Aidan Gillen selects his favourites for Triskel Arts Centre

ACTOR Aidan Gillen played John Boy in the RTÉ crime series, Love/Hate, and will be back on our screens as Charlie Haughey, in Charlie, later this year. Gillen has selected seven of his favourite films for showings at Triskel Christchurch from Jan 17-20.

Gillen limited his selection to an era “because there are 100 films I’d like to have picked. It would be a widely held opinion that the ’70s were a golden age, for American cinema at least, and I’d subscribe to that.” He attributes it to “something as obvious as America emerging from the darkness of the Vietnam era, while still reeling from the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.”

Gillen says these tragic events, “combined with the arrival of a more intellectual, film-schooled director, influenced by the European new wave, led to much self-examination and really great, character-led cinema from people like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. We wanted to show some Cassavetes’ films, but there were copyright issues.”

Jaws, halfway through the decade, “changed the game forever, with spectacle and box office becoming the priority. Having said that, there’s no way Jaws would have been as good without three really good performances from character actors like Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw and Roy Scheider.”

Taxi Driver was Scorsese “coming into his own. It features one of the all-time great screen performances, from Robert De Niro, who really put that kind of anti-hero on the map. There’s brilliant cinematography by Michael Chapman and music by Bernard Hermann, combining to present New York as a kind of lurid, dreamy hell.”

The film is very violent, but Gillen doesn’t find this hard to take. “That’s what the film is about — a man driven to the limit by his post-Vietnam alienation from just about everything and everyone.”

Gillen says the horror genre has evolved. “Some of the scariest horror I’ve seen is the more modern Asian stuff; it’s very real. The Exorcist is quite real, too. It’s very convincing. You know, Satan manifest in a 12-year-old girl in a respectable American home. Rosemary’s Baby had been there already, I guess, but The Exorcist was a more visceral experience altogether. Before I’d even seen the film, I attended an exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image, in London, devoted entirely to the effects in The Exorcist. The effects were taken very seriously indeed and were quite ground-breaking at the time. But that wouldn’t mean as much if it wasn’t placed in such a tight mood piece.”

Another horror film that Gillen has selected is The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy, which wasn’t well-received. “That’s probably because the version that went out initially was a studio hack job. What we’re showing is the ‘final-cut’ version, which is shorter than the director’s cut and longer than the studio cut. There are so many versions of this knocking around, all of which tells you that they didn’t really know what to do with the film when it was delivered. They put it out as half of a double bill with Don’t Look Now, which they obviously didn’t know what to do with either. Both films are now regarded as classics.”

Actor Christopher Lee regards The Wicker Man as his best film and was instrumental in pulling together this latest cut. “It’s a very creepy film, set in an unapologetically pagan island society in the 1970s. It has one of the most nihilistic, godless endings ever and a lovely folk soundtrack. What really makes it stand out, for me, is how normal life seems for everyone on the island, how content and happy they seem.”

Badlands is described by Gillen “as the most beautiful and strange murder/coming-of-age drama you’ll ever see. It made Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek stars.”

Performance, starring Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg, has Jagger in his best acting role. “In fact, it’s his only good one. He’s playing a rock star, so it’s not too much of a stretch for him. What’s fascinating about Performance is not the sex or drugs, real or otherwise, but its alarming style and newness. There certainly hadn’t been a gangster film like this before.”

For Gillen, Al Pacino’s performance in Scarecrow (directed by Jerry Schatzberg) “is definitely one of his best and probably my favourite.” It also stars Gene Hackman and, despite being “brilliant and breathtaking,” not many people have seen the film.

Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night asks whether films are more important than life for their makers. Gillen says they are the most important part of life when working on them. “If people weren’t that passionate about film-making — and I don’t think it’s even a choice — films wouldn’t be any good. From my own experience, I can say that filming something, or staging a play, is an intense endeavour. Day for Night is a really good film about the people who make films.”

Gillen doesn’t know when Charlie will be screened.

“Filming Charlie was quite a ride. I would say it has been one of the most exciting times I’ve had as an actor and I really hope it’s going to be as good as we want it to be.”

Getting into the zone for the role required “the same preparation as anything else with a factual character.”

Gillen read about Haughey and watched him on TV. “I reckon it’s a fairly straight-down-the-line representation. Haughey was a complex person and, hopefully, we show some shades. When an actor is playing a character, they always try to make them sympathetic. How he comes across in the finished product will really be shaped in the editing process.”

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