COVER STORY : A Heroic Effort : The life--and death--of Irish revolutionary Michael Collins has intrigued many a Hollywood filmmaker, but it took native lads Neil Jordan and Liam Neeson to bring it off.

For four decades, filmmakers have been intrigued by the idea of committing the life story of Irish republican hero Michael Collins to the big screen. The legendary directors John Ford and John Huston--two men with Irish blood coursing through their veins--toyed with the idea. Robert Redford considered making a Collins movie. In the 1980s, Michael Cimino and Kevin Costner separately visited Ireland to eye locations, armed with drafts of scripts based on Collins’ life.

None of those attempts ever got off the ground, but at last a Collins film is on its way: The Irish director Neil Jordan, best known for “The Crying Game” and “Interview With the Vampire,” completed a 14-week shoot here in early October, working from his own script. Yet Jordan himself is hardly a newcomer to the long saga of getting a Collins film made: He was first commissioned to write a script about him in 1982.

Collins, whose name is not well known outside Ireland, was the Irish Republican Army’s commander-in-chief, ran intelligence for the IRA and was a crucial figure in Ireland’s war of independence, which began in 1919. He was a leading negotiator of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922, in which Irish rebels agreed with Britain on the partition of Ireland. The arrangement has survived to this day, with the southern part of the country governing itself and Northern Ireland remaining part of Britain.

But the treaty sharply divided the Irish, and supporters of future Irish President Eamon De Valera wanted northern and southern Ireland to unite, independent of Britain. Civil war soon broke out, and later in 1922, Collins was ambushed and murdered by opponents of partition. He was just 31.

“He was like Robin Hood, Che Guevara, Gandhi, the Scarlet Pimpernel--all the characters you can imagine, historical or fictional, who meant a lot to a country,” said producer Stephen Woolley, who is making the film for David Geffen and Warner Bros. “The significance of Michael Collins’ memory, the state of Ireland now, the importance of that treaty, the peace with Britain and the size of this project--all these things mean so much to the Irish people.”

Of course, you’d expect a producer to talk up his movie. But there is a strong case for Woolley’s claims. Film sets are always a focus of community interest during shooting, but that interest is usually confined to the immediate vicinity. By contrast, most of Ireland seems riveted by the Michael Collins film; public and media interest is so high it’s off the scale.

The best example of this occurred in September after shooting was completed on a spectacular set that re-created Dublin’s city center circa 1916. Built on the grounds of a hospital in the Grangegorman district, it is the biggest film set ever constructed in Ireland. As a goodwill gesture to the people of Dublin, Woolley agreed to open it up to the public on two weekend days; admission was free, but people were invited to make donations to three local charities.

More than 1,000 people were waiting patiently in line an hour before the set was opened. Over two days an astonishing 40,000 Dubliners donated some $26,000 and filed in to see the set, 150 yards long, featuring mock-ups of pubs, shops, a hotel, the historic Mansion House and the General Post Office building--site of the aborted Easter 1916 rebel uprising.

Then there was the open call for extras who would play the audience in a scene where De Valera addresses a public meeting. The film’s producers desperately hoped that they would manage to get as many as 2,000 people; 4,500 turned up, some from as far away as Northern Ireland, and more than half had to be turned away.

Bronze busts of Collins are advertised in Ireland’s newspapers for 85 pounds ($130), an offer clearly made timely by the brouhaha surrounding the film. When shooting started, there were articles and features on the film in all Irish national papers every day for a week.

“It was absurd,” Woolley said. “It’s like we’re performing some service. We’ve been given this ticket, this key to the city. Because it’s Michael Collins, whatever we do seems OK. People just want to feel they’re a small part of it. I can’t tell you how exciting this is to the people of Ireland.”

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To the rest of the world, it’s perhaps less exciting at this stage, mainly because Collins is such an obscure figure. At this stage its working title is simply “Michael Collins.” But, said co-producer Redmond Morris, “Warners are testing some titles at the moment, and I expect it’ll have a main title, with the subtitle ‘The Michael Collins Story.’ ”

In fairness to Woolley, the film is an intriguing project. Not only is it the first movie about Collins, it is also easily the biggest film made by an Irishman in Ireland, with 84 locations and an estimated budget of $25 million.

The cast is appropriately starry, too. Liam Neeson (an Irishman, of course) plays Collins. Julia Roberts is Kitty Kiernan, his fiancee. Aidan Quinn plays Harry Boland, Collins’ close friend and republican compatriot, who fell out with him abruptly before his death and who also loved Kitty Kiernan. English actor Alan Rickman plays De Valera, while Stephen Rea (a longtime regular in Jordan’s films, including “The Crying Game” and “Danny Boy”) is an Irish actor portraying a British agent.

“Neil wrote the first script 13 years ago and approached me about 10 years ago,” Neeson said on a break between scenes. “So we’ve both been waiting a number of years to do it. It’s just the way forces work in Hollywood--it’s taken until now, with ‘Interview With the Vampire’ for Neil, and ‘Schindler’s List,’ I guess, for me, for the powers that be to say, yeah, let’s go along with this.”

That’s true, agreed Woolley, adding: “Five years ago, none of us was anyone you’d throw more than $10 million at.”

But, Jordan insisted, finally getting the film made was far from easy, even if his and Neeson’s stars were in the ascendant: “I’d made ‘Interview With the Vampire’ for David Geffen and Warner Bros., and they said, what next?

“I told them I’d like to make a movie of my Michael Collins script, but it was David who was instrumental in getting us to the point where the film was happening. It took work. Studios don’t generally want to make big expensive period films about a subject matter that can cause controversy, and where the central characters die in the end.”

Despite these hurdles, Jordan considers the story of Collins’ life irresistible: “You have these two characters, Collins and Boland. They’re so close they sleep in the same bed. They fall in love with the same woman. They achieve what everyone thought was impossible--creating the first dent in the British Empire and getting the British to agree to truce talks. Then they disagree and the consequence is, they split. One is killed by people on the other’s side and the other dies on the day he’s due to be married.”

Jordan grimaced. “Write that as fiction and people would say you’re being impossibly romantic. But it is true.”

It was British producer and former Columbia studio head David Puttnam who commissioned Jordan, who had studied history at University College, Dublin, to write a first draft of the Collins script. Coincidentally, Jordan was directing his film “The Company of Wolves” by day and writing the script by night in a London flat he was sharing temporarily with that film’s producer--Stephen Woolley.

Jordan had a personal link to his subject. His grandmother, as a post office worker in London, had occasionally run messages for Collins from 1910 to 1915, when he began to organize Irish republican groups in that city. Still, that fact made his initial task no easier.

“At the start I didn’t like the figure [of Collins] very much,” Jordan recalled. “He seemed an incredibly ruthless and violent character. But the more I read about him, the more fascinated I became. I began to see contradictions, layers of personality. It’s odd: I wrote the script first, then became fascinated by him.

“When I first wrote it, I said to Liam: ‘I’d like to do this with you.’ He certainly wasn’t a big star back then.”

How times change. Neeson is a big star now. But more important, the political situation in Ireland has also changed drastically. Since the late 1960s, widespread violence between Protestants and Catholics has been a fact of life in Northern Ireland; bombings, kidnapings and various acts of terrorism have all been tragically commonplace.

But for the past 15 months a cease-fire between Irish republicans, who want to see the island united and independent, and Ulster Unionists, who want to see Northern Ireland remain British territory, has held firm while peace negotiations proceed. (President Clinton was set to become the first American president to visit Northern Ireland late last week amid an announced breakthrough on the issue of disarming the IRA.) It is against the background of this historic, hopeful cease-fire and peace process that Jordan’s film has been made.

“I wouldn’t have liked to make [the film] before,” Jordan acknowledged. “If I’d made it five years ago, the critical reaction from the more conservative areas of the establishment would have been a lot more venomous. If there are bodies in the streets, [studios] don’t want movies about the events that led to those bodies in the streets. At the moment there aren’t any, which is probably one of the reasons I’m doing it now.”

Watch Liam Neeson stride across an Irish country field toward his trailer, dressed as Michael Collins in full military uniform, and you get an idea why Jordan envisaged him in the role. Jordan’s script was first called “The Big Fella,” a nickname given to Collins by his compatriots. And standing 6-foot-4, Neeson would seem to fit the bill perfectly.

He has just completed a routine scene, sitting in the rear of an open-topped IRA staff car, part of a convoy of armored vehicles. It slows at a small village pub long enough for one of Collins’ aides to give a signal to a man in the doorway, then picks up speed again. It’s a real pub--O’Byrne’s in the tiny hamlet of Greenane, dressed to look as it might have in 1920.

Neeson is in his 12th week of shooting and confident he has a handle on the character of Collins. During filming, he has been staying in Dublin with his wife, actress Natasha Richardson, and their baby son, Michael. Neeson has often cycled to work on the set, just as Michael Collins often used a bicycle to move around Dublin (though he was wanted by the British authorities, he rode around quite openly, hiding in plain sight).

“He was still a young man when he died, and that’s part of the tragedy of heroes,” Neeson said. “They’re often young men cut down in their prime.

“You can only speculate what he’d have done if he’d lived. But I think his vision was way beyond the geographical parameters of Ireland itself. He knew a lot about the history of other countries. He wanted to put Ireland on the world map, not just give it its independence and have it exist as a little island. He had great plans for it economically, financially, socially and culturally.”

Neeson, who grew up in Northern Ireland, remembered hearing about Collins when he was younger: “It was always in hushed tones, as if he was in the next room, someone who shouldn’t be discussed. That’s because one side in this country feels he was a traitor in not bartering for a full republic [for all Ireland] after three months of negotiating for a Free State [in the south only]. That’s what started the civil war. He was accused of selling Ireland out.”

Neeson had several years to anticipate playing Collins, and he said he has read “as much as anyone has” about him: “I’ve also met a number of the Collins family, and you can see the man in them. They’re all incredibly bright, alert, vivacious people. They’ve held positions of power, they’re worldly wise, they can talk about any subject.

“I first met them in January. Jordan, Woolley and myself went down to west Cork. They invited us into their home, and I learned more about Michael Collins in that afternoon, sitting drinking pots of tea with Michael’s nephew Liam, Liam’s wife, Betty, and their daughter Helen.”

As an infant, Liam Collins was actually in the family house, Woodfield in west Cork, when it was razed by the brutal Black and Tans--mainly unemployed British ex-soldiers, deputized to quell the Irish rebellion by any means they saw fit, including indiscriminate murder and burning houses to the ground.

“Liam’s 75 now, and as bright as a button,” Neeson said. “I got a real sense of [Michael] just sitting there with his blood relations. That afternoon cemented something for me.”

This is all fine, except not everyone is overjoyed that a film on the subject of Michael Collins is being made. Protestants in Northern Ireland and many people in England, who have been targeted by IRA terrorism for a generation, are skeptical at best. But not all doubters are British or British sympathizers; Dublin journalist Kevin Myers, who has a column in the Irish Times, the country’s most distinguished newspaper, views Collins as “a bloody leader, and a bloodier failure.”

In a controversial essay this past summer in London’s Daily Telegraph, Myers referred to Bloody Sunday, a 1920 incident in which Collins masterminded the murder of a dozen British Secret Service officers, many of them in their beds. “Nothing which Collins . . . achieved required force, except of course that personal psychological need for violence amongst militant Irish nationalist leaders,” Myers wrote. “Violence failed Ireland in Collins’ time as it has always failed Ireland.”

Myers’ essay triggered exchanges on the Telegraph’s letters page between Collins supporters and detractors. In the latter group are those who fear that a film lionizing Collins now would encourage favorable parallels between himself and a present-day Irish figure--Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing. Adams and Sinn Fein have signified willingness to be part of the current peace talks; so both he and Collins, the argument goes, are men who espoused violence before turning to peaceful negotiations with former enemies.

This complex political back ground has left Jordan a tad defensive. When this (English-born) reporter asked to read a copy of the shooting script, much anxious conferring took place, lasting several days. (A script was finally provided.) But Woolley stressed that security on the set has been no greater than for any other film: “Dublin’s a European city, and there’s no more violence here than in London, Paris or Berlin.”

Yet Jordan may be right to feel a need to tread carefully; anti-republican feelings will surely surface again when the film is released in the spring. Still, he makes a plausible case that this is not a rabble-rousing movie.

“If Michael Cimino had filmed this story, it would have been rivers of blood,” he said. “Had it been Kevin Costner, it would have been very heroic. I’m just glad it’s me who got to make it.

“Michael Collins was all ambiguities, as far as I can see. He was ambiguous toward Irish nationalism, which he regarded as being in love with epic and bloody failure. He was ambiguous in his attitude toward the British. He was objective and dispassionate in his dealings, with no racism there. He was ambiguous about violence, because he tried to end it. He was a militarist trying to become a democrat.”

If any one word is key to an understanding of Jordan’s films, ambiguity is that word. His scripts typically present us with characters who then turn out to have unexpected facets; think of “Mona Lisa” and “The Crying Game.”

Woolley, who is English, developed this theme: “Collins was a complex character, and the film reveals the complexity of the problem and the savagery of the times. I don’t think people will walk out of this film feeling elated. It’s almost a cliche now for the British to be villains, and we have Brits in this film, but in essence it’s more about the Irish. I hope it’s not as much about Brit-bashing as its detractors might think. It isn’t the kind of movie where people will be cheering in the aisles.”

Instead, he added, the film reflects on the absurdity of violence: “Look at ‘Danny Boy,’ ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘The Crying Game.’ All those films say violence gets you nowhere. With this film, I’m sure questions will be opened up again and asked, Gerry Adams comparisons will be made and people will react strongly. But I don’t want to spend my career making films people think are nice. You have to ruffle a few feathers.”

Yet Woolley also insists the film avoids what he calls “the gossip” about Collins. Two areas of unresolved speculation about him are the identity of the man who actually shot him, and whether Collins was the lover of Hazel, Lady Lavery, wife of the Irish portrait painter Sir John Lavery, and one of London’s most brilliant and beautiful society hostesses.

“The facts we know about him are so extraordinary and big, it’s crazy to try and prove anything else,” Woolley said. “That’s why Neil’s story is about Collins’ relationships with Boland, De Valera and Kitty Kiernan, and how he managed to turn a corner in the history of Ireland.”

Certainly the script has attracted high-priced talent, working for less than their normal fees; Jordan and Woolley both observed that their $25-million film might ordinarily have cost twice as much.

“People assumed we cast Julia because we wanted to get the film made,” Woolley said. “But it was quite the opposite--we had a green light, we were making the movie, and we had a call saying Julia wanted to meet Neil. That’s great, because you realize you have something people want to be in, not because they’ll be the star.” As it was, Roberts worked for four of the 14 weeks, assuming an Irish accent which she stuck to even when not speaking her lines.

“There were times when we could have made this film on a much lower budget, and shot it mainly in rooms,” Woolley said. “But to give Neil credit, he refused to come down to a low budget figure. If he’d attempted to do that, it wouldn’t have had the ability to transcend being a local Irish story into world box-office.”

The film depicts an era rarely discussed in schools outside Ireland. Neeson, for one, hopes it sparks an interest in Michael Collins’ times: “It really is an important film for Ireland, because it shows something of what those turbulent times were like, and just what was at stake.

“I hope it does what ‘Schindler’s List’ did in terms of opening educative doors all over the world. It seems one in three college kids didn’t know the Holocaust had happened, so Steven Spielberg and Universal set up an education program, using the film as a launching pad to teach kids that part of history. Hopefully the same might happen with this film.”

Jordan feels the same way, and characterizes the Collins story as “a bit like a creation legend.” In the story, he says, is contained the seeds of modern Ireland today.

“The two states here, north and south, were created from that period, 1916-21,” he said. “All the arguments we’ve had since were adopted back then. The tragedy of the division of this country and its two states eventually arose from an argument between the Irish themselves. It’s as though they had their backs pushed against the wall, and all they could do was to fractionalize and splinter.

“And all this comes from two personalities: Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera. They’re like Cain and Abel. That you can tell a story of such historical import, yet tell it through such fascinating people--it’s quite extraordinary.”