

Star Brendan Gleeson too was worried about romanticizing Cahill, but he also wanted to be fair to a man who died only recently (in 1994) and whose family and associates would bristle at a smear. He felt he couldn't fully inhabit the role until, in rehearsal, "Jon Voight told me just to make my peace with Martin. I can't please everybody. I didn't want to carry that agenda. That was the thing that took a lot of stuff off my shoulders when Jon said that. As much as I could, I did him justice. I can look him in the eye and say, `This wasn't a cheap shot.' Maybe I got it completely wrong, but I tackled it with integrity. There's nothing more I can do if somebody's going to take umbrage at it."

Voight, who plays Cahill's police nemesis, explains why it was so hard for the police to catch Cahill. "They knew what was going on with him, but the police had some problems dealing with it. In Dublin, they didn't deal ordinarily with serious crime. They didn't have the equipment. They didn't have guns at the time. They couldn't do very much. And Cahill was very tricky. They knew when he showed up at the police station that something was going on, that his gang was performing something, and he was getting his alibi. But they couldn't break him. He was very clever."

Boorman, who is known for films set in green forests and jungles (from Deliverance to Beyond Rangoon) shot this Emerald Isle tale in black-and-white. "It is a bit of an irony, isn't it?" he laughs, then explains, "Because it was about recent events, I wanted to give it some distance. Because of the awful distraction of contemporary colors, I wanted to give it a unified look. It's much more intense, too. It feels like peeling away skin when you shoot close- ups of the actors. And black-and-white helps the mythic dimension of the film. It's closer to the condition of dreaming and the unconscious."

Cahill's complexity is encapsulated in the already notorious sequence where he crucifies a supposedly disloyal underling on a pool table, then apologizes and drives him to the hospital. "There was something even further which I couldn't put in," says Boorman. "It would have been too complicated. They passed a law in Ireland whereby, if you were the victim of malicious damage, you could claim compensation from the government. As he [Martin] was taking Jimmy to the hospital, he said, `You know, you've got a good claim for malicious compensation.' That was typical of this extraordinarily twisted mind he had."

-- Gary Susman

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