FIFTY DEAD MEN WALKING written and directed by Kari Skogland, from the book by Martin McGartland and Nicholas Davies, with Jim Sturgess, Ben Kingsley, Kevin Zegers, Natalie Press and Rose McGowan. A TVA Films release. 117 minutes. Opens Friday (July 31). For venues and times, see Movies.
Let’s start off with the elephant in the room.
When director Kari Skogland brought Fifty Dead Men Walking to the Toronto Film Festival last year, she did so under a cloud of controversy. Martin McGartland, the former IRA member and informant for the British government on whose autobiography the film is based, publicly denounced the movie for the liberties he claimed it took with his story.
And now Skogland is taking a moment to revisit those charges.
“A lot of what he was talking about came from his not having seen the film,” says Skogland, on the phone from the set of her next project, a miniseries based on Vincent Lam’s book Bloodletting And Miraculous Cures.
“He saw the film eventually and really liked it,” she continues. “And the thing was, I wasn’t making a documentary. He had a book to put it all in I had an hour and a half. By virtue of the paradigm of storytelling, I was forced to make some changes and alterations.
“He had three handlers, and I amalgamated those characters into one, for example. All of this is well within the sort of dramatic licence a filmmaker must take, but my feeling was – and this was true of everybody on the production – as long as our mantra was the truth and we were seeking the truth, we couldn’t go wrong.”
Skogland says McGartland had a very political agenda for the movie, and her goal was to walk a fine line.
“I was interested in the human journey,” she says, “the conundrum of when the right and wrong of both sides get murky. You have to make some very strong choices that you’ll have to live with. That, to me, was the story I wanted to tell.”
That said, Skogland did take some obvious liberties with McGartland’s story – an opening assassination attempt “somewhere in Canada” actually happened in Newcastle, England, for example.
“The point of it was to say he’s not safe anywhere,” Skogland explains. “And it was a bit of a nod to Canada because Canada invested in the movie. So, you know, perhaps in the role of truth it served its purpose – in the role of accuracy obviously not.”
That brings us to the issue of the movie’s level of Canadianness. The inclusion of Fifty Dead Men Walking in the Toronto Film Festival’s Canada’s Top Ten list last year raised a few eyebrows – it’s a specifically British film, shot in Ireland with a predominantly British cast, after all.
“Canada has this tendency, in terms of the financing, to ask, ‘How is that Canadian?'” Skogland says. “Well, it’s Canadian because I made it. I took my Canadian perspective over to Ireland and dug around, and I found a very interesting story and brought it back.”
That’s a fair point – but her next one throws me.
“I think, as Canadians, that’s just as important as our peacekeeping service. We go out and find these stories that other people are not willing to tell. And this movie could not have been financed without Canada’s involvement. It would not have been made.”
Interview Clips
Kari Skogland on the advantages of being a Canadian filmmaker in Ireland:
On how this new movie fits into her filmography:
On casting Jim Sturgess as Martin McGartland:
normw@nowtoronto.com
