When Canadian filmmaker Kari Skogland adapted Fifty Dead
Men Walking—Martin McGartland’s 1997 memoir of working as an
informant against the Irish Republican Army—the events she choose to
portray from the non-fiction book were also indicative of the battles
she had to fight off-screen.
The film Fifty Dead Men Walking tells the story of
McGartland’s recruitment by anti-terrorism officer, Fergus (Sir Ben
Kingsley), as an inside man in the IRA and McGartland’s attempts to
thwart IRA violence by passing along key information to the police.
Skogland, whose last film was the Margaret Laurence adaptation
The Stone Angel, responded to McGartland’s book when she
discovered “the voice of an everyman who rises to the occasion when the
right and the wrong of things is harder to discern. That was a story
that I felt was relevant to modern times,” she says. “That was the
story I wanted to tell. Not a political story, but a human one.”
However, while McGartland was sure to name names and be faithful to
his story in his book, Skogland distanced the movie from any suggestion
of pure non-fiction. There is a prominent disclaimer at the end of the
film that states McGartland did not approve the screenplay and his book
provided inspiration for the story.
“The dumb thing is, is that he’s since approved it,” Skogland
clarifies. “It was a bit of a tussle at one point, so we put that in
there for his benefit, and he’s since said how much he likes the
film.”
Skogland realized that the larger context of The Troubles—the
Northern Ireland violent conflict that lasted from the 1960s to the
mid-1980s—would have to be established for the audience, in favour of
more detail from McGartland’s story. As well, real people from
McGarland’s book would have to be molded into fictional characters for
legal and practical reasons; for example, his four real-life police
handlers were distilled into Ben Kingsley’s weary Fergus. More
information has come to light since McGartland’s book was released
about British informant activities within the IRA that Skogland wanted
to use, to illustrate her point about “just how murky it was.” While
McGartland has since been mollified, these changes caused tension
between the filmmaker and her subject while developing the film.
“I didn’t want to make a political document—that wasn’t my plan,
and I think he did. I think he wanted it to be very anti-IRA, as
compared to pro-IRA,” says Skogland. “I wanted it to walk the line,
because it was a human story, because it was about the fact that
people, when they get involved in any extremist group—and you could
argue that the government is an extremist group, only on the right side
of the law—remain people that can do extraordinary things, both good
and bad.”
Skogland reports that Northern Ireland Screen—that country’s
version of Telefilm—initially said that they did not do films on The
Troubles, but came around on the strength of her script. “The fact that
it wasn’t an us-versus-them movie,” Skogland says.
“On the question of ‘How do you tell a story within the dramatic
paradigm?’ You have to take certain license. My goal was to stay true
to the spirit of what happened and who we were dealing with. I believe
I achieved that, but I couldn’t be absolutely accurate for all these
other reasons.”
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2009.
