by MATTHEW HAYS

“I’m proud to be British,” director Paul Greengrass tells me over the phone. “No, seriously. I grew up in and around London. It’s essentially a decent, liberal, humane place.”

Greengrass isn’t exactly making apologies, but he is discussing his latest film, Bloody Sunday, which recounts the horrific events that took place on Jan. 30, 1972, when British forces opened fire on what was a peaceful demonstration. When the dust cleared, 13 people were dead, in what has become a day of infamy for the Troubles between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. On that day, the Brits set off decades of radical militant posturing by Catholics, after setting an horrific standard for violence.

“This was an incredibly dark day, there’s no two ways about it,” says Greengrass, whose previous films include Resurrected and The Theory of Flight. “It was a very shameful thing that our government did.”

Facing past horrors

Greengrass has pulled out all the stops with this, a stunningly told docudrama in which he artfully uses hand-held cameras, largely unknown actors and actual locations to create an intensely realistic portrait of a day that went so terribly wrong. “The film was made in the spirit of reconciliation, to tell the truth about that day,” says Greengrass, noting that the film was made jointly by British and Irish, Catholic and Protestant. The film was set to be completed for the 30th anniversary of the shooting—many may be familiar with it through the U2 song “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—in the spirit of “trying to build peace, inch by painful inch,” says Greengrass. Much of the film was guided by Don Mullan’s book about the protest, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday.

Indeed, though historical epics virtually always tend towards the didactic and hopelessly lopsided, Greengrass and his filmmaking team explored the conflict from every side possible, including extensive interviews with soldiers who’d been there that day. “We wanted to take a day that’s so contested and create a film with one story that wouldn’t degrade or defame anyone. We didn’t want to portray the soldiers as psychopathic Nazis. That day was bound to go wrong and it did. This film doesn’t absolve the commanders either. But ultimately I think it was the politicians who were to blame.”

Severe setback

The film is particularly depressing in light of the gains that were being made in the conflict at the time. Ivan Cooper was then an idealistic civil rights leader, a Protestant who worked in the Catholic camp. (He’s portrayed brilliantly in the film by James Nesbitt.) The events of that day effectively trampled on many of his dreams of peaceful change, setting the stage for a staggering cycle of violence.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Greengrass says Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (’65) was a model film for Bloody Sunday. “I saw it when I was 17 at the school film club. I watched it again when we were starting to make this film. It’s still visceral, alive, a cinematic masterpiece. It’s not a film about lectures—it shows you how it is, rather than telling you.”

But Greengrass explains that he was also worried about lapsing into cinema verité cliché. “I didn’t want it to seem like mannered realism. In the end, I think what makes it real are the performances. I’d love to take credit for it, but really, it’s all those families who came out and marched, many who had stories about the actual day. I think it was a catharsis for many of them to be involved with the film. There was something deeper than acting going on. People were reaching back to very painful times.”

Greengrass agrees that the conflict in Northern Ireland has come a long way in recent years, praising Prime Minister Tony Blair for setting up an official inquiry into Bloody Sunday. “It’s an incredibly important step forward,” says the filmmaker. But he says the film seems almost more relevant today, in light of situations in other parts of the globe.

“We set out to make a movie about Britain and Ireland. But it tells us something about the world today. It’s playing itself out on our TV sets every day. The peace in Northern Ireland is about shared rights, not contested nationalities. You both want to live on this land. You’re going to have to share.

“This realization, on both sides, is the gift that Northern Ireland has given us.” :

Bloody Sunday opens Friday, Oct. 25

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