A conversation with Helen Mirren's
director, Terry George
How did you first make contact with Helen Mirren?
Taylor Hackford, her partner, read the script of "Some Mother's Son" a few years ago, before I had done "In the Name of the Father," and passed it on to Helen. Once she was interested, I didn't consider anyone else. She's perfect for the role she's playing.
What was it about Mirren that appealed to you for this role?
There's just a great depth of humanity that she brings to the screen. For this part, it was particularly important, because she plays an intelligent woman caught up in a terrible dilemma.
There's a sort of tradition in war that the mothers and the wives stand on the sidewalks and cheer with their flags. Then they wait in the train stations, airports and docks for the bodies to come home. They're the passive sufferers.
The Irish hunger strike was a unique occasion where the mothers were forced into the position of deciding their sons' fates. It would seem a foregone conclusion on first reading that of course a mother would save her son. But when your son is Gerry Adams or Bobby Sands or Che Guevara, then it becomes a real dilemma as to whether the mother should intervene at some point to save her son's life.
So Mirren's character is in conflict over whether she should save her son's life?
Very much so. Even though the characters are fictionalized, a composite of several mothers, it's a true story about what they went through at the last stages of the hunger strike.
What does she choose?
Ah, you'll have to wait and see the film. I can tell you the story is about the friendship of two mothers -- a staunchly Republican nationalist mother and Helen's character, a schoolteacher and widow trying to keep her family together. She's deeply concerned about just managing to have her family survive.
How did Mirren get into character for the film?
She quietly traveled around Northern Ireland talking to people. She has a fair knowledge of the politics. During the period when the strikes were going on, she lived with Liam Neeson in a fairly staunch Loyalist community. Her sister is a school teacher and is quite similar to the character Helen portrays. She talked to her sister quite a lot about the everyday mechanics of getting through the day.
Did she give you a whole range of emotions or home in on a single response in one or two takes?
Basically all I had to say to her was less or more, faster or slower. It was three or four takes max to have something to play with in the cutting room. The basic thing is that she never wants to appear to be acting -- and she never does. Yet the craft is amazing. A lot of the crew is the same we used for "In the Name of the Father." So you get that same experience we got when we were watching Daniel (Day-Lewis), you know. Actors take a performance away out from reality and then the great ones pull it back so close to reality you can't see the hairline gap between reality and what they're doing. That's what Helen is capable of doing.
