We Spoke to Director Yann Demange About His New Film '71

1971 and 1972 were pivotal and deadly years in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The British army were called in in an attempt to police the situation, but actually exacerbated it. Belfast was at the centre of the violence.

It is amidst this chaos that Yann Demange has formed the backdrop for his new film ’71. The plot follows a British soldier accidentally abandoned by his unit following a riot on the streets of Belfast in 1971. The film is both a suspenseful thriller and a chase movie, where the young soldier is separated from his unit and must try to find his way out of hostile Catholic territory whilst being chased by the IRA. Demange’s film poses some pretty heavy questions on the conflict and young people’s involvement in it, so we met up with him to discuss the chaos and futility of it all.

VICE: Hi Yann. The film was great. In Britain we don’t learn about the Troubles in school or anything, how much did you know before the project?
Yeah, I’ve been talking about that a couple of times today and it’s shocking. I mean I’m so embarrassed about how ignorant I felt – I was like “no, really, that happened?” I’m a Londoner but I’m not British, I’m a French passport holder, my family came here in the late 70s. So it was alien to me. I went to a London comprehensive – no one taught me about the troubles. I asked my niece and nephew if they knew anything about it – but it’s still not taught! It’s still not on the curriculum, which is absurd, ridiculous. They’re not teaching us what happened. So anyway, I didn’t have a clue. I had to do so much research.

Why do you think people don’t really talk about what happened?
I think a good deal of work’s been put in to making sure they don’t. I think that there’s just been an agenda of skipping over it and not focusing on it. I mean it’s very recent as well. People haven’t quite processed it enough yet. The most important piece of research I did was going out there and meeting people who were active on all sides. Meeting families.

What was it like working with Jack O’Connell?
Working with Jack O’Connell was fantastic. I knew very early on I wanted Jack O’Connell. We met and had a couple of drinks. He understood the character straight away, I mean he’s cut from the same cloth in that he grew up wanting to be a football player or join the army. He understood the psychology of his character, he understood Gary Hook better than anybody. In fact in the end we just changed it and said the character was from Derby.

In some ways he was playing himself?
It’s not that he’s playing himself, not at all. It’s a transformative performance on his behalf. The character’s much more passive than his instincts are, and he had to communicate a lot without saying anything. So it was a very sophisticated performance in that respect. The film hangs on Jack O’Connell.

I felt one of the themes that ran through the film was about the innocence of youth – and a lot of young people thrown into this mad situation.
That’s why I wanted to make it. When I read it, I thought, ‘this is worth fighting for to get paid’. I’d been looking for a film for a long time and you’ve got to ask yourself what its reason to exist is – you might not get a chance to make a second film so on your first film, you have to really care about it as it might be the only chance you get.

Does it have lessons in it that could be applied to other wars as well, like about young people going to war and about the kind of futility of it?
I can’t give lessons or teach, that’s definitely not something I can do. But it poses questions. You’re with the character. He doesn’t know what the hell is going on. I wanted us to be the same: you’re kind of lost in the futility of it; the madness of it, the endless shades of grey. Dirty conflicts. Modern conflicts are like that since the Second World War. It’s really hard for parents who lose their kids now – they don’t really know why. No one knows why.

So, it’s been over 40 years since ’71, do you think that that gives it enough distance to make a film about it?
I dunno man. ’71 and ’72 were the biggest, most pivotal years. The period that our film is set in is like that internment period. And internment and Bloody Sunday were the two biggest recruitment drives for the provisional IRA. They were huge turning points. It became a full on war.

Internment was this period in the autumn of 71. The British government advised not to do it, but the Northern Irish government passed this law called internment and they were just allowed to go into the Catholic community and arrest everyone, mass arrests and just hold them on suspicion of terrorism. And actually what they did was a huge recruitment drive. People were like fuck this. When I saw pictures the landscape looked like an apocalyptic film, it looked like something from Cormack McCarthy’s The Road or something. I couldn’t believe it. They piled up cars at the end of their streets, trying to stop the RUC from coming in, burning the cars, smashing the bin lids to let everybody know to get their kids in the house. Basically they were just coming in willy-nilly, arresting every male. You know, fathers, grandfathers – just insane.

When you were in Northern Ireland did you find that people still have really strong memories about what happened?
Absolutely. They don’t want to be defined by that, understandably, I think they roll their eyes: ‘another story about the troubles’. But they’re still battling and fighting to know the truth, they can’t rest. And when you come into contact with that, it’s quite affecting. It was important for me that the film engaged in the humanity. I’m not a polemicist and it wasn’t about driving a subject, it wasn’t subject driven. It’s about the human story at the heart of the film and so it works within genre.

I thought it was quite critical of the military as an institution. The line about the army “it’s just rich cunts, telling dumb cunts to kill poor cunts” was quite affecting.
Yeah I thought it was the best bit of dialogue I’d ever read. The writer Gregory Burke summed it up in a line. He’s an amazing writer and he’s so sparse with dialogue. When he puts a line of dialogue in it’s so weighted and meaningful and that line sums up the whole film in a way. I mean I’m not anti-army as an institution because they’ve kind of done some wonderful things, they’ve saved our lives and our way of living and the army saves a lot of lost souls.

But also there’s terrible betrayal that takes place. Sometimes they’re quick to throw an arm around a disillusioned, disenfranchised boy – boys who are seeking the paternal and they say, ‘we’re your family’ and then this terrible betrayal takes place where they’re so quick to sacrifice them sometimes for very unclear reasons. It’s painful. You need an army. It needs to exist unfortunately but it’s a shame: the extinguishing of these lives.

Did a lot of the cast and the crew have links to Northern Ireland and the Troubles?       
A lot of the cast. Logistically we ended up having to shoot in the UK. I wanted to use the Divis flats, with its Brutalist architecture, but they no longer exist in Belfast, they’ve been torn down because Belfast has been regenerated and it now looks like any British provincial town. None of the period detail we needed was there anymore. We did a massive search and there was a dead ringer for it at Parkhill estate in Sheffield. And we had three weeks to shoot.

But I was still adamant that we had to use an Irish cast so we flew them all over, so they’re not an English cast doing accents, I wasn’t having that. So, by nature, almost everybody we cast has got a story of how the Troubles affected their family. We cast from Southern and Northern Ireland. The real litmus test is the screening in Belfast.

Yeah, I read that that was the screening you’re most worried about.
Worried is the wrong word. It’s the most important screening. It’s their film. I’ve got to be able to look people in the eye having made a film about their city and have not misrepresented them. I hope the film has enough integrity and they feel enough honesty – that would be important to me.

Thanks Yann.