by Brendan Clay
Director Stephen Burke’s latest film adapts the true story of a large-scale IRA prison break in Northern Ireland in the 80s and stars Irish actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as real-life IRA member Larry Marley. Vaughan-Lawlor is a well known performer in his home country, and U.S. audiences may know him from a brief appearance in the first season of Peaky Blinders or as Ebony Maw, herald of Thanos, a vocal and motion-captured performance for Avengers: Infinity War. I interviewed both men separately via telecommunication about Maze.
Stephen Burke
Why did you want to tell the story of the Maze breakout?
I had done projects before about the conflict in Northern Ireland. I had done one about the civil rights movement in Derry in the 60s and I’d done one set around the hunger strike. They were just half-hour dramas but I had a real interest in the subject. And then a Northern Irish producer, Brendan Byrne, he was making a documentary about the escape for the BBC. And he asked me, would I do dramatic inserts for it? When he sent me all the material, I said there’s a movie in this if you want to do that instead. So he made his documentary and I wrote the script. I started off working with him as producer and then my wife, Jane Doolan, came aboard and she ended up being the lead producer with Brendan.
How did you deal with the controversial and morally gray subject matter and avoid glorifying IRA violence?
I guess from the get-go there was that responsibility to be even-handed. The film is very much informed by the time it was written. It was written nearly twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement. There had been peace in Northern Ireland since before the Good Friday Agreement, so I didn’t want to do something that was going to reopen old wounds. I took a tactic the prisoners used of befriending the warders even though it was based on a deception. They befriended the warders in order to get a view of the prison they weren’t allowed to look at. I used that as a way of looking at how the divide among the two communities was crossed. Even though in that situation it was based on deception, it allowed me to have these conversations between two totally opposed men.
Why the narrow focus on Larry Marley and Gordon’s relationship?
It was partly the approach we were taking to show a relationship between opposing men, but also, in fairness, if we’d had a bigger budget we would of done a bigger landscape..I would have continued the film up until events outside the prison after the escape. When the escapees are under the floorboards in people’s houses and trying to make it across the border … Even though it’s a prison escape movie, financiers were nervous … The conflict is not a great box office draw. … When it came out it did huge business in Ireland which was gratifying.
How do you think an American audience might respond to the film?
I don’t really know how it’s going to go down. I imagine some of the screenings that I’ll be at, the people who are there at the first screenings will already have an interest in Irish subjects. … But you know I’m from Dublin, I’m Irish, I’m 50, and I knew nothing about the Maze escape until Brendan came to me with his documentary idea. I was quite well-informed of the larger aspects of history, but I think this one, because it was such an embarrassment to the British government, it was kinda glossed over because it had shades of The Great Escape and nobody wanted it to seem like these were prisoners of war escaping
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor
How did you become involved in the film?
I met Stephen Burke, the writer and [director] in I think it was 2014 or ’15. And he told me he had this script about the Maze prison escape and it’s not something I knew much about. I knew a lot about the hunger strikes and the “blanket protests” obviously, but I didn’t know anything about the escape. I was fascinated by the script’s ability to be both a thriller and a drama at the same time and have a political message.
Were you familiar with Larry Marley?
I wasn’t familiar with Larry at all to be honest. It’s a funny thing growing up in Dublin. I grew up in Dublin in the kind of 80s, and even though Belfast is an hour and a half drive from Dublin essentially, it’s like growing up in the 80s, Belfast was another planet really. And so you always were aware of this huge massive conflict going on up the road. This huge intensity, but you weren’t really exposed to it that much except in the news. … So I didn’t know anything about Larry really until I started researching the film.
… It’s interesting talking to some of the men who had been in the blanket protest and who had been on hunger strike. And there was in some instances and cases maybe survivor guilt. And I suppose I think the way it was mapped out in the film is that partly Larry’s drive to escape is to also to battle his own conscience about not dying in the hunger strike. And I think that’s probably not uncommon amongst survivors.
… What’s interesting about Larry is his thing was always about thinking big. Always thinking big. That he wanted 200, 300 inmates to escape, and he thought, why not the whole prison? Why don’t we try to get everyone out? And his great gift was about … obsessive planning. And the detail of the minutiae of trying to break this system. And it being a message to the world that the hunger strikes hadn’t broken the morale in the prison of the Republicans.
What do think this film has to say to people who are worried about violence returning to Northern Ireland in some form as a result of Brexit?
We made this the summer of the referendum. I think it speaks to all conflict in terms of when you come up against a brick wall, dialogue has to be—it’s the only solution. Dialogue is the only way forward.
brendanjamesclay@gmail.com