The Trouble Over ‘Michael Collins’

“Michael Collins” may have more than Oscar potential written all over it. Neil Jordan’s sweeping, devoted testament to the Irish freedom fighter--whom the British saw as a terrorist--has become something of a metaphor for the troubled times in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

It’s also become a film requiring special handling after the Irish Republican Army’s bombing in February of the London financial district that killed two and last month’s outbreak of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. These events not only splintered the 1994 truce between the British and the IRA, but they also put Warner Bros., which produced and will distribute Jordan’s epic work, into a delicate position on releasing the film in the troubled region.

“Michael Collins” will open in the United States on Oct. 11, but Warners is taking a wait-and-see position before releasing the film in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Collins, you see, was a founder of the IRA.

“We are going to show this in Venice [at the film festival] and there will be plenty of press screenings for all of the world press to see. After that our plan is to open it in America,” said Robert Daly, Warners’ chairman and co-chief executive. “It has always been our plan. We are certainly very aware of the problems in the U.K. and Ireland and we will stay very attuned to what is happening there.”

Daly expects to release “Michael Collins” in Ireland and Britain “probably some time after the first of the year, again depending on the political environment. . . . This is not a film we are hiding. But again, we will be sensitive to the conditions in the world at the time.”

Despite Warners’ intentions, the tabloid press in Ireland and England has already begun taking potshots at the film, even though virtually no one has seen it.

On July 28, the News of the World ran the huge, bold headline: “Collins Film Hits Bloody Crisis,” tagging it a “News of the World Exclusive.”

It was accompanied by a second headline, “IRA Bombs Threat to a Blockbuster.” The story said the film “is facing a crisis because of the IRA bombing campaign” and that “a lavish premiere . . . may have to be scrapped.”

Julian Senior, a London-based Warner Bros. executive, called the story “utter rubbish,” adding that no premiere has even been planned and that Warners was never contacted about the story.

Jordan said several papers have published stories about the film from writers who haven’t yet seen it, making what he considers dangerous or misleading assumptions about its context. This is familiar turf for the director of 1993’s “The Crying Game,” the saga of a disenchanted IRA gunmen who falls for a transvestite. Before Jordan won an Oscar for his screenplay, the film failed to open in Britain since it was perceived as a political statement. After the Oscars it was relaunched and did well.

“Michael Collins is a story that everyone here seems to be scared of,” Jordan said in a telephone interview from Ardmore Studios in Dublin. “So many people have tried to do him. John Huston tried for many years. Robert Redford, Michael Cimino--again for a long time--and Kevin Costner. His story is the one story that can actually tell the truth about the problems between Ireland and England.

“Michael Collins basically organized the beginning of the end of the British Empire. What he did was the first crack in this mighty empire, you know,” he continued. Jordan said that his film, which stars Liam Neeson, Alan Rickman, Aidan Quinn and Julia Roberts, is almost documentary in nature, sticking true to the story of Collins’ life. It is more about history than any political statement, following Collins’ life from the 1916 Easter Rising through the Anglo-Irish war to the 1922 civil war, when Collins is killed by the IRA, said Jordan, a schooled historian himself.

“He was a very interesting figure in that he was a proponent of warfare when necessary. He was actually a soldier. He wasn’t a proponent of terrorism,” Jordan said. Since the IRA is widely perceived as a terrorist group today, “that is quite the wrong perception of what Collins stood for. It is true that he developed techniques of guerrilla warfare, used by Mao Tse-tung and many others. But he would not be a proponent of contemporary terrorism practiced today,” Jordan said.

“Because he wasn’t a terrorist, I think that is the reason that his story makes certain establishments in Ireland and England quite nervous today. They cannot use that against him. He was a soldier and a statesman . . . and over time a man of peace.”

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Still, political parties have already sized up the picture. Irish Republican factions have accused the filmmaker of glorifying a traitor, he said, while the conservative right in Britain has branded the movie an “anti-British travesty” and an “IRA film.”

Jordan said he doesn’t understand why the articles have attacked his film so early. “I do think there is an attempt to ghettoize the movie I made and to ghettoize Michael Collins. They are saying the film is trying to cause trouble. What it does show is how to disengage from violence.”

Jordan said he hopes the IRA-British cease-fire will resume soon and that when people in the troubled countries do see his film they will understand. “My politics don’t enter into this film in any way. It is a very moving story about a man who hated what was happening and fought to obtain his country’s independence. It’s a bit more like ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ than anything else.”

Jordan said he is willing to show the film to any political leader in both England and Ireland to give them peace of mind. “I think they will come to see it as a metaphor. That we keep reliving this history lesson over and over.”