Peter Mullan took time out from the Galway Film Fleadh to talk to Paul Farren about his latest movie, Gaby Dellal's On A Clear Day. He also had much to say about the ethics and politics of contemporary cinema.

Paul: There's a lot of home truths in the film.

Peter: Ay, it's no' corny. Gaby always hated me saying it, but at script stage I was calling it a Sunday afternoon movie. She was like 'what do you mean, it's a Sunday afternoon movie? – I thought you liked it?' I said 'I did, to me it's a compliment. I watched The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on a Sunday afternoon, I watched Bad Day at Black Rock on a Sunday afternoon...'

But you also get The Poseidon Adventure...

That's what she thought; she thought The Sound of Music, The Great Escape, all that. For me, because of the twist – which I thought was gorgeous, because I didn't see it coming – it reminded me of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I was about ten when I saw that, and I was so horrified that he stopped running. I was rooting for him all the way – I was a huge Tom Courtney fan – and it was like 'come on, you cannae not win the race – you can win this race'. And for years it done my head in, like Planet of the Apes, it was something to think about, and it annoyed me intensely – and I don't think I've ever seen it again. It was like 'no, don't be this. I know what you're doing, I know you're trying to show you fucked the system – but fuck it! Win! Get there!'

But that's what it was about, he fucked the system but he fucked himself. But there's a part of us that wants to see something good, we want the human spirit to survive.

Now especially it's weird how films are very much of their time. And that's why director's cuts, when they go back fifteen years – sometimes it's fifteen months – it never gets any better. Very few director's cuts are better than when they came out, it was there at the time. It's like a fucking pop song; yeah, you can go back, you can change the harmonies, but the bottom line is you were who you were on March the 10th 2004 – that's who you were, you're not the same person you were on March the 5th; something changes.

It's like saying: 'The Mona Lisa's good, but why don't we fiddle around a bit and make it even better?

And just now with the avalanche of nihilistic cynicism posing as cartoons that we've been hit with every summer since 9/11, when hand in glove with Bush they say (it doesn't matter what subject you look at) there's good guys and bad guys, and we'll tell you who the good guy is. And the good guy may be a monster, but he's not really a monster... And it's an avalanche, it's like you can barely breathe for it. So, weirdly enough with this wee thing, you watch it and it's a really timely reminder that we're not all rapists, murderers, killers, paedophiles... because you see so much of that now, particularly on telly. I think CSI is extremely well made, but after a while you do think 'does human life mean anything to you, except an opportunity to do a very clever shot of a bullet flying through the air, penetrating the fucking rib-cage, coming out of the other side into the setee...' you know? Is human misery purely there now to be exploited for clever camera shots? I've been reading a lot of American scripts that I get sent to direct; it never ceases to shock that they maintain that they are upholders of human values, and it's like 'yeah, but you just killed this guy in a really horrible way and you really don't give a fuck!'

A film like Shane Meadows's Dead Man's Shoes is the antithesis of that kind of thing, but it didn't get distributed properly.

No it didn't; it died a death. Shane's got a heart on him the size of fucking Hampden Park; he's got a great fucking heart, I'm a big fan of his stuff. There's so little room now in the marketplace (as they call it) for anything that genuinely looks at you and me, and communities, and big struggles. A lot of that has been the laziness of the left. Left-wing filmmaking in the last ten years has not been too impressive, because it's basically either given up, or effectively – even unconsciously – it's kinda joined the system, which is 'well fuck it; what was it, a nine-minute rape scene? I'll give you a sixteen-minute gang-bang.' And that now is what poses as radical. Like those two fuckwits in Cannes, I read a full page on them in the Guardian, and it was the film they were all talking about in Cannes [The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, co-written by director Thomas Clay and producer Joseph Lang] – I thought 'excellent, two young guys from England'. Halfway through you were like 'fucking hell', because they were so delighted that the reason they got all this attention was a seventeen-minute gang-bang. They actually consciously said that Irrevérsible has a nine-minute rape, we'll get a seventeen-minute gang-bang. It's like... aww!

I think Gaspar Noé's films – Irrevérsible and first film I Stand Alone [Seul contre tous] – they do shock the fuck out of you, but I don't think he's just out to shock; he make you think about what's happening.

I met him in Toronto and we just spoke briefly, and the deep impression he left on me was he was getting off on it. He didnae strike me as a troubled soul. The impression he gave me was he coulndnae believe his luck that so many liberal reviewers were basically saying 'I know he is out to shock, but it's to do this and to do that.'

It's the big question.

It's the big one, because now all shock and all cinema is immediately dealing with context, in the sense that if you've a man kissing a man at one o'clock in the morning in a gay film it's not shocking. If you've got a man kissing a man in a Cary Grant film in 1956, say, that's shocking, that's seriously shocking. And it's not necessarily because it was all those years ago, and it was Cary Grant; it's the fact that the whole film doesn't seem to be able to accommodate that particular act. There are some older films I look at where an act of violence has a much more shocking effect than a lot of modern-day films, and Rodriguez start to finish.

That's not emotional violence, it's play violence.

Absolutely, it's cartoon; it's pornographic. And I think the difficulty we've got over the next ten year is how the fuck do we maintain some kind of artistic integrity, push things on in terms of narrative, in terms of cutting techniques; how do we do that and at the same time keep some kind of humanity without it being worthy and boring? And it's gonna get hardcore in the next decade, because we're smack bang in the middle of one of the worst wars since 1945, that purports to being completely open to examination when in actual fact they buried it to the point of 'we will hit you with this every night for a month until we bore you to fucking tears so you won't even complain that 25 Iraquis getting blown to bits gets a 15-or 25-word piece; so you won't even write letters about it anymore. The marketing machine of the establishment now is cleverer than it was ten or twenty years ago. We are so sophisticated, and we that maintain that artists can try and do something a little bit fucking different, or whatever; I don't know how well we're handling it, to be honest. The film festivals that I've been to in the last few years – a lot of the films are just pish. They're just indulgent.

The fact that Bush and Blair can trick Western society into believing that there's a James Bond villain out there...

They began in commerce and then moved into politics, and I think what they've mastered was 'well, how do we sell somebody some cheap piece of shit that really nobody wants to actually fucking eat?' 'Well, you call it McDonald's, and you glamorise it, and you do X, Y, and Z; you get the kid thing, and make it child-friendly, and you put in substances that should be downright fucking illegal, and you make it really really cheap.' And with all that know-how, the saddest thing for me about Fahrenheit 9/11 (I was in America at the time it came out) the saddest thing was all that press, and Weinstein (to give him his due) really put his neck on the line, the big break-up with Disney, Moore was getting death-threats, and not a single demonstration. It was like 'fuck, what do you have to do?' This didn't just play to 25 people in a fucking film festival, this played to 25 million Americans, and still the bastard gets in; still they voted for him!

I think another reason for it is that people feel they've done enough by going to the fucking movie.

Could be; I've paid my five dollars, and that's my contribution to the 'cause', as it were, and then it stops there.

I like Moore, but I'm also wary of him, because he plays the same trickery.

Very much so, he plays type against type. Where Michael's very clever is he plays all that game... but you're right, it'll come up and bite you right in the arse. Maybe again, within the left, you wonder: now maybe it's time I lost my purity a wee bit. And I think the biggest challenge, what I cannot do, I just refuse to do it, is in my soul think 'just leave it to the arthouse and the festival circuit; fuck the multiplexes'. No – that's where my kids go, that's where my family go, that's where my class goes, so why should I abandon them for the fucking fascists? So you're thinking right, okay, get into the multiplex without selling your soul. And it's difficult, because you're thinking God, right enough, because you need your big stars, you need this... and then you become one of these reformist pricks. At the same time it's like, well I cannae just walk away from that challenge. There must be some kind of way in which we can actually – God forbid – get people to want to watch our films, as opposed to 'well, you should watch it because it's fucking good for you' or 'you should watch it because actually it's heavily influenced by Jean Renoir'. That's the kind of thing you need to get by.

If you look at the works of Kusterica and stuff, cause he just made it fucking exciting. It's really exciting as well as complex and fascinating in so many different aspects. The bottom line is some cracking tunes and some fucking good actors – I mean that's the bottom line. And yet, in the left especially (if you can call it a left now, it's more like a kind of alliance of non-establishment), there's still people just waiting for the sell out – and very much so in Scotland. But, ironically if you sell out big they have to love you for that. I've never done an advert or anything like that, but nobody's ever come up to me going 'if you ever do an advert I'll fucking…[makes thumping sound]' Never; never ever ever. I know for a fact I could cut people intae bits tomorrow in some big fucking [blockbuster] thing, and because I'm in it with Sean Connery nobody would give a fuck! It'd be like 'I saw your movie – is he a nice guy?' Nobody would say to me 'I just saw you in a film and you slice up little babies, and you laugh your head off …' nobody would give a monkey's fuck.

And it's weird, there are so many different standards in film and filmgoers. We're all the same: on the one hand you want the affirmation in a film that let's be totally decent to one another, and it's not worthy and boring. But at the same time there's another reality there, and it's the reality that we all encounter on a daily basis. But at the same time you think if I just keep looking at that other reality, which I am kind of prone to do anyway – I kind of prefer the darker stuff, it's like then I become part of the problem. If I'm whacking people and things, I'm just frightening them into locking their doors, and no' trusting another single human being – you just don't trust anybody. Those are the big challenges for us, and I don't have any answers to it yet. Cause you see I'm naturally more attracted artistically to the darker side – and I don't apologise for that – for me I can't just suddenly jump into fucking Disneyland, I'm just not built that way. But how then do you go about making films that do look at the darker side, but at the same time don't conform to what the establishment need us to believe.

If they're going to introduce ID cards (we've got every cunt basically terrified that somebody's a foreigner), how do they go about that? What better avenues or means to do it than through The Bill, Coronation Street, and a whole host of other things, which are very difficult tae fight against. We've got a soap in Scotland now, and it's weird. There's a big potential in soap operas; everybody slags them off and all that shit, but they have a huge impact: Remember the gay guy in Eastenders? I think that did more for the gay movement than any fucking demonstration. Then they discovered lesbians; now every second woman is a lesbian because that's two fannies for the price of one!

When our homegrown soaps try to tackle the big issues it's more for shock value – they don't try to say anything.

It's almost like part of their remit, and yet they have potential. But when you're fighting against that opportunism, which is what that is, then you're into serious art grounds. And the minute you enter that you've lost 98% of the guys who might gi' you money to make your fucking film. The biggest difficulty now, I think, for making movies is how the fuck do you sell something to these cunts and they don't know...? It's like being back in the McCarthy era! You've got tae sell it to these motherfuckers, and they don't see the allegory, they don't see the politics, it goes by their radar. And they're no' stupid, they'll look now for anything that's subversive, or whatever. Some of them come to you looking for subversive, cause that's sellable. They come to you looking for controversy, cause that's the morality of capitalism – it's money. If it makes money we don't give a monkey's fuck.

They'll make anything, think of the most horrible subject imaginable, the most horrible thing that could happen to people, and if the good old public wouldn't pay their dollars… Again there's a double-standard thing with the festival circuit and the arthouse circuit, there's this kind of unwritten thing that we'll pretend none of you ever watch them … but none of you can escape Hollywood…

I hate that elitism; arthouse elitism goes right to the audience. It's like the whole theatre thing: the only time most ordinary head-the-balls will go and see a play is when it's local amateur drama.

In live theatre there's nothing more innately subversive than the idea of someone standing up, communicating with another human being – and there's nae money. It's not about fancy effects; it's very simple human communication, telling a story, a beginning, middle, and an end – not necessarily in that order. And you do get that richness. But you're right, it does remain fucking middle-class. The barnies I have in Glasgow... I went into a theatre where I've worked, and they'd fucking six million to do the place up – no money for actors, no money for fucking playwrights. And they built this fucking construction that basically screams out at you 'unless you've got some fucking money, or at the very least a university education, fuck off!' And you look at this thing – six million – and the administrator says to me 'what do you think?' and I said 'I think it's horrendous'. When are they going to realise that the reason people go to the cinema and don't go to the theatre is because it's not class-ridden? Unless it's a fucking arthouse theatre, which becomes class-ridden. Because you go in there, and it's the quality of money. What movie do you want to see? That's five dollars, ten pound, whatever – bosh. You walk into a theatre and everything from the lassie that sells you the tickets to the wee guy that shows you to your seat reeks of 'just who the fuck are you?' Because there's this terror that suddenly fifty members of the audience might jump up and strangle an actor.

It's one of the things that puts me off going to the theatre.

Of course; you cannae go to the toilet, you cannae cough, you cannae breathe sometimes. It's like a fucking museum, and it's deadly. You get deadly cinema then, because it works its way through. And, as you say, you get the elitists … There's two very famous directors (who will remain unnamed), I asked them once 'if I could guarantee you a million people will see your film – I won't guarantee they'll like your film – or a Palme d'Or, what would you choose?' The two of them said 'Palme d'Or'. I said 'I guaranteed you a million people', they went 'Palme d'Or, you take it to your grave, a Palme d'Or – your kids, your grandkids.' I said 'I'm giving you a million people.' 'But you said there's no guarantee they'll like the film.' I said 'well no, it's part of the hypothesis. If I did guarantee it would you still say Palme d'Or?' They said 'Palme d'Or'.

That's pathetic, isn't it?

I was shocked, I was fucking shocked, and they're really famous arthouse directors. You're sat, and you're like 'you must be aff your fucking nut! A Palme d'Or?! It goes on the mantlepiece! Your wee'ns might have it as a… thing. A million people, they might not like your movie, but then again a million might love it. It's a mass fucking media; you're trying to get as many as possible'. But that's how far the elitism has gone.

In the festival circuit and the arthouse circuit they can't trade wi' box office, so they trade wi' awards. So that's the currency. The currency in Hollywood is box office. It doesnae matter if your film's pish, if you've got it; you're in the hierarchy. And then suddenly you're backed up by certain establishments. I got the fucking Chevalier from the French government posted to me. I get honourary doctorates now. The English offered me an OB fucking E; an OBE for me, are you fucking nuts? Did any cunt tell you what the fucking hell I've been saying all these years and you want to give me the Order of the British Empire? Are you fucking nuts? But do you know what happened? I ticked 'no' and marked it with a message that they were cheeky bastards even to offer it to me, but didnae post it. They sent me another one two days later – the same letter!

But it's fascinating how the establishment then buy into that currency. You know that shit 'money talks', and all that – and it does, obviously. Yet there's a parallel fucking world going on alongside, and it's all about awards and reviews. And somewhere along the way the actual reason for doing it in the first place got lost. But I've met loads of filmmakers who've honourably broken out of that, and have tried different things, and they don't give a monkey's fuck about Lion d'Or or Palme d'Or, they don't care. Ken Loach being the classic. Ken's never had a Palme d'Or, and I doubt it upsets him. But there's a wee part of you that gets a bit 'I could have won, and I didn't'.