Peter Lennon, director of the 1968's Irish documentary Rocky Road to Dublin, is interviewed by Carol Murphy.

In the late 60's Peter Lennon was living in Paris as a freelance journalist for the Guardian newspaper. When he was sent to Dublin to review the Theatre Festival he was struck by a level of denial amongst his drinking pals in relation to the idea that Ireland had changed, that 'censorship was a thing of the past' and that the population no longer in thrall to the omnipotent presence of the clergy. What was said and what Lennon experienced in Ireland were two different things. So he persuaded the Guardian to let him stay on in Dublin to investigate, resulting in a series of articles with titles such as 'Climate of Repression' and 'Grey Eminence'. Uproar ensued. Lennon then had the idea to make a documentary 'in which Ireland would condemn itself out of its own mouth'. But how?

Soaked in the sensibilities of French filmmaking and the idea of the 'camera stilo', Lennon raised funds from a friend, hired cameraman Raoul Coutard, most famous for his work with Godard and Truffaut, and approached what became The Rocky Road To Dublin with a clear idea of what he wanted to do in order to answer the question - what happens to a nation once the revolution is attained?

Filmed on 16mm in black and white The Rocky Road to Dublin sits somewhere between fine art film and documentary. It raises a collection of questions about the state of a repressed and religiously indoctrinated Ireland in the late sixties. These questions manifest themselves through a series of interviews and interactions with representatives of the most powerful institutions in the country and the least powerful and underrepresented - from following an all singing and dancing Catholic priest, Father Michael Cleary, on his rounds to interviewing John Huston, in Ireland filming his latest feature. Alongside the interviews and voice over narration the film features absolutely wonderful footage of Dublin in the late sixties where the camera, with great affection, films, amongst other things, a session in a local pub, students dancing at a student club, laughing children chasing the camera along Dublin streets and the rough and tumble of a hurling match.

The humour in The Rocky Road, which sometimes makes Father Ted look like social realism, is underpinned by examples of religious repression. It is heart breaking to watched confused school children reiterate warped interpretations of the catechism, or a quiet and put upon female student or to listen to a young married woman who is told by her local priest to sleep in a separate room than her husband after seeking his help with her marital problems.

After the closure of the Cannes Film Festival in 1968, directly after the screening of The Rocky Road To Dublin, Lennon's film was picked up by demonstrating students and the French Press alike. The Rocky Road was screened in Dublin for three weeks to packed audiences but unsurprisingly due to an amalgam of institutional and aggressive media propaganda the film was banned in Ireland and left unseen for almost 40 years.

I think that The Rocky Road is a very affectionate film but when I see the scenes of Father Michael Cleary singing to the women in the hospital ward I find it funny but it is also really tragic.

He was a horribly patronising and vain creature.

Yes but I also thought he was a complete pawn.

A complete pawn himself?

Yes.

The thing was that I applied to the hierarchy to give me a priest and they knew at that time that I had these four critical articles about the church and so they thought that the way that I would be bowled over would be to send me a singing and dancing priest - which shows what level of spirituality they were operating in Ireland. The agreement was that he would tell us from day to day where he would go and we could follow him and keep our distance so he had complete freedom. He illustrated what we wanted to illustrate which was that the priest was your father and your brother and friend, he'll sing to you in hospital, he'll dance at your grave as it were. They weren't storm troopers or anything like that but they were there to always make sure that people kept the party line.

I think that the affection in the film is present in the timing that you give to certain scenes. For example there were so many of the scenes were I felt indulged and I didn't want them to end for example the scene of the children running, or people singing in a pub.

Well when you are making a film like that, even though it is very personal and you are talking about politics, it is absolutely essential that you show who are the victims of this and to give a sense of how human they are and how nice attractive people they are. I had to clear with Coutard that we had to linger on the people to make it clear that we were attacking the establishment and not the people. I mean, how they missed at the time that it is an affectionate film amazes me.

The film makes it very clear that women were not respected in Ireland at that time.

We filmed the scene with the students for about an hour and the female student was brushed aside each time. And I'll tell you something else about the students, which is a bit shocking. You know they weren't students from UCD but from Trinity and Trinity was the one place in Ireland to which the church had absolutely no access or authority. So why was it that even in Trinity they weren't even allowed to talk about politics? They were supposed to be the future leaders of the country.

But that is a good example of how the views of Catholic culture in Ireland permeate through into secular culture.

It just shows that if the brainwashing goes on too long in the church and the establishment it will even seep into places that could quite easily stand independently.

I found the scene with the married woman talking about 'coitus interruptus' really heartbreaking. You put her voice over images of a beach with a ship in the background.

It was Dollymount Strand. What is great about that place is that the tide is always out and you have these lovely patterns on the sand I thought it would work very well. I wanted it to be, not decorative, but in some way poetic and still not intrude on what she was saying.

How did you find that woman?

Well I knew her and her views. But no one could know who she was in those days so I had to record it myself in a hotel. I never said who she was. But also it was clear enough that she wasn't a working class person. It was important to show that middle class people who were supposed to be educated should still be the victims.

What struck me about it was that she was not bitter at all.

I chose her for that reason but also because she would say, 'Oh that little bit of suffering did me good' you know the awful way that the church is put on you.

Yes the Irish totally fetishize suffering. Where did the thought come from to make a film? Did you feel that your newspaper articles weren't powerful enough?

First of all I was a great film fan. I was in Paris at that time and that is the importance of an environment on the possibility of making films. You know people thought that making films was like building a block of flats and it more or less was with a crew of 150 with all kinds of expenses but I was in Paris at the right time where it was normal for people to take a camera to express themselves as it was for Italians to sing or something. I thought that since I was a great film buff and going to the cinemateque all the time, it would be a bit of an adventure and a great and satisfying way to stretch myself. And then I was able to get Coutard which was absolutely marvellous.

Did you feel intimidated by the prospect of making a film? How did you approach it?

Well the only way to approach it is to remain in a state of passion all the time and I was only afraid that we wouldn't be able to get what we wanted. I was just going like a demon and also it was different than someone who is in the profession who wanted to make a film. And so I just thought that we would go and go and go and see how much we could cram in within the space of time. And Coutard was quite expensive in the sense that he was highly paid but he would give you more usable stuff in half an hour than most people would give you in a week. But also what happened was I made him work on his day off. I heard that Huston was up in town and I needed him in the film. And one thing that he said to me was - Ah Peter isn't there something strange about independent filmmakers they never seem to need to eat and they never seem to need to sleep and they never seem to need to shit.

The Rocky Road to Dublin is somewhere between fine art and documentary.

I was very concerned, as I would be in writing, to get something like a little bit of poetry into it and to have a very powerful visual element to it. Then if it works it is compensation for the hell you have to go through. People ask me why I didn't make another film. What happened was that I moved to England and it was like going from a vineyard into a cemetery where all the rules for making films were completely against me. I was spoilt to imagine that with your first film, you raise the money from a friend and you choose the cast and crew as it were, you write it, you choose the music edit and everything. I'm sure I would have come a cropper if I had succeeded in penetrating the English industry. Well the only thing that I could have passion for at that time - it was in the early seventies - was Ireland. It was 1971, internment without trial, 1972 Bloody Sunday and the British film industry wouldn't touch anything about Ireland apart from news reports. It wasn't for about 20 years that they started to really draw on those themes as a source for gangster films. So I was blocked in every way. But another thing was that I had a very interesting job. I was a feature writer on Harry Evans' Sunday Times and I was made television critic. I was there from 1972 to 1976, which was the golden period of English television drama and there were wonderful documentary films. I also had a couple of kids to bring up - it is something men always say and they leave out the fact that the wife was also working. But anyway, if I had had a less interesting job I would probably have exposed myself to that terrible life again. But I think England would have defeated me in any event.

Would you consider making films now?

Well it is getting a bit late now. People have asked me over and over again would I not make a sequel to The Rocky Road. You couldn't do it. The past really is a different country. That place even for me is pretty mythical.

I was fascinated by the footage of you at the Cannes Film Festival in 1968 especially when you stood up and said that it was so unfair to stop the festival after the screening of The Rocky Road because all the other filmmakers didn't have a chance to show their films.

Well the problem there was that the footage of that is owned by Belgian television and they are a rapacious lot. They wanted 7,000 euro for that 59 seconds and if you went into 61 sec it would be 7,000 more. But I was making an important point there - I mean I didn't finish the point. We brought the country to a standstill. We have all these cinemas and equipment and everything, and what we should do is liberate everything and everybody who wants to show his film and not stop showing films. And Godard is a mad man, a tremendously talented guy, but he is a complete fucking lunatic. Afterwards how it ended up was he said to me, 'We are doing the revolution and all you are talking about is tracking shots and close-ups' and I wasn't talking about any such thing.

Godard's egotistic dogmatism is almost as bad as the people who were banning your film in Ireland. Is it the flip side of the same coin?

Well he is Swiss and that might explain a lot of it. I mean for his first four or five films he did marvellous films, wonderfully innovative in a perverse and hugely self-indulgent way but they worked perfectly well. But then in the end he sort of gave up everything and gave himself over to the revolution as it were and to be one of them, which of course is a load of rubbish because he could never be one of anybody. He went through this period of turning out really dumb films actually. I knew him before as a journalist and he was always a bloody pain in the arse.

I think you have to be like that.

You have to be and he really kicked his way into the front. And he kicked his way through the film industry and in fact one time he got his producer on the ground and kicked him.

How do you feel about the response to the film here in England?

Well I suppose what is marvellous is that an English paper would say that the most interesting and significant film of the week is the retrieval from obscurity of The Rocky Road To Dublin. If it was the most interesting and significant film of the week in England, what the hell was it for Ireland? I was really startled that we got this kind of coverage. I'm not modest or anything. It was established in 1968 that it was a great film but I didn't think that there was any way that an old documentary would have access to that level of coverage in the paper where in The Independent, The Rocky Road To Dublin gets 4 stars, Pride & Prejudice three - I mean there must be something in the water!

But think of the mechanisms involved in the making of Pride & Prejudice and yet you get the 4 stars. That is wonderful.

Yes.

Rocky Road To Dublin is out on DVD on the 24 October 2005.