Peter Mullan: Sisters of misery

Peter Mullan's controversial new film is tipped to win a prize at the Venice Festival, but it almost didn't get made. He tells Geoffrey Macnab why the story of a sadistic nun felt so close to home

It's a Sunday morning on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel and the Italian press is following Peter Mullan around as if he's the Pied Piper. The Scottish actor-director's second feature, The Magdalene Sisters, was rapturously received in Venice two days ago. Mullan's typically outspoken remarks about the Catholic Church in his press conference assured he made the headlines in the local papers, too. Everyone wants a piece of him. "They really work you, man," Mullan confides in a coffee break. "You don't get a minute off. They follow you to the toilet and stuff. I thought Cannes was bad, but this is something else."

The Magdalene Sisters is set in the early Sixties in one of the notorious Magdalene asylums in Ireland where "lapsed" women (that's to say orphans, or young girls who've become pregnant outside marriage) were sent to work in the laundries to atone for their sins. Amazingly, the last Magdalene Home was closed down only six years ago. The film follows four "inmates". Ruling over them in brutal fashion is Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), a Nurse Ratched-like matriarch who seems to derive personal pleasure from the girls' suffering. McEwan excels as Sister Bridget. The reason she is so effective, Mullan argues, is that she plays the character as if she's caring and sweet-natured. "Geraldine just had it. She giggled, she laughed, she's a little bit cheeky..."

Mullan was inspired to make the film after seeing a Channel 4 documentary, Sex In A Cold Climate, about the suffering of the Magdalene women, but he confides that many incidents in his own life also fed into the movie. For instance, not long after he finished school in Glasgow, he had encountered a woman just like Sister Bridget

"My mother, like most working-class mothers, wanted to get rid of her 17-year-old son over the summer. She said she'd found me a job. It was a nun looking for two volunteers to refurbish a fire station, converting it into apartments for single, homeless schizophrenic women."

Instead of "getting drunk and working in a factory," which he'd done the previous summer, Mullan set off for London. The fire station was in Poplar, east London. The pay was £5 a week. No sooner had he arrived, he realised that the nun who was to be his boss for the next eight weeks had a picture of Benito Mussolini behind her desk. Her behaviour was extreme, even by Sister Bridget's standards. "She had these twinkly little eyes. She was only about 4ft 9in tall. You would never believe anybody could be as cruel as she was," Mullan recalls.

Next door to the fire station lived a man the nun had dubbed "Satan" – a black pimp working two prostitutes. He paid the nun rent. "I really kind of liked this guy because he used to smoke a lot of joints. He was everything that she wasn't. I'm not saying his choice of profession was admirable, but there was something bizarrely honest about his activities."

Mullan proceeds to tell a rambling story about how the pimp intervened when the nun locked out one of the schizophrenic women on a freezing, wet evening. "She was outside. She was 64-years-old and I couldn't do anything about it because of the padlock on the door." The pimp, hearing the womnan crying, smashed the door down with a crowbar and let her in.

There's a touch of the barroom tall tale about the anecdote. Mullan freely admits he likes to embroider events. He's a master storyteller who seems able to produce a different story about this nun's brutality at whim. None the less, it's apparent that his experiences in Poplar played a crucial part in the way he wrote Sister Bridget's part. "I know this character. I know how she smiles. I know the little glint in her eyes, her sarcasm, the way she used the power of the church. She didn't have a sadistic smile. She had a beatific smile, but it was what was behind it."

Disconcertingly frank, Mullan adds that he was also driven to make the film by the memory of his bullying and alcoholic father, who had died days after he returned from Poplar. "He just popped while I was ironing my shirt for the first day of university. Quite literally, the sun came through. You couldn't dramatise it – it's too corny."

Ask him how he feels about his father now and Mullan replies: "I understand less now even than I did then, because I've got three kids. To the day, I'll never understand why he did the things he did – why you'd have eight kids and quite happily have them hate your guts."

At least, his resentment and hurt enable him to play martinets and bullies, and to bring characters like Sister Bridget to life. "I can't explain it but I can act it," he says. "A lot of good actors can't act pain. Something like this has either happened to you or it has not. Look at Samantha Morton [who was put into care as a child after her parents' marriage broke down]. That [anger] comes from somewhere. Quite rightly Sam doesn't talk about it, but I do talk about it. It's important for me to talk about it because other kids are going through it and I want them to feel less lonely than I felt."

Mullan spent three-and-a-half years trying to get The Magdalene Sisters made. To avoid the "minor acts of sabotage" he feared he'd face in Ireland, he ended up shooting the film in Scotland. Even then, the production was dogged with problems. Vanessa Redgrave – originally cast as Sister Bridget – dropped out after her mother fell down the stairs. The financing threatened to unravel and Mullan was obliged to "put £17,000 of my own wages" into the production to prevent it being closed down after the first week. He had already deferred 50 per cent of his fee for writing and directing the film. "To do the film and then end up substantially poorer than when I started really, really angered me."

Such struggles are hardly new. It was a similar story with his debut feature, Orphans. The original backers, Channel 4, lost faith in the film, which only surfaced in British cinemas after winning a prize at the 1999 Venice Festival.

In making The Magdalene Sisters, Mullan dispensed with the magical realist style he used so effectively in Orphans. "It [Magdalene] is as near to the flames of social realism as I'm ever likely to go," he concedes. "I knew I couldn't be gimmicky with the camera. It had to be peopled-centred. I wanted it really simple." There's only one shot in which he departs from his ultra-disciplined approach – an expressionistic flourish in which we see the looming presence of Sister Bridget reflected in one of the girl's eyeballs as she is punished for trying to run away.

"I knew it was an OTT shot. I knew it didn't fit in with the rest of the film, but I didn't care. I wanted the nun to be in her head. It's not subtle but I don't think I'm a subtle guy... Ken Loach will hate that moment," he chuckles.

On one level, it's a surprise that The Magdalene Sisters reached Venice at all. A few months ago, when the furore over the Italian government's interference in the Festival was at its height, Mullan suggested he would refuse to allow the movie to be shown. The government was accused of trying to promote a right-wing agenda. And even today Mullan insists that: "Silvio Berlusconi is as big a threat to artistic and political freedom as anyone else on this planet."

Now, the movie is being tipped for one of the festival's prizes. Whether or not it wins anything, Mullan was second only to Sophia Loren in the clamour he caused among the public and the press – an unlikely achievement in itself.