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Cillian on the Cannes triumph + more Barley reviews

29 May 2006 at 03:26 PM | by Melty_Girl

[Note: This was originally published by cillianONLINE, which has been inactive since September 2006.]

Interviewed about The Wind That Shakes the Barley taking the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Cillian told RTÉ radio, "Just to get selected is a big deal and then for [Ken Loach] to win, we’re all thrilled."

Irish news outlets are reporting Cillian's take on parallels Barley holds for American/British engagement in Iraq, an analogy that Ken Loach has made quite explicitly:

Murphy said that people were free to draw parallels from the film, which he said were pretty obvious. But for us, we just wanted to make a film as true as possible to that era and commit to the characters as honestly as possible. Hopefully if stories are universal, people can take from it what they want.

Cillian also promises a bit of sport at the Cork premiere:

It was very special shooting down in Cork because I’m from there. All these stories and this history is still very much alive down there and the people where we shot [the film] were just amazing. We’ll have a bit of a hooley on the 20th of June.

In other news, the Cannes award prompted the BBC to review Barley. While Darren Waters is unenthusiastic, he offers this nugget about Cillian's performance:

Murphy handles his role well—and wrings out depth from his character that is not written down on the page. His sense of torture when forced to shoot an informer from his own ranks is both touching and the touchstone of the film.

There is a more engaging article from Nigel Andrews in The Financial Times:

A fresh war begins on screen between two sides equal in their passion, idealism and ruthlessness: the Irish and the Irish. When their internal argument begins between taking the shilling of negotiated freedom and pressing for true and final liberty, we are in virtually virgin territory. This is Loach at his best: lucid, vivid, engaged. Paul Laverty’s script rises to the challenge, so do actors Cillian Murphy, Liam Cunningham and Pádraic Delaney.