The Tiger's Tail - John Boorman Q&A

Q: Might this film be called a tribute to Hitchcock?
A: Hitchcock had a wry ironic sense of humour and this story is strange and bewildering to some extent and I wanted to get the jokes in where I could.

Q: Brendan Gleeson is an essential element.
A: He is a wonderful actor. He is very intelligent and thoughtful but when you come to shoot with Brendan something else happens that is unexpected. He falls into inspiration and instinct when he is acting, which makes him very special. It makes it very exciting because sometimes he goes off at a tangent and you have to pull him back. Very often he discovers something really wonderful.

Q: How did you achieve the subtle differences in the twins?
A: When we made The General, Jon Voight played an Irish inspector. I found him a police inspector from Cork to work with. Jon said it was not just the accent - which he knew he could do - it was getting the body language, gestures... the whole thing. Often an actor can do an accent perfectly but it still seems false because it is not connected with these other elements. We talked about that when we were planning this and finding the two characters and the things that separated them. When we were shooting the film I treated them as separate actors. So in a sense it was not that difficult for me because I was intent on separating them and dealing with them as two different characters. For Brendan there were occasions when he had to play both characters on the same day and he was sometimes quite grumpy about that. But he was fine if he just played the one character in the one day. He never really puts a foot wrong though, he is a remarkable actor.

Q: How tricky was it to film the scene when the twins fight on the beach?
A: His brother Frank was the stand in for the wide shots. He has the same sort of build as Brendan. So some of the shots are Brendan with his brother. I trained his brother to copy Brendan's walk and he was so close to the way he walked and behaved that you could hardly tell them apart.

Q: Had Brendan's son Brian acted before?
A: No. He has another son who is an actor. There is a real talent there. In the boy you see what Liam was once.

Q: Kim Cattrall says she tried too hard with her accent.
A: She is playing a middle class Irish woman and I said that I could show her three or four women of that type who would all have different accents. They try and talk less Irish or become rather affected. I told her to find something specific rather than general.

Q: You had the idea for a film about twins a long time ago?
A: I had an idea when I saw a documentary about twins who had been separated and then met years after... the whole notion of identity intrigued me. I was going to do a film about it with Jack Nicholson but it didn't come off and I put it to the side. Then when I wanted to do something contemporary about Ireland, I saw a country in a state of confusion, trying to discover its identity, I thought about a story about twins whose identities are confused.

Q: What about depicting Ireland, warts and all?
A: When the film opened in Ireland it became hugely controversial, people were upset. All the things about the health service and traffic jams were being discussed but putting them on film seems to become difficult for some people to deal with. It divided people. On one side they were saying these things needed saying and on the other side there was a feeling that Ireland was a great success and this was being knocked by an Englishman.

Q: There seem to be difficulties in all your films. Indeed you thought of quitting after making Hell in the Pacific?
A: There were difficulties in my relationship with Toshiro Mifune. I had a Japanese and American script. But a wrong version of the script, in which Mifune's character was a buffoon, got to him by accident. So I had to correct him in front of the crew and the loss of face made it horrendous. So he fought me on every scene. It was a struggle to get through it. I made it so difficult for myself by filming on the most remote part of the Pacific and it was the most horrendous experience. By the end of it I did not want to go on.

Q: What happened to the short film you made at 15?
A: I don't know what became of that. I think it was on 9.5mm, which was film where the perforations went down the centre. That was my introduction to film making but I don't know where it went. It might be in an attic somewhere.

Q: Wouldn't you like to see it again?
A: I never want to look at any of my films again. The only occasions I do see them is if there is a retrospective. I introduced a retrospective on Lee Marvin at the Lincoln Centre in New York. So I watched my films then and quite enjoyed the experience but I would never make an effort to go and see one of my films just for entertainment.

Q: Why did you have such a great relationship with Lee Marvin?
A: When we talked about Point Blank he discussed his war experiences when he was a boy in the Pacific campaign. It brutalised him and in a way he was trying to refine his humanity. I saw that Point Blank was very much his story. I understand that and him. In a sense it was a documentary about him and I made him understand things about himself which he hadn't faced. That was why our bond was so strong.

Q: Are you going to make Memoirs of Hadrian?
A: It is something that I have been trying to do for a long time. We are struggling with the script.