October 15, 2002 "Bloody Sunday" - The Making
Film producer Mark Redhead on the making of "Bloody Sunday"

"No single thing propelled Paul Greengrass and me towards making a film about Bloody Sunday. The Troubles in Northern Ireland had cast a dark shadow across the lives of everyone in these islands since our teenage years. Bloody Sunday had come to symbolise to us both the worst in the long, often unhappy and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland. It was a terrible turning point, the moment when the civil rights movement was destroyed, when the mass of civilians were driven from the political stage, and the struggle in Northern Ireland became one between men with guns. With the advent of the peace process and of a ceasefire and the possibility of a better future, it seemed to us both that rather than slamming the door shut on the memories of years of suffering, the most constructive thing one could do - not least as Brits - was to explore the dynamics of the relationship and try and make some sense of our painful shared history.

"For Paul, Bloody Sunday had a particular significance. In 1982 as a young WORLD IN ACTION producer, he was the first journalist to get into the Maze prison to film and interview the IRA hunger strikers. Paul's film of one of the hunger strikers, Raymond MacCartney, with his hollowed out eyes and gaunt face framed by a beard and long hair was to become one of the iconic images of the Troubles. Paul had long been haunted by the discovery that McCartney, himself from Derry, had joined the Provos and taken up arms as a direct response to the shooting of 27 people, 14 of them fatally, by members of the Parachute Regiment in Derry on Bloody Sunday, 30th January 1972.

"Almost our first action on commencing the development of the film was to contact Don Mullan. Now a Dublin based writer, Don had been raised in Derry. He played a vital role in bringing the events of Bloody Sunday back into public view. An inquiry into Bloody Sunday, chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, was mounted in the months after the tragedy, and quickly concluded that the army had been fired upon and that several of the dead had been carrying weapons. Thereafter, for twenty years, Bloody Sunday had been forgotten. Don was fifteen when he attended the march on Bloody Sunday, and indeed was standing just two feet away from seventeen year old Michael Kelly when he was shot dead.

"A chance remark on a return visit to Derry had alerted him to the existence of piles of old plastic bags full of hundreds of civilian statements taken by civil rights activists in the week following the shootings. Copies of these statements had been submitted to Lord Widgery, but were ignored. Don painstakingly read the statements, and they became the basis of his book: EYEWITNESS BLOODY SUNDAY. This book helped to re-awaken public interest in Bloody Sunday, and gave new impetus to the campaign by the families of the dead and wounded for a re-investigation of the events. It set in motion a chain of events, which led ultimately to the present Inquiry chaired by Lord Saville. We asked Don to join us on the production as a consultant and co-producer. He was quickly to become a close friend. Through his work, Don had developed close relations with the families of the dead and wounded, and he brought us together with them and helped win their support for the film. We hoped that we would be able to include as many Derry people as possible in the filming to bring the authentic voice of Derry into the film.

"We felt from the start that it was important in the light of the history of conflict to make the project as inclusive as possible. Pippa Cross, Head of Film at Granada, and the celebrated Irish director Jim Sheridan had a long-standing relationship since working together on MY LEFT FOOT and THE FIELD, and it seemed right to make the film an British-Irish co-production between Granada and Jim's production company Hell's Kitchen. Jim and his long-standing professional partner Arthur Lappin joined the team as executive producers. Pippa found commercial support for our ambitious plans also at the Film Council's New Cinema Fund, the Irish Film Board, Portman Films and ITV.

"It was important to us as Brits to tell not only the story of the civilian population and its victims, but also of the British soldiers because BLOODY SUNDAY is at least half a British story. The British self-image is of a reasonable people - temperate, not given to excess. Yet how was it that British soldiers could shoot 27 unarmed civilians? We also believed that story might have wider resonance, for throughout history there are stories of the collision between armies and civilian populations with parallels in Chechnya, Israel and beyond."