Michael Collins - About the Production...

Michael Collins remains so controversial in Ireland today that his name has been stripped from history books and even the signpost to his place of birth is frequently vandalized. Yet Collins has long fascinated those who know his story, including Neil Jordan, who wanted to bring Collins' life to the screen for more than a decade.
Jordan wrote the first draft of his script for "Michael Collins" 13 years ago, shortly after directing his debut feature film, "Angel." Since then, every time he finished a film, he tried again to make the story.
"When I read through the history," says Jordan. "I thought it was such an incredibly romantic story that if you invented it, people wouldn't believe you." At the time, Jordan was sharing a flat with producer Stephen Woolley in London, and would write a few pages each day. "They intrigued me and made me want to find out more about Collins," says Woolley.
It was to be a long time, however, before the project came to fruition. "The script fell into what they call 'development hell,'" explains Woolley. "The scale of the project demanded a certain rank of director, and I don't think Neil at that time had enough weight to command that kind of budget. But he always felt, quite rightly , that he couldn't contain it, that the film had to have an epic scale."
After producer David Geffen completed "Interview With The Vampire" with Jordan and Woolley, the question again arose of making "Michael Collins." "David was instrumental in ensuring that the film was made," says Woolley. "Interview With The Vampire' had been such a good experience for everyone involved that he wanted to keep the same team together for 'Michael Collins.'"
According to Jordan, the script has changed very little since that first draft 13 years ago, but the director's perceptions of Collins the man have shifted subtly. "The more I explored Collins' character, the more fascinated I became by him. Now I'd regard him as more of a heroic character. When you see the 20-year war of attrition that happened in Northern Ireland, you realize the power of the forces that were arrayed against him.
"At school we were fed very simplistic versions of these painful and complex historical events," says Jordan, who grew up in Southern Ireland. "People couldn't tell the story of these events for a long time because they'd been psychologically maimed by them. That's why I thought that it would be a very positive thing to make this film. You've got to be able to talk about this stuff before you grow up, address these aspects of your past to get beyond them. It's like the Vietnam war in America -- it was quite a while before people could start coming to terms with it. Collins seems to me to represent what modern Ireland wants to be. He was more pragmatic and realistic -- a much more attractive character than most of those that we had to grow up with in Ireland."

A Special Note From Director Neil Jordan
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